This set of songs and rituals is named for the forces working on a patient's
behalf—Red Antway, Coyoteway, Hailway, and so on—in a ceremony that may last one, two, three, five, or even nine nights.
The Singer and his apprentices make a sandpainting by dribbling colored powders onto a one-to-two-inch thick bed of sand,
usually laid out on the floor of a traditional cribbed-log dwelling. Pigments come from such materials as pulverized cedar charcoal, red
sandstone, white gypsum, yellow ocher, pollen, cornmeal, and crushed flower petals. These paintings average about six feet square, though
they range in size from a foot to twenty feet or more in diameter.
Sandpaintings' principal colors-white, blue, yellow, and black-remind Navajos of the Four Sacred Mountains bordering their
traditional homeland. These mountains and some of their associations are:
White Shell Mountain (Sierra Blanca Peak, Colorado): white-east-dawn
Turquoise Mountain (Mount Taylor, New Mexico): blue-south-day
Abalone Shell Mountain (Mount Humphreys, Arizona): yellow-west-twilight
Coal Mountain (Hesperus Peak, Colorado): black-north-darkness
A painted garland that wards off evil often borders a sandpainting. Garland motifs include the rainbow, interconnected
arrowheads, sunflowers, and a multicolored mirage. The sandpainting opens up at the east, the direction from which Holy People come in
response to the Singer's chanted request for intercession. Such additional protectors as Moon, Sun, Bat, Buffalo, Big Snake, Beaver, and
Otter may patrol this point of entry. All sandpainting images are heavily laden with meaning. For example, Beaver and Otter are used because
they loaned their furry skins to the Hero Twins when Sun tried freezing his offspring by withholding warmth. Holy People often seen in
sandpaintings include Big Fly, Corn Beetle, the Four Sacred Plants-corn, beans, squash, and tobacco-Stars, Lightning, Thunder, and a variety
of animals, insects, and reptiles.
Sandpainting compositions are laid out in three basic patterns: linear, extended-center, and radial. Linear sandpainting
figures appear along one or more lines above a ground bar. A central design dominates extended-center sandpaintings. In radial format images
whirl around a center point, often an indication of a particular location such as the Place of Emergence from which the Holy People entered
Glittering World.
Made to strict specifications, the sandpainting becomes a homing beacon which draws Holy People through its eastern entry
to infuse the sacred space with healing powers. Their presence is invoked as the Singer repeats such song-formulas as:
With your moccasins of dark cloud come to us
With your leggings of dark cloud come to us
With your shirt of dark cloud come to us
With your headdress of dark cloud come to us
With your mind enveloped in dark cloud come to us
The ceremony climaxes when the Singer seats the patient directly on the sandpainting, rubbing pigments from the bodies
of painted figures onto corresponding parts of the patient's body so, as a Nightway chant says, "life is restored in beauty"—the
beauty of hózhó.
Then the sandpainting is destroyed, lest it improperly summon Holy People and anger them. Sometimes the pigments are taken
outside and deposited beside a lightning-struck tree to guard the home where the ceremony was held.
Starting around 1919 and until his death, a Singer named Lefthanded (c1867–1937) broke with tradition by weaving, or
supervising two of his nieces' weaving, at least seventy sandpainting rugs. Scholars persuaded another Singer called Red Point (c1865–1936)
to preserve a sandpainting archive on paper which appeared in the books Sandpaintings of the Navajo Shooting Chant (1937) and Navajo Medicine
Man (1939). Lefthanded's rugs and Red Point's drawings seem to violate the prohibition against making permanent representations of sandpaintings.
But both men probably edited their sandpainting reproductions. Even minor changes-color substitutions and omission or addition of figures,
for example-switches off the beacon that summons the Holy People.
Today, many Navajos create "sandpaintings" with colored sand on glue-covered particleboard, a technique dating to the
1930s when a pair of white sign painters, E. George de Ville and his wife Mae Allendale, introduced the practice in Gallup, New Mexico.
These are commercial efforts, some quite elegant, and strictly secular: intentional alteration renders the designs harmless to buyer and
seller alike.
Yet even glimpses at these fragmentary parts of a much bigger whole bring new meaning and a heightened sense of awareness
to the Singer's prayer in Nightway:
The world before me is restored in beauty
The world behind me is restored in beauty
The world below me is restored in beauty
The world above me is restored in beauty
All things around me are restored in beauty
My voice is restored in beauty
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty
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