Changing Woman

At a Glance

• Central figures: Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé - Changing Woman, the central female deity of the Diné (Navajo) people; First Man and First Woman, who found her as an infant; the Sun, who became her husband; and the Hero Twins - Monster Slayer (Naayéé’ Neizghání) and Born for Water (Tó Bájísh Chíní), her sons.
• Setting: Diné (Navajo) tradition, in the world after the People emerged from the lower worlds; the sacred mountain Ch’óol’í’í (Gobernador Knob) in what is now northern New Mexico, and later the western ocean.
• The turn: Found as an infant on a mountaintop and raised by First Man and First Woman, Changing Woman grew to maturity in four days and was visited by the Sun, conceiving the Hero Twins who would rid the world of the monsters (naayéé’) that threatened the People.
• The outcome: After the monsters were destroyed, Changing Woman moved to a home built for her on the western ocean, where she created the four original Diné clans from her own skin.
• The legacy: The Kinaaldá, the Diné coming-of-age ceremony for young women, reenacts Changing Woman’s own passage into womanhood and remains one of the central ceremonial practices of the Diné people.

First Man heard the crying. It came from the top of Ch’óol’í’í, from somewhere near the summit where the clouds sat against the rock. He climbed. The sound grew clearer as he went higher, and when he reached the place where the mountain met the sky, he found an infant lying on a bed of rainbow and cloud. She was wrapped in nothing. She was alive.

He brought her down to First Woman, and they raised her. She was not like other children. On the first day she crawled. On the second day she walked. On the third day she spoke. On the fourth day she was a woman grown, standing tall with dark hair to her waist. The world was still new, still dangerous, still full of the naayéé’ - the monsters born from the misdeeds of people in the lower worlds. But the child who had been found on the mountain was now something the world had not yet contained: a woman who could change.

The Mountaintop and the Four Days

First Man and First Woman knew what they had found. She was not a lost child. She was placed there by the Holy People, set on the mountain’s crown like a seed pressed into soil. They called her Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé - Changing Woman - because her body moved through the seasons the way the earth does. In spring she was young and supple. In summer she was full and strong. In autumn her hair grayed. In winter she bent and slowed. Then spring came again and she was young.

When she reached womanhood on that fourth day, the Holy People instructed First Man and First Woman to perform a ceremony for her. This was the first Kinaaldá. Changing Woman ran toward the east at dawn. She ran as far as she could and came back. She ground corn. She was molded - her body pressed and shaped by the hands of an older woman, aligning her limbs and her purpose, preparing her for what she would carry. A great cake was baked in a pit in the earth. The ceremony lasted four days, because four is the number that holds the world together in Diné thinking - four directions, four sacred mountains, four times of day.

She came out of the ceremony changed. Or rather, she came out of it fully herself. The ceremony did not make her sacred. She was already sacred. The ceremony made the world ready to receive her.

The Sun’s Visit

The Sun traveled his path across the sky each day, and he saw her. He came to her. The details of their meeting are told carefully, because the union of Changing Woman and the Sun is one of the most important events in the Diné world - it is the joining of the earth’s power and the sky’s power, the female and the male, the renewing and the constant.

She conceived. She bore twin sons. The first was Naayéé’ Neizghání - Monster Slayer. The second was Tó Bájísh Chíní - Born for Water. They were small at first, but they grew quickly, as their mother had. They asked who their father was. Changing Woman did not answer at first. The twins pressed. She told them: your father is the Sun. He lives in the sky. If you want to find him, you will have to travel east to the edge of the world.

The twins went. Their journey to their father’s house is its own long story - the tests the Sun put them through, the weapons he finally gave them, the monsters they killed one by one until the earth was safe for the People. But that story belongs to the twins. Changing Woman’s story continues on the ground, in the silence after her sons left.

The Western Ocean

When the monsters were dead and the world was cleared, the Sun came to Changing Woman again. He asked her to come live with him. She refused. She would not live in his house. She was not his to keep. But she told him: build me a house in the west, on the great water, a house of white shell and turquoise and abalone and jet. Build it where the sun goes when it sets.

The Sun built it. Changing Woman walked west. She went to the edge of the land and beyond it, to an island on the western ocean, and there she lived in the house the Sun had built. He visited her each evening when he completed his journey across the sky, and each morning he left again. This was their arrangement. She did not follow him. He came to her.

The Four Clans

On the western ocean, alone in her house, Changing Woman rubbed the skin of her body - from under her arms, from her chest, from her back, from beneath her feet. From each place she rolled small pieces of skin between her fingers. From these she made people. Four groups of people, one from each part of her body. These became the four original Diné clans: Kinyaa’áanii (Towering House), Honágháahnii (One-walks-around), Tódích’íi’nii (Bitter Water), and Hashtł’ishnii (Mud People).

She sent them east, back across the water, back to the land between the four sacred mountains. They arrived and they were the People. Every Diné person traces clan membership through the mother’s line, because the clans came from Changing Woman’s body. She made them from herself. They carry her.

The Ceremony That Continues

Changing Woman did not die. She does not die. She ages through the year and renews, ages and renews. She is still in her house in the west. The Sun still visits.

When a Diné girl reaches puberty, her family prepares the Kinaaldá. The girl runs at dawn toward the east, as Changing Woman ran. She is molded, as Changing Woman was molded. She grinds corn. A cake is baked in the earth. For four days she reenacts what Changing Woman did on the mountaintop when the world was new and she was becoming herself for the first time.

The girl does not become Changing Woman. She runs in Changing Woman’s footsteps. The ceremony makes visible what is already true - that the capacity to change, to renew, to carry life forward, lives in the body. It came from the mountaintop. It came from the skin rubbed between fingers on the western ocean. Every daughter of the People carries it.