Changing Woman

Changing Woman, Asdzaa Nadleehe, is the most beloved and central figure among the Diyin Dine'e, the Holy People of Navajo religion, found upon a mountaintop as an infant by First Man and First Woman and raised to maturity within four days by the miraculous power that surrounds her from birth. Her defining characteristic, and the source of her name, is a continual cycle of aging and renewal: traditional accounts describe her growing old with the passing of each year and then, upon reaching old age, walking toward the rising sun until she meets her younger self walking the opposite direction, merging with that younger form and beginning the cycle again, an image Navajo cosmology treats as expressing the essential renewability of life itself rather than a single, one-way arc from birth to death.

Changing Woman is also the mother, by the Sun and by Water, of Monster Slayer and Born for Water, the Hero Twins whose exploits ridding the earth of dangerous monsters make the world safe for the Dine to live in, giving her a foundational maternal role in the wider Navajo emergence and hero narrative that shapes much of the tradition's broader mythology.

Maureen Trudelle Schwarz's ethnographic study of Navajo views on the body and personhood, titled directly for this figure, documents how thoroughly Changing Woman's story shapes lived Navajo religious practice specifically through the Kinaalda, the multi-day puberty ceremony held for a Navajo girl at her first menstruation, in which the girl is ritually identified with Changing Woman herself, running toward the sun, having her body moulded and blessed by an older female relative, and baking a large ceremonial corn cake, all reenacting elements of Changing Woman's own origin story so that the young woman's transition to maturity is understood as a genuine participation in the Holy Person's own renewing power rather than merely a symbolic reference to it. This direct ritual identification of an ordinary Navajo girl with the tradition's central creative figure is a distinctive and well documented feature of Navajo religious practice, and the Kinaalda continues to be performed by Navajo families today, making Changing Woman's presence in Navajo religious life an active, continuing reality rather than a figure known only from recorded mythology.