indians

SAND PAINTING A SACRED HEALING ART OF THE NAVAJOS

In the autumn of 1880, Washington Matthews, a 37-yearold Irish-born U.S. Army surgeon, arrived at his new posting in the sprawling Four Corners region, where the borders of Arizona, Utah, Colorado and New Mexico meet. Matthews, who spent the next four years - and another four during the 1890s - immersing himself in Navajo culture, became the first person to tell the world about the tribe's sacred healing art of sand painting. Early on, a Mexican named Jesus Arvisu, who was captured by Apaches and later traded to Navajos, told Matthews, “The Indians make figures of all their devils, sir.” Years passed before the physician actually saw a sand painting and learned Navajos created pictures on 1to 3-inchthick beds of sand, some as small as a foot square, others 20 feet across, most averaging about 6 feet. The dry paintings were made with pigments obtained from such materials as pulverized gypsum, yellow ochre, red sand, charcoal, pollen, cornmeal and crushed flowers.

These images did not depict Jesus Arvisu's “devils” but the legendary heroes and heroines and supernaturals known as the Holy People. The vast Holy People pantheon includes First Man and First Woman; Spider Woman, who taught women how to weave; Big Fly, conveyor of messages between Earth Surface People such as the Navajos and Holy People; vast populations like the Mountain People (all things living in the vicinity of mountains); and narrowly defined groups like the Snake People and the Corn People.

Navajos especially revere Changing Woman, mother of the Hero Twin sons of the Sun called Monster Slayer and Born for Water, who made the world a safer place for Navajos by slaying many threatening creatures. (But not, significantly, Lice Man, Hunger, Poverty and Old Age.) The Navajo term for sand painting-iikaah, “the place where the gods come and go” seems dead-on accurate. Summoned by a singer, a hataalii, a medicine man or, more rarely, a medicine woman, the Holy People enter a sand painting, infusing it with their healing power. Sand paintings are considered gifts from the Holy People to Earth Surface People like the legendary Rain Boy, an inveterate gambler, lost all of his family's possessions. Fleeing angry relatives, he began an odyssey, arriving one day at the home In the house of long life, there I wander.

In the house of happiness, there I wander.

Beauty before me, with it I wander.

Beauty behind me, with it I wander.

Beauty below me, with it I wander.

Beauty above me, with it I wander.

Beauty all around me, with it I wander.

In old age traveling, with it I wander.

I am on the beautiful trail, with it I wander.

of a beautiful woman whose jealous hus-band, Winter Thunder, shattered him with hail. Some Holy People, pitying Rain Boy, restored him, and more adventures fol-lowed. Returning to his people, Rain Boy brought healing ceremonies he learned from the Holy People.

Sand painting designs, like those obtained by Rain Boy, duplicate images Holy People use in their rituals. Matthews pre-served an account of an Earth Surface Person receiving such a gift from Changing Woman's son Monster Slayer: "Next, four sheets of sky were brought forth. A white sheet was spread on the floor in the east; a blue sheet in the south; a yellow sheet in the west and a dark sheet in the north. On each of these sheets was painted a picture, which the Navajo was told to study with care and remember. When he had done this, they rolled up again the sheets of sky and Nayenezgani [Monster Slayer] said: 'Such pictures you must teach your people to draw. They cannot do this on sheets of sky as we do, but they can grind to powder stones of various colors and draw their pictures on sand.' The sand paintings typically used in nighttime rituals conducted inside a Navajo houseusually an eight-sided, cribbed-log hogan cannot be made by just anyone. The singer supervising construction is a specialist whose years-long appren-ticeship to another medicine person initiates him as a practitioner of a ceremony known as a "way." Each way is named for the forces A way may have as many as a hundred sand paintings associated with it, others far fewer. Some 500 different sand paintings have been recorded the first documentation by Matthews in the 1880s and as many more may remain unreported. Although ways differ in length of ceremonies, number of sand paintings and forces toward which prayers are directed, all share a common goal: the restoration of hozho.

Hozho a word with no English-language equivalent can be grasped by blending such concepts as "sacred," "holy," "blessed," "balanced" and "harmonious." (Matthews rendered it as "beauty" or "beautiful.") Hozho is fragile, easily disrupted by chaotic forces. This happens if someone becomes bewitched, plagued by dreams of the dead, or violates one of the tribe's numerous taboos. "Don't throw a rock from a mountain," adults advise children. "The Holy People put it there and might be angry."

When life tips out of balance, disorder takes over. Someone in need of Mountain-way, for example, can suffer from a range of ailments, including arthritis, rheumatism, fainting spells, nervousness or stomach dis-orders. Through a way's sand paintings and ceremonies, the singer appeals to the Holy People, summoning the gods to heal the patient by reinstating hozho.

The construction of each sand painting follows a prescribed formula. Some interpretation appears in the decoration of the figures' kilts or tobacco pouches, but the (LEFT) Father Sky, with a constellation of stars in his belly, and Mother Earth, with the Navajos' four sacred plants corn, beans, squash and tobacco in hers, anchor the center of Rosie Yellowhair's Blessingway sand painting Whirling Log. COURTESY FIFTH GENERATION TRADING CO., FARMINGTON, NEW MEXICO overall appearance remains as set as the chemical formula for water. If the sand painting is not correctly made, the gods will not come. Properly constructed, it functions as a beacon the Holy People cannot ignore.

Sand paintings face east, the direction from which the Holy People enter it. Although they are protected by a variety of garlands a Rainbow Person, interconnected arrowheads, sunflowers and the multicolored mirage among the possibilities the limits of a garland's powers rest at the painting's eastward entrance. Often, this point of vulnerability highly susceptible to evil forces is watched over by such guardians as Sun, Moon, Bat, Buffalo, Big Snake or Big Fly.

Sand paintings convey complex messages. Their colors seem randomly applied, but they link the four sacred mountains rising up at the farthest boundaries of Dinéhtah, the name Navajos apply to their land. White, the dominant color in the eastern part of a sand painting, represents Shell Mountain, sometimes called White Gem Mountain (Sierra Blanca Peak in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains near Alamosa, Colorado). Blue, wedded to Turquoise Mountain (Mount Taylor in the San Mateo Range near Grant, New Mexico), holds sway in the south. The western part of the composition features the color represented by Abalone Shell Mountain (Humphreys Peak in the San Francisco Mountains near Flagstaff). Black looms heavily in the north, associated with Coal Mountain, also called

NAVAJOS OFFER THIS EXPLANATION: SAND PAINTINGS WORK BECAUSE THEY ARE GIFTS FROM THE HOLY PEOPLE. ONLY FAITH AND THE RESULTS BORN OF IT TRULY MATTER.

Jet Mountain (Hesperus Peak in the La Plata Range near Durango, Colorado). Singer, patient, friends and relatives sit around the sand painting joined in common purpose by the singer's prayers, a melodic recitation of repeated refrains reflecting the universal need for meaningful ritual. Matthews recorded a prayer to one of the Holy People from Nightway:The ceremony reaches its climax as the singer escorts the patient into the sand painting itself. Like Jacob's Ladder in the Old Testament Book of Genesis, the sand painting presents a center of transforma-tion. For a few dazzling and dangerous moments, as the singer rubs pigment from the sand painting onto the patient's body, the Holy People, sand painting and pa-tient merge into one. At the conclusion of the ceremony, par-ticipants destroy the sand painting, often by scraping it together on a blanket and depositing it outside. If it were left in place,

the Holy People, having no choice but to revisit it, would discover no ceremony under way - no singer, no patient, none of the honor they expect and which is their due. Their displeasure could manifest it-self in the patient's loss of the hozho re-stored by the ceremony. Navajos who watched Matthews make sketches of sand paintings believed this creation of permanent sand painting im-ages doomed him to a terrible fate. But within a generation or two, this attitude changed, largely because of the activities of two singers: Lefthanded (1867-1937), also called Hosteen Klah, and Red Point (1865-1936), often called Miguelito. Be-ginning around 1919 and until his death, Lefthanded whose specialties included Nightway, Shootingway and Hailway wove or supervised two of his nieces in the weaving of 70 tapestries of sand paint-ing designs. To prevent harm from befalling the nieces, he performed various precau-tionary ceremonies. As for Red Point, he preserved a sand painting archive on paper, providing abundant material for two schol-arly, profusely illustrated books. Both Lefthanded and Red Point were singers, endowed with the requisite power for dealing directly with the Holy People. Even so, they probably altered their re-productions of sand paintingsperhaps through color substitution and the omis-sion or addition of figures to render the designs harmless. Today many Navajos, relying on a tech-nique developed during the 1930s by a pair of non-Indian New Mexico sign painters, manufacture "sand paintings" for sale. Made with colored sand and glue-coated particle-board, these purely secular creations repre-sent a commercial art form.

Does sand painting work? It can, indeed, help the patient. "If the patient really has confidence in me, then he gets cured," a Navajo medicine man told a curious med-ical researcher a few years back. "If he has no confidence, then that is his problem." What, exactly, happens during a successful sand painting ceremony remains unknown. Navajos offer this explanation: Sand paint-ings work because they are gifts from the Holy People. Only faith and the results born of it truly matter. Given attention, surround-ed by people who care, the patient follows a trusted singer along the healing pathway. That is enough. Long ago, Washington Matthews, a physi-cian trained in the Western tradition, found himself pulled deep into the meaning of sand painting. Like so many others who came to learn from the Navajos, he discov-ered that the true meaning of these altars of hope and healing eloquently echoes in the closing words of a Nightway chant: The world before me is restored in beauty. The world behind me is restored in beauty. The world below me is restored in beauty. The world above me is restored in beauty. All things around me are restored in beauty. My voice is restored in beauty. It is finished in beauty. It is finished in beauty. It is finished in beauty. It is finished in beauty.

Ron McCoy teaches history at Emporia State University in Kansas. Raised in Arizona, he returns to the state as often as he can. Photographer Jerry Jacka has documented Native American culture and art for five decades. A photography exhibition of his work titled Arizona Highways: Celebrating Native Cultures opens September 30 and runs through March 11, 2001 at the Heard Museum in Phoenix.