We Went to a "Navajo Sing" in Monument Valley

MONUMENT VALLEY

Long parted friends meet on their way to the "sing."

They came from afar, unhurried, some in wagons, a few in trucks.

the dance and the muffled boom-boom of the drums and you've never heard such music any place before. You are a mile from the dance and the silence has closed in about you tighter than ever except for the chant, muffled and dim, which seems to make the silence heavier about you. No moon yet, only darkness and the pin points where the stars are and the dim shapes of the twisted juniper trees and the chant, which must be as old as the world itself, coming to you over the hill ahead. As you drive along the chant gets louder and when you get to the hill you get a glimpse of the fire and then you drive down the hill and up a small canyon and you are at the dance. In the center by the fire are the dancers, to one side are the Navajo men chanting their old, old chant of the Squaw dance. A great crowd of people encircles the dancers and the chanters and beyond the people are the wagons and on the ledge surrounding the hollow where the dance is you see hundreds of horses, some with riders, some unattended, appearing almost like ghosts. On the hillside people are sleeping and sitting around and eating, all silent as the night, and below are the fire and the dancers and the people. A Navajo girl weaves in and out of the crowd watching the dancers and suddenly she sees the person she is looking for, seizes him and Twelve hundred Navajo gathered in the loneliness of Monument Valley, their camp buzzing with noise, color and commotion. They came from all over the reservation for the "sing."

forces him to dance. To get out of it he must pay a tribute. Side by side with arms around each other's waist they join the dance, a stomping movement to the beat of the drum, the boy always going forward, the girl backward. The boy pays his tribute, the dancers part, the girl goes searching for a new boy.

(There is a deep social, religious and racial significance to the Navajo Squaw Dance as there is to all Navajo ceremonies. More learned scribes discourse authoritatively on these ceremonies and to these we refer the readers who prefer more information than appears in this impressionistic sketch.) About one o'clock in the morning, the moon, sadly truant in her duties, finally got around to Monument Valley. The darkness dissolved in the orange light of the rising moon. Now the monuments themselves took shape, weird, bashful fellows standing around as if they, too, wanted to dance. The moonlight filtered through the crowd, adding to the beauty of the setting. The horses, standing around on the ridges surrounding the dance gathering, lost their dimness-hundreds of Navajo ponies standing around as if they were waiting for Ross Santee to happen by and draw them as they stood. The dancing went on and on and neither the dancers nor the chanters paused for a moment for a breath of air. The moon joined the merriment, the monuments looked down in all their solemnity and only when the new sun began to put in an appearance did the dance come to an end. The dancers parted, families got in the wagons, the ponies were gathered and the trek started to the foot of Merritt Butte where more solemn ceremonies were to take place that day. Wagons followed the road but the riders in single file broke off across country between camps, a distance of six or eight miles. They came riding over the hill, seven hundred of them in single file, their colored shirts, blankets and dresses gleaming in the light of the rising sun. The silence was broken by the slow clumpclump of walking horses, and then the riders began to sing as they rode, paying homage to a new day and the monuments echoed and reechoed their half-sad, half-glad songs. A sight such as this was something that only happens once in years and never, to some people, in a lifetime. This is beauty and music and poetry and religion. You blink at the very unreality of the beauty about you. Yet you can smell the dust, you hear the songs, and you are stabbed by the colorful pageantry being enacted before you by the simple people called Navajo. How long ago and far away is yesterday and the civilization you left a couple hundred miles away!

At the camp everything is a bustle. You sit around and watch Navajo women expertly slit the throats of the many sheep to be barbecued for twelve hundred people. The sheep are skinned and butchered . . . zip . . . like that. The cooking hogan is a mammoth place made of brush. Inside are many fires where more women are making bread and coffee and cooking the mutton. This is a big "sing." a very rich Navajo is having it because he has been ill and before it is all over it will cost him much money, but it is worth it. On one side of the camp is the medicine man's hogan, made of mud, and near it a big brush hogan. Further away is another camp where seven or eight hundred Navajo . . . considered the visitors . . . are awaiting for the rites to begin. The word goes out that there is to be a Mud Dance. Inside the medicine man's hogan there is chanting and the various solemn and intimate preparations for the curing of the ill. If a person only knew the words of those chants, knew the meaning of all the solemn mystery of the Navajo!

Then there is so much happening it becomes a blur in one's memory. The crowd began to gather near the medicine man's hogan. The ill and the ailing, for whom the "sing" is given, form a procession and walk to the medicine man's hogan. The hair of the men and women alike is let down and hangs loose down the back. It is all very solemn. The ill and ailing enter the hogan. Then there is more chanting. Finally the procession leaves the hogan and moves away. From the visitors' camp, chanting begins. Horsemen mount their steeds and in relays ride around the medicine man's hogan. They ride hard and they shout as they ride. One of them has a cap pistol. It sounds puny and weak. In the olden days the riders all had pistols, real pistols with bullets, and rifles, and they fired these as they rode, and they rode hard in the olden days as they do now, only in the olden days they were not a defeated people, a tribe on a reservation that white men wouldn't have, but they were undefeated in the olden days and proud and courageous and strong, and they didn't have a cap pistol that sounded puny and weak. They rode in relays, twenty and thirty in a group, riding around the hogan, hard and fast, and shouting. May they always ride hard and proud and fast!

Then the Navajo visitors all gathered in front of the hogan and received presents, not expensive presents, just friendly presents. Then everyone moved to one side and there was no one around the hogan, only chanting inside. Then the Mud Dancers came out of the hogan, some through the smoke hole in the roof and the Mud Dance began. They danced around each person who was ill. The medicine man administered in the ways of his people and the ill and ailing were tossed high toward the sun in a blanket. After the solemn ceremonies the Mud Dancers picked out some of the spectators and doused them unceremoniously in the mud. This kept up all afternoon and in the evening and night there was dancing again.

The next day the crowd began to drift back into the reservation-north, south, east, west. They slowly dispersed, scattered as if by the very wind, retracing their tracks into the trackless expanse of their endless land. The travelers at Goulding's Lodge continued their journeys. The silence and the loneliness returned again to Monument Valley. The "Navajo sing" was over. . . . R. C.