The mountain chant: a Navajo ceremony

238 Pages·1997·2.21 MB·English

by  Washington Matthews

title: The Mountain Chant : A Navajo Ceremony
author: Matthews, Washington.
publisher: University of Utah Press
isbn10 | asin:
print isbn13: 9780874805420
ebook isbn13: 9780585133140
language: English
Mountainway (Navajo rite) , Navajo
subject
Indians--Rites and ceremonies.
publication date: 1997
lcc: E99.N3M42 1997eb
ddc: 299/.764
Mountainway (Navajo rite) , Navajo
subject:
Indians--Rites and ceremonies.
Page iii
The Mountain Chant
A Navajo Ceremony
Washington Matthews
Foreword by Paul Zolbrod
Orthographic Note by Robert W. Young
THE UNIVERSITY OF UTAH PRESS
SALT LAKE CITY
Page iv
Disclaimer:
This book contains characters with diacritics. When the characters can
be represented using the ISO 8859-1 character set
(http://www.w3.org/TR/images/latin1.gif), netLibrary will represent
them as they appear in the original text, and most computers will be
able to show the full characters correctly. In order to keep the text
searchable and readable on most computers, characters with diacritics
that are not part of the ISO 8859-1 list will be represented without
their diacritical marks.
Foreword and Orthographic Note © 1997 by The University of Utah
Press
All rights reserved
¥ Printed on acid-free paper
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGING-IN-PUBLICATION
DATA
Matthews, Washington, 1843-1905.
The mountain chant : a navajo ceremony / Washington Matthews;
Foreword by Paul Zolbrod; orthographic note by Robert W. Young.
p. cm.
Originally published: Washington, D.C., 1887, in U.S. Bureau of
American Ethnology, Fifth Annual report, 1883-84. With two sections
suppressed from the original edition.
Includes bibliographical references.
ISBN 0-87480-542-2 (acid-free paper)
1. Mountainway (Navajo rite) 2. Navajo IndiansRites and
Ceremonies. I. Title.
E99.N3M42 1997
299'.764DC21 97-25249

Page v
Contents
List of Illustrations vi
Foreword
by Paul Zolbrod vii
Note on the Orthography of Navajo Words
By Washington Matthews xxiii
Orthographic Note
by Robert W. Young xxv
Introduction 3
Myth of the Origin of the Dsilyídje qaçàl 5
Ceremonies of Dsilyídje qaçàl 36
First Four Days 36
Fifth Day 37
Sixth Day 42
Seventh Day 46
Eighth Day 47
Ninth Day (until sunset) 48
Last Night 49
The Great Pictures of Dsilyídje qaçàl 62
First Picture (Home of the Serpents) 64
Second Picture (Yays and Cultivated Plants) 65
Third Picture (Long Bodies) 68
Fourth Picture (Great Plumed Arrows) 69
Sacrifices of Dsilyídje qaçàl 69
Original Texts and Translations of Songs 73
Songs of Sequence 73
Other Songs and Extracts 82
Addendum: The Suppressed Sections 87
Page vi
Illustrations
Plate facing page
X. Medicine Lodge, viewed from the south 38
XI. Medicine Lodge, viewed from the east 39
XII. Dance of Nahikàï 52
XIII. Fire Dance 53
XIV. The Dark Circle of Branches at 54
Sunrise
Color Plate following page
62
XV. First Dry Painting 62
XVI. Second Dry Painting 62
XVII. Third Dry Painting 62
XVIII. Fourth Dry Painting 62
Figure page
50. Qastcèëlçi, from a dry painting 15
51. The çobolçà, or plumed wands 40
52. Akáninili ready for the journey 42
53. The great wood pile 47
54. Dancer holding up the great plumed 52
arrow
55. Dancer "swallowing" the great plumed 52
arrow
56. The whizzer, or groaning stick 56
57. Yucca baccata 58
58. Sacrificial sticks (keçàn) 70
59. The talking kethàwn (keçàn-yalçì') 70
Page vii
Foreword
By Paul Zolbrod
Although much has been written about Navajo ceremonies since the
initial publication of this work over a century ago, little of it has
matched the intensity Washington Matthews (1843-1905) drew from
the Mountain Chant as he put it into written form. And none of it
registers his scope in showing how storytelling articulates a
ceremonial vision of humankind's place in a broader scheme.
Scholars have recognized Navajo ceremonies as rituals of healing or
blessing and often consider them discrete units. As practiced today,
however, they intersect with a cohesive scheme wherein people unite
with a nonhuman community that today's conventional thinking
cannot yet fully accommodate. Navajos themselves see the
ceremonies as a means to restore order or renew it both communally
and for specific individuals. The ceremonial system is also presumed
to be in decline, although it persists and may even be undergoing
something of a resurgence.
Variously called dances, revival meetings, or gatherings to restore and
maintain well-being, they are generally described in terms of
procedure and paraphernalia rather than for what they express. In his
discussion of Navajo ceremonialism in Volume 10 of the
Smithsonian's definitive Handbook of North American Indians, for
example, Leland Wyman devotes one paragraph out of twenty folio-
size pages to an underlying "large body of mythology" (556). Thus the
ceremonies are unevenly represented because they have drawn
attention more for the objects they display and the spectacle they
occasion than for any religio-poetic essence. What they express, and
what their Navajo participants believe, go largely unnoticed in spite of
what Matthews has recorded here.
While still practiced today, for example, the mountain chant attracts
outsiders to the spectacular fire dance held on its closing night. Yet it
receives virtually no attention for reiterating an episode