First Woman

First Woman, Altse Asdzaa, is formed from an ear of yellow corn at the same founding moment in Navajo emergence cosmology that produces First Man from white corn, and the pairing of white corn and yellow corn as the material origin of the first two Holy People is itself significant within Navajo tradition, where corn holds deep ceremonial importance as a central sustaining and sacred substance used throughout Navajo ritual life, including in the Kinaalda ceremony connected to Changing Woman.

Navajo emergence narratives describe First Woman as playing a decisive role in organising elements of the social and ceremonial order once the people reach the present world, and in some tellings she is credited with introducing important elements of correct ceremonial knowledge and practice, working alongside First Man as a genuine co-architect of the created order rather than a passive or secondary figure standing beside him. Her association with corn and with the deliberate establishment of correct order and practice situates First Woman as a foundational source of the structured, correctly ordered world, hozho, that Navajo religious thought treats as the proper and health-sustaining state of existence.

First Woman's association with establishing correct order connects directly to hozho, one of the most important concepts in Navajo religious thought, usually translated as beauty, harmony, balance or the state of a world and a life properly and correctly ordered, and understood as the goal both individual Navajo religious practice and the tradition's ceremonial system as a whole are oriented toward achieving and restoring when disrupted.

James Kale McNeley's study of holy wind in Navajo philosophy situates figures such as First Woman within this broader philosophical framework, in which the emergence narrative's account of the world being properly organised at its founding provides the template that later ceremonial practice, particularly the many chantway healing ceremonies conducted by Navajo medicine people, works to restore whenever illness, disorder or misfortune indicates that hozho has been disturbed for a particular person or community. Understood this way, First Woman's role at the beginning of the tradition is not simply historical or mythological but the origin point of an ongoing, actively maintained religious project that continues in Navajo ceremonial practice today.