NAVAHO POETRY: AN INTERPRETATION BY EDA LOU WALTON An appreciation of Navaho song presupposes an appreciation of the Navahoes; an understanding of the quiet simplicity and dignity of the life of these nature-people leads inev itably to a deeper understanding of Navaho song. People and song are one. Out of the living tribal spirit springs the significant expression of that spirit. Along the steady flow of days lived near to nature, little springs of clear, poetic thought bubble up, invigorating the bordering land, swelling the stream. For the Navaho Indian, life is serious, but not puzzling; significant but not ponderous. Unto each day for him sufficient is the evil and beauty thereof. He is a natural mystic; yet he is inclined to love the orderliness of ritualization. Through his ritual he arrives at a mechanical adjustment to his environment; through his vision, his adjustment is made beautiful. Two such forces, the power of mystic vision and the tendency to ritualize, when functioning strongly in one race, may be involved in a conflict that is destructive to art, or in a reconciliation that is conducive to its development. The reconciliation of mysticism and institutionalism is the dominant characteristic of the Navaho people. Navaho mysticism springs from a love of Nature. These people living the nomadic lives of herders, moving across the mesas in small groups from place to place are in constant communion with nature. They know her in her many moods. They worship the Sun-Bearer, who brings them light and heat, Male Water-the San Juan River-and Female Waterthe Rio Grande-because they make verdant their desert lands. The natural and the supernatural are for the Navaho Indian, but two phases of one manifestation. The natural has supernatural power and the supernatural is constantly present even in the milder moods of the natural. Hence, the Navahoes are true mystics; mystics who live and dwell in the mystic vision. That they seek this vision at its highest is certain. It is to impart and re-live the realization of the mystic vision that ritualization exists; it is for this that these people sing, dance, and carry through elaborate ceremonies. But it is also certain that the realization of the mystic vision comes to the Navahoes individually, comes easily into their daily lives; that almost always they are intensely aware of dwelling in a god-inhabited world where the god-moment occurs with great frequency. It occurs most naturally in the presence of natural beauty; for a nature people is more susceptible to the mysticism which is a part of nature worship than to the more artificially produced forms such as self-torture and fasting. However, because they have learned to yearn for and to desire the moment of exaltation in which god-contact is realized, the Navahoes, like the Christian mystics, have learned to produce this exaltation by mental concentration, by prayer and fasting. These things become a part of ritual, and ritual exists altogether for the purpose of attaining the feeling of god-nearness, the result of which will be beneficial to the sick and well alike. Because they are natural mystics, then, the Navahoes are ritualistic; through ritualization they attain the consummation of contact with the more than natural. It is not true, however, that all peoples who are by instinct. mystic-and this would take in many of the more primitive races-are ritualistic. The gap between the supernatural and the natural may be bridged by other means than religious ritual. It may be bridged by magic, or there may be no gap at all. People who are truly "prelogical" in Levy Bruhl's sense of the word, never distinguish between the concrete and the spiritual. To them a tree is, at one and the same time, a tree and a tree-spirit. But when in a people there are two tendencies functioning in racial progress-the tendency to enjoy exaltation and the tendency to order-then we shall have, as in the Navaho, a people both mystical and ritualistic. The Navahoes are almost unique in this; moreover, in them the tendencies toward mysticism and towards ritualization are evenly balanced. Now ritualization tends to become standardized; hence it tends to be destructive of the individualistic mystical attitude towards life. A people is seldom so vitally mystical as to be able to be both mystical and ritualistic. Usually we find-and the Pueblo Indians, near neighbors of the Navaho, exemplify this-that as a life is more and more ritualized, it is less and less fraught with the imaginative intensity of vision. Certain religious conceptions come to be matter of fact; fixed patterns of expressing these conceptions defy innovation. Individualism dies in the press of socialization, for ritual is always social. To any one who has lived on these vast desert mesas of New Mexico and Arizona, surrounded by rugged forested peaks above which the skies are a certain blue, and beyond which the distances are unobscured by any haze, there is nothing to wonder at in the Navaho attitude well illustrated by this little anecdote of Dr. Matthews. Dr. Matthews, who is now dead, was the greatest authority on the Navaho Indians. He had asked, it seems, from an old priest to whom the gods were very real, some information concerning the creation myths. Before telling the myth, the old priest humbled himself to the divinity he felt all about him, and repeated with dignity the following words addressed to the Earth Mother, The Sky Father, the divinities of Darkness and Light, of the East, Dawn, of the West and South, and of the North, Darkness, and the divinity within himself, his conscience, perhaps, or merely his sense of his own deep nobility: Horizontal Woman, before you shame I have; Horizontal-land-yellow, before you shame I have; Darkness, before you shame I have; Sun-bearer, before you shame I have; That within me standing, with me speaking, before you shame I have; Always you are looking at me, Never am I out of sight, Therefore truth I tell, Therefore truth I always tell, My word, to my breast I hold you.1 This was the priest's acknowledgement of the fact that the life of the Navahoes is colored with the sense of god-contact; they are the brothers of gods. Yet undoubtedly as they have progressed racially, this ever-present sense of the gods in nature about them has lessened in intensity. They have realized little by little that man himself does, in some measure, control his fate. They have learned to plant corn for food, to herd sheep for a living. They no longer are the hunters and warriors, dependent upon the graciousness of their environment. So the gap between the sacred and the profane world has, for them widened, and, that it might not widen too greatly, they have adopted, perhaps borrowed in part, that means of bringing about a heightened contract between the two worlds, ritualism. Through ritualism the mystic vision of poetic hearts has been imparted to the entire tribe; through ritualism the poets have re-lived the sacred contact; through mysticism the worlds of the Real and Unreal have been brought together. But it is in ritualized song that Navaho religion finds the 'Matthews, Washington: Navaho Legends, p. 258. I have used throughout this essay my own translation of the various texts. The Navaho texts, especially, I have studied so thoroughly as to be able to make such changes as change of the poetic form in the collector's translation. chief means through which the gods are made to meet men. In the exaltation of ceremonial singing, the Navahoes have, as a people, been able to feel the gods to be with them. The effect of one of their long ceremonies is that of a slow rise day by day and hour by hour, to a tremendous emotional crisis in which all night the air is shattered by continuous loud singing; then there is a drop very suddenly into silence. The emotional pitch arrived at is not dissipated, it is not allowed to die away; with the daybreak comes absolute quiet; the catharsis of the mental and spiritual excitement is enjoyed by each of the participants after he has stolen away to rest. The joy becomes individual, not a group sensation. Through song, men have met the holy ones; through silence the blessings of the contact are realized. Since song is thus used as an instrument of adjustment between the divine and the human, its content and form naturally reflect its function. In content and form the Navaho ceremonial song is indicative of the Navaho mystical attitude towards his world and of the effort to heighten and maintain that attitude through ritual. There is reflected in the songs the struggle between the two forces so characteristic of the people. Because this struggle is reflected, Navaho poetry differs essentially from that of the more purely ritualistic Pueblo and from that of the non-ritualistic Pima tribes. We have, in fact, in the southwest, three Indian tribes whose racial differences are clearly demonstrated by their poetry-the ritualistic Pueblo, the non-ritualistic Pima, and the uniquely mystical and ritualistic Navaho. We find expressed in Navaho ceremonial songs lines of esoteric symbolism and tribal desire for god-contact, and lines wherein there is the fresh picturing of individual poetic experience such as the coming of dawn, the flight of a white dove over the desert. It is an unusual combination, this mixture of the sincere poetic figures with the accepted rites and symbols. Sometimes one feels that all the beauty in Navaho poetry lies in the bright bits of poetic imagery, illuminated |