The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony: Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1883-84, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1887, pages 379-468Matthews, Washington
Religion
The Mountain Chant, A Navajo Ceremony: Fifth Annual Report of the Bureau of Ethnology to the Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution, 1883-84, Government Printing Office, Washington, 1887, pages 379-468
Matthews, Washington
Mountainway (Navajo rite); Navajo Indians -- Rites and ceremonies
60. It was agreed that before the dance began Dsilyi‘ Neyáni should be
allowed four days and four nights in which to tell his story and that
the medicine man should send out a number of young men to collect the
plants that were necessary for the coming ceremony. For four nights and
for four days he was busy in relating his adventures and instructing his
hearers in all the mysteries he had learned in the homes of the ¢igìni.
Then they built the medicine lodge and got all things ready for the new
rites and for the purification of the one who had returned. The shaman
selected from among the plants brought him by the young men such as he
thought would best cleanse his patient of all the strange food he had
taken among the alien Indians and in the houses of the supernatural ones
whom he had visited. On the first day he gave him pine and spruce; on
the second day, big and little willows; on the third day, a plant called
litci and the aromatic sumac; on the fourth day, cedar and piñon. Of
these the prophet drank cold and hot infusions in the morning by the
fire.
61. During these four days the ceremonies which Dsilyi‘ Neyáni had
introduced were in progress. On the fifth day it was proposed they
should send out the akáninili (meal sprinkler) or courier to invite
their neighbors to the great dance. There were two couriers to be sent:
one was to go to the north, to a place called Çògojilá‘ (Much Grease
Wood), to invite some friendly bands of Ute, some distant bands of
Navajo, and some Jicarilla who dwelt there; the other was to go to the
south, to Tse‘lakàī-silà (Where Two White Rocks Lie), to ask the
Southern Apache, the White Mountain Apache, the Cohonino, and a tribe
called [¢]ildjèhe, to attend. To the camp in the north it was a journey
of two days and two nights, and it would take the fleetest runner the
same time to return. To the home of their neighbors in the south it was
as far. As these long journeys must be made on foot and running, they
could not find a single young man in the camp who would volunteer for
the task. The men counseled about the difficulty all day and tried much
persuasion on the youths, but none were found willing to make either
journey.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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