Oral Patterns of Performance: Story and Song

Contents

Oral Patterns of Performance: Story and Song

Notes

About the Author

About the Book

Oral Patterns of Performance: Story and Song

Everything is made possible through stories.

—Hugh Yellowman, Navajo, explaining why stories are told

I’ve been poor most of my life; I’ve known only one song.

—Little Wagon, Navajo, on the importance of songs

Early in the Navajo creation story, First Man and First Woman (who are depicted as gendered holy beings made up of colored light), hear a strange noise on a nearby mountain shrouded by clouds. Apprehensive about what this unknown noise may signify, but feeling a need to investigate, First Man rejects First Woman’s advice to avoid the dangers, saying:

Do not be afraid . . .

Nothing will go wrong. For I will surround myself with song.

I will sing as I make my way to the mountain.

I will sing while I am on the mountain.

And I will sing as I return.

I will surround myself with song.

You may be sure that the words of my song will protect me.¹

What First Man finds on the mountain is a baby girl, crying; it is Changing Woman, the first real personage in Navajo mythic history, and the closest to a full deity of all the sacred people (yei) in the Navajo pantheon. He brings her back to First Woman, and the two, totally clueless about what to do with a baby, set about ritualizing her life and physical development by creating proper words and stories.

Much of the Beautyway story and ceremony focuses on the discovery and maturation of Changing Woman, and today, whenever a hogan is blessed, or a wedding is performed, or a young woman celebrates her first menstruation, songs from this extensive ceremony are sung, the words vividly dramatizing for contemporary people their identity with the sacred past. For Navajos, actually uttering words creates the reality of their world: Spoken or sung language is a creative act; hence, people avoid speaking of things they don’t want to see appear in the world around them. One of the most terrible things to say out loud (if a Navajo carpenter pounds his thumb with a hammer, for instance) is shash, bear, for—uttered in passion—the word may really summon a bear, and bears are ritually (and factually) difficult to deal with.

Spoken words, especially when enhanced or intensified by repetition, ritual structures, and musical phrases, are the principal means Navajos use to create a sense of order and harmony in the world they inhabit. The medicines administered to a patient in any Navajo healing ceremony are a response to the symptoms being treated, but healing in any deeper sense comes through the power of the words in the ritual. Along with doing sand paintings (which are symmetrical, cyclic, oriented to the universe, and usually four sided), placing the ritual inside a hogan (which is round, oriented to the east, and represents the womb of Changing Woman), and using four-way repetition in the songs (which represents the four directions), Navajo curing ceremonies have the same patterns and assumptions we have been discussing. Most of these rituals are not secret and are not conducted by mysterious shamans but by hataaii, literally singers, who may be either male or female (hence the uselessness of the stereotypical English term medicine man) and spend about fifteen to twenty years learning the songs, sand paintings, stories, and medications for one ceremony or Way. Most of these singers know several Ways, which are healing rituals envisioned as moving along a trail; obviously, even mastering one is an intellectual achievement of some