Kinaalda: The Navajo Puberty Ritual (Video)
At this point, the girl’s family will sing the first prayer. The prayer lasts for about thirty minutes and after it is finished, the girl will finished putting on her ceremonial attire. She wears a woven ‘rug dress’ that is essentially a Navajo rug that is sewn together on the sides, leaving holes for the head, arms and legs.
The girl will also wear jewelry made of turquoise, shells and other materials for her ceremony. Finally, she will put on buckskin moccasins and wrap leggings around her calves to prepare herself for her run.
Throughout the ceremony, the young woman will perform tasks on others that she is having performed on herself. This is because the Navajo believe that during a sacred ceremony, the participant gains the power to help others in the same way they are being helped.
During the Kinaalda, this means that the young girl will be ‘molded’ by her mother and then she will also ‘mold’ others in the tribe and so on.
As the next step in the ceremony, the young woman will make her first run. She will run several times over the course of her four day ceremony, usually twice a day: once in the morning and once in the evening.
She will run out, as far as she can, toward the east, then she will turn and return to the Hogan. During the first night of the ceremony, she will stay in her family’s Hogan where she will be forced to sit straight up with her legs straight out in front of her for the entire night without being allowed to sleep.
While she sits this way, men in her family will sing more prayers. They will sing throughout the night and into the dawn while the young woman remains seated.
In the morning, the young woman will begin the arduous process of making her alkaan, a large, ceremonial corn cake that will be fed to the entire tribe. She will begin by grinding pounds upon pounds of corn into meal which she will then have to stir into several batches of thick batter.
To help her stir the batter, her mother will give her a special stir stick which is made out of several greasewood sticks tied together. These stir sticks are sacred to the women of the Navajo partly because they are often passed from generation to generation during the Kinaalda.
