The Sacred Hoop: Recovering the Feminine in American Indian Traditions

ceremonials known as chantways. The primary purpose of these
rituals is healing, based on the Navajo understanding that health
depends on an integrated psyche. In the Navajo system, an
isolated or alienated individual is a sick one, so the healing
practice centers on reintegrating the isolated individual into the
matrix of the universe. Because it is structured after ritual
patterns, the resolution of House Made of Dawn lies not in the
death of Abel or that of Francisco but in their willing and
knowledgeable participation in the ritual pattern that informs
their tribal life. That is, not only do they engage in ritual practice
but they understand its proper role in the scheme of things, a role
that continues beyond the grave and that thus makes death only
another kind of ritual transformation.
The narrative that accompanies the Navajo Night Chant, one
of the many chantways used among the Navajo for healing, is
about Crippled Boy and Blind Boy, who are abandoned when
the tribe moves. Thus condemned to certain death, Blind Boy
carries Crippled Boy on his shoulders, and so teamed they make
their way. They come to a high cliff and climb it. At the top they
encounter some Holy People who teach them the Night Chant.
Momaday has reformulated the overt elements of the narrative:
Abel is not blind, but dumb. He is not crippled, though his
grandfather Francisco walks with a limp, and Abel himself is
seriously maimed in the beating from the Mexican cop. The main
way in which Abel resembles the heroes of the traditional tale is
in his ostracism and the seeming inevitability of his death in
isolation and despair. The Holy People do not appear directly as
characters in the novel until the final episode, but they are
present throughout in a number of indirect ways. They are most
like themselves in the story Abel’s white lover Angela tells to
her son about the bear and the maiden (169–171). The story told
by the assimilated Tosamah about the Taime tree of the Kiowa
gives a Kiowa version of the supernaturals (89–90), and they are