Changing Woman

At dawn on the fourth morning a dark cloud came down and sat on the top of Gobernador Knob, a blunt stone butte in what is now northern New Mexico. First Man had been watching that summit for days, lifting his medicine bundle toward it each sunrise. He climbed. In the wet grey light near the top, with rain still ticking on the rock, he found an infant girl, and beside her stood Talking God. First Man laid the child on a strip of cliff-rose bark and carried her home.

That is one way the Navajo, the Diné, tell the arrival of Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé, the woman who changes. It is not the only way. In the long version that the army surgeon Washington Matthews wrote down in the 1880s and printed in 1897, she begins as a small figure of turquoise, brought to life by the holy people alongside a second figure cut from white shell. The shell figure becomes White Shell Woman, her younger sister. Elsewhere the two are one being under two names. The tellings do not agree, and nobody seems troubled by it.

What they share is speed. First Man and First Woman fed her and she grew at a rate no child has matched since. Four days took her from the cradle to womanhood, though some narrators add, with a straight face, that it was really four years. When her body announced that she was grown, the holy people gathered and held a ceremony over her. That was the first Kinaaldá, and it has not stopped since. For four days a Navajo girl who has reached puberty is dressed and treated as Changing Woman herself. She runs toward the east at first light, further each morning, with her breath loud in the cold air. She grinds corn until her arms ache, and the meal goes into a great round cake that bakes overnight in a pit in the earth. By the last morning the smell of it hangs over the whole camp.

The world Changing Woman grew up in was a bad place to raise children. Monsters hunted across it and the people were nearly gone. Then the Sun noticed her. The accounts handle this with some delicacy: she lay in the open where his light could reach her, and she bathed where water fell, and between the warmth and the dripping water she conceived. She bore twin boys. In Matthews’s telling the sisters split the work, one child each, the elder fathered by the Sun and the younger by water. The boys are Monster Slayer and Born for Water.

She raised them quietly. When the giant Yeitso came sniffing around the hogan and pointed at small footprints in the dust, she told him she had pressed them there with the side of her hand because she was lonely. The boys were hidden underground a few steps away. As they grew they asked who their father was, and she would not say. They found out anyway, crossed the sky to the Sun’s house, survived his tests, and came home armed with lightning. Then they did what their names promise. Their mother stood in the doorway and watched the bodies of the monsters turn to stone across the landscape.

After that the Sun wanted her nearer the end of his day’s road. She did not simply agree. She asked for a house as fine as the one he kept in the east, and she asked for it to be built out on the western water, away from the shore. Her stated reason was that people would one day be numerous and she did not care to be visited too often. She got her house. The Sun comes to it every evening.

It was lonely there all the same. So she rubbed loose skin from her own body, and from those small rolls of skin, worked together with the mountain soil bundle that First Man had carried up from the lower worlds, she formed four couples. They walked east to their own country and became the ancestors of the four original Navajo clans. Corn is hers as well. So is the Blessingway, the ceremony the Navajo use to set things right at a birth, a wedding, a new house or a girl’s coming of age. Its songs go back to her, and one of them is sung inside every other Navajo ceremony.

Her appearance is the one thing no storyteller can fix, and that is the point of her name. She is a girl in one season and a bent old woman in another. When she has grown old she becomes young again and starts over. She never dies. Matthews thought she stood for the turning year, the land going grey in winter and green in spring, and that reading has stuck, though the stories themselves simply say she changes. Turquoise belongs to her and white shell to her sister, earth to one and water to the other.

Her powers are the slow kind. She makes life and food. She renews herself, and through the Kinaaldá she hands a share of that renewal to every girl who runs east in her place. Nothing in the record shows her harming anyone. She is good.

Her limits are just as clear. She does not fight. When monsters filled the earth she could hide two children and lie to a giant, and the killing had to wait for her sons. She needed the Sun to conceive and the holy people to raise her. And for all her making, she lives a long way off, on water no one crosses, in a house she chose because it was hard to reach. The Apache honor a close relative of hers, White Painted Woman, whose story runs along similar lines, but the two are separate figures belonging to separate peoples. Among the Navajo she is met mostly in the person of a tired girl with corn meal on her hands, on the fourth morning, turning back from the east.

Frequently Asked Questions

Who is Changing Woman?

Changing Woman is the most revered holy being of the Navajo, known in the Navajo language as Asdzą́ą́ Nádleehé, “the woman who changes”. She is the mother of the Hero Twins, the maker of corn and of the first Navajo clans, and the central figure of the Blessingway ceremony.

Why is she called Changing Woman?

Changing Woman is named for the way she ages. She grows from a girl into an old woman and then becomes young again, over and over, without dying. Washington Matthews, who published the Navajo origin story in 1897, read this as an image of the changing year.

Who are Changing Woman’s children?

Changing Woman is the mother of the twins Monster Slayer and Born for Water. She conceived them through sunlight and falling water, and the Sun is named as their father. In the version recorded by Washington Matthews, her sister White Shell Woman bears the younger twin. The twins grew up to rid the earth of its monsters.

How did Changing Woman create the Navajo people?

Changing Woman made the first Navajo from her own skin. Living alone in her house on the western water, she rubbed skin from her body and, using the mountain soil bundle of First Man, formed four couples. They became the ancestors of the four original Navajo clans.

What is the Kinaaldá?

The Kinaaldá is the four-day Navajo ceremony for a girl who has reached puberty. It was first held for Changing Woman, and the girl is treated as Changing Woman while it lasts. She runs toward the east each morning and grinds corn for a large cake baked in the ground.

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