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Article published in November 2002 on the Coming of Age ceremonies for Navajo women.

Kinaaldá

 “I did it!  I did it!  I did it!” thinks Gertrude Walters, Navajo, immensely proud of her accomplishment. The chant will ring through her mind for days …years.  After an all-night sing in her honor, she has emerged from her grandma’s hogan (an eight-sided lodge) on the Tóhajiilee reservation, 35 miles west of Albuquerque, New Mexico.  It is dawn, the night was long, and she has come of age— the right way, the way of the Diné (dee-NEH, Navajo meaning the people).  Her happy eyes linger on the brightening sky.

The Diné are a people scattered over several reservations of land in Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado—an area larger than Connecticut, Massachusetts, New Hampshire, and Rhode Island, combined. Isolated as they are, even from each other, they hold to the old ways. 

 Their most cherished ritual, the Kinaaldá, brings a girl into womanhood by testing her with rigor and shaping her with grace and care.  The rites include hair combing, dressing, stretching, massaging, racing, corngrinding, baking the corn cake, and painting. Today, city- and reservation-dwelling Navajos continue this two- to four-day ceremony, although sometimes they shorten it to a single-day observance announcing the girl’s passage into womanhood.

The ceremony has a single purpose: to help a girl grow into a wholesome, mature woman, one who takes her role seriously.  It tests her physical, moral, and intellectual strength as it recreates the original ritual held for Changing Woman, a deity and most honored among Holy People.   The girl, for a brief time, becomes the deity.

Changing Woman changes with the seasons and, ages ago, created the Diné. She is young and old and reborn eternally. Changing Woman and her mother, First Woman, created the Kinaaldá and, during the ceremony, Changing Woman became blessed with the ability to bear children.

“Kinaaldá means,” Gertrude’s hands open emphatically. “You let everyone know you’ve become a woman.  You have a say. Your brothers, your friends treat you differently. You are different."

Her brothers show more respect. Now she mothers them more but regrets losing the carefree hunts and hikes she loved when she could hang out with them.

Twenty-five years later, memories return to a book-loving Gertrude, who still lives among the canyons of the Tóhajiilee reservation where she was raised.

The most powerful of the Holy People, the Sun, rises in the east. Therefore, Kinaaldá begins to the east. The morning of the first day, Gertrude and her godmother aunt (Ideal Woman) kneel on the hogan floor and face the blanketed door to the east. Her godmother combs Gertrude’s long black hair and ties it loosely with a buckskin strap. By this act, she ties together thought, life, and good values.

Gertrude stretches face down on blankets outside the hogan. Ideal Woman massages Gertrude’s shoulders and lower back, ‘shaping’ her into a beautiful strong woman. On the last day she molds Gertrude again.

The second day, Gertrude dashes from the hogan and runs east to greet the rising Sun. Her brothers race, hollering, close behind and shatter the dark quiet before dawn. They yell to wake the Holy People spirits, who follow. Each day Gertrude runs in the dark of the morning and again at noon. Each time she sprints farther and faster.

On a flat millstone, she grinds white, yellow, blue, spotted, and red corn kernels into meal to make a 4-foot across sacred corn cake for her people. Her hands blister from the harsh stone. She stirs the batter hour after hour.  It bakes in a husk-lined firepit, the flames leaping through the night.

On the last evening only, Gertrude sits in the hogan with back properly erect and legs stretched in front, all night long. The medicine man, her family, and friends sing her the sacred songs. With beauty before me, I am traveling... And she does, dark hair piled high on her head, her whole life through.