The ceremonial system of the Dine is transmitted by apprenticeship. A singer learns a chantway over years from a singer who holds it, in full, including the songs, the prayers, the sequence and the sandpaintings, and the knowledge is inseparable from the entitlement to use it. This is not information that happens to be private; it is an office.
The outside record is nonetheless very large. Late nineteenth and early twentieth century anthropology documented Dine ceremony in exceptional detail, including reproductions of sandpaintings that are made and destroyed within a ceremony and were never intended to persist. Some of that work was done with the cooperation of singers who had their own reasons for wanting a record made; some was not. The results circulate freely and are still reprinted.
The consequence is a genuine asymmetry: material that the tradition holds under strict conditions is available to any reader in a library, and its availability is not evidence that it was ever meant to be given.
The Navajo Nation has since developed its own research protocols, and access to sites, ceremony and material is governed by the Nation rather than by whoever wishes to study it.
This atlas therefore states what kind of institution the ceremonial system is, records the structure of the religious order, and reproduces no ceremonial content. Where a reader wants more, the appropriate route is the Nation and its scholars.