Described, Not Reproduced

Blessingway has been written about at length, and some of that writing was done without permission. Ethnographers recorded songs, prayers and sandpainting designs through the first half of the twentieth century and published them, putting material into libraries that the Dine had not released. That history is the reason this record stops where it does. What can be said publicly is what the ceremony is for, when it is held, who conducts it, and how it stands in relation to the rest of the ceremonial system. What is not set down here is the order of the songs, the words of the prayers, the designs, or anything that would function as an instruction for performance.

A reader wanting that is being pointed to the wrong place: the knowledge is held by hataalii, it is transmitted through apprenticeship, and it is not the atlas's to hand on. This is not a gap in the research. It is the distinction the atlas keeps for every closed practice, which is that a living tradition can be described from outside without being reconstructed for whoever happens to read about it. Charlotte Frisbie's study of Kinaalda and James McNeley's account of Holy Wind in Navajo philosophy are published works a reader can go to next, and Navajo institutions rather than this atlas are the right authority on what may be said further.