Kinaaldá: Coming of Age in the Navajo Nation

Text and photographs by Christopher Scott Carpenter

The door of a hogan, the traditional dwelling of the Navajo people, always faces east. On clear mornings upon the sun’s rise, hazy light will fill the octagonal dome structure; the walls - traditionally mud reinforced by timber, though modern construction includes both concrete and drywall - will start to gleam as the family gathers in the daylight to make prayers to Father Sky, one of the holiest figures in the pantheon of Navajo deities, whose glowing power rises slowly before them.

Some mornings, however, a Navajo family will be up before the sun rises. 

Delshay Henio, fourteen years old, bursts through the door and hurtles into the pre-dawn chill. She’s dressed in Navajo regalia: a shawl, a dress, moccasins, several pieces of turquoise-laden jewelry, and a simple Navajo ponytail. Hot on her heels is a band of her brothers and cousins whooping and hollering - more specifically, a vocalization called ululating, as in a war cry - in an announcement that Delshay is fast approaching the eastward horizon, and that the spirits of the sky should be ready.

Why? Because Delshay is in the throes of a weeklong tradition called kinaaldá, the Navajo ceremony that transitions girls into women. At fourteen, Delshay experienced her first menstrual cycle, and that set in motion a five-day community effort to instill within her traditional Navajo values and foster within her the resilience and strength of womanhood.

Delshay will actually burst from the hogan and run toward the eastward horizon and back three times each day for the duration of the ceremony. She runs so frequently because, like womanhood, the act demands perseverance, stamina, good health, and strong work ethic. The first run precedes dawn. The second begins when the sun is at its zenith overhead and no shadows are cast on the dry soil below. The third occurs before sunset, before darkness begins to retake the land. In Navajo spiritual teachings, shadows suggest the underworld. When running in the morning as the light rises and in the middle of the day when light is at its most expansive, the gang will whoop and holler; but when running in the evening, as the light begins to fade and darkness spreads, the boys are silent and somber. In shadows the Navajo dead are counted, and a traditional Navajo will never compliment a pretty sunset.

At fourteen years old, Delshay, in many ways, is a fairly typical teenage girl in the American Southwest. She grew up on a ranch roughly forty minutes north of Gallup, New Mexico. She plays volleyball and runs track. She competes in rodeos, utilizing her love of working with horses to excel in events like barrel racing and pole bending. One key difference, however, is that when presented with the option to undergo the intense trials of kinaaldá, a ceremony that would connect her maturation through history to the many Navajo women that came before her, she accepted.

As the young people gallop across the arid and craggy land of this swath of the Navajo Nation, a semi-autonomous sovereign country-within-a-country that straddles the Four Corners region of the United States, Delshay’s parents, grandparents, aunts, and uncles are already in the shade house cooking breakfast and tending to firewood and water supplies. Breakfast consists of flash-fried discs of dough - Navajo fry bread - and a scramble of eggs, meats, and peppers. Watermelon is a constant companion to meals, and Navajo iced tea is in abundance to quench thirst throughout the day, which, in the desert, has a tendency to become scorchingly hot. 

Family, friends, and community members will arrive throughout the five days of the ceremony, coming from the vast reaches of the Navajo Nation and beyond in order to wish Delshay well and deliver donations of food and drinks. Throughout the ceremony the community is fed, and they gather in the relative coolness of the shade house to reconnect and hold vigil for the young woman on her journey into adulthood. Each time a new guest arrives, Delshay must greet them as any traditional Navajo woman should, and then bless their donations by walking with them in the customary clockwise circle around a central ash pile inside the hogan. 

To feed the guests the men decide to pool enough money to purchase three sheep for slaughter. With clinical precision a Navajo butcher slices the neck of one deep enough that he is eventually able to sever the head, which will be set aside for roasting. Blood gushes into a large plastic bowl and grows thick and sappy in the heat. Curious flies buzz around the carcass as it is disassembled. Limbs are snapped and carved, organs are extracted, and soon only the pelt of the animal is left drying in the sun. A trio of children gather around the sheep’s head to giggle and poke its eyeballs, only to be chastised by their father nearby. They flee to the family’s trampoline. The butchered sheep’s meat, known as mutton, makes its way into community stews, and the blood is kept for blood sausages. Lard is wrapped in the intestines and then cooked, contracting into charred coils - “Twizzlers,” Delshay's grandfather Dave calls them. 

One key figure in the perpetual cooking machine is Delshay’s grandmother, Darlene Peshlakai. With silver windswept hair, the humor of a sailor, and the swagger of a cowgirl, Darlene is a strong matriarch for the Peshlakai-Henio family that, for the most part, all reside in houses surrounding Darlene’s own, planets around a central star. 

The inculcation of strength is a major aspect of Delshay’s kinaaldá, and she has remarkable family influences. In March of 2010, the Peshlakai family was returning home from a basketball game when a drunk driver collided with their car. Darlene’s two youngest daughters were killed in the accident. Since then, Darlene and her husband Dave and the rest of the Peshlakai family have dedicated immense effort to combating drunk driving within Navajo communities, who are disproportionately affected by problematic drinking. Their efforts crystalized in the founding of Peshlakai Angels Vs. Drunk Driving, an organization that generates public awareness of the dangers of reckless drinking through memorial rodeos, basketball tournaments, and motorcycle rides, and an annual drunk driving checkpoint.

Delshay’s kinaaldá will culminate in the baking of a cake in traditional Navajo fashion - superheating a fire pit throughout the ceremony by steadfastly feeding wood to a sort of perpetual flame, and cleaning out the ash only when it overflows. Delshay’s brothers and cousins - the same gang who race headlong behind her toward the eastward horizon three times a day - are responsible for maintaining the fire. The boys take shifts throughout each night to guard the earthly oven from wind, dust, and rain; as a result, they also can sometimes be seen dozing off in obscure corners of the ranch.

The cake, called alkaad, is based on roasted dried corn that Delshay grinds in the hogan using a Navajo metate, the stone crushing tool and slab basin used throughout Mesoamerica in a wide variety of cultural variations. The continuous act of placing, smashing, and grinding the kernels of roasted corn and then collecting the resulting fine corn residue is laborious and hard. Though insulated, the hogan isn’t air-conditioned; as the heat rises in the small space, droplets of sweat slide off her brow and into the rising pile of powder to form tiny coagulated nodes.

In fact, mixing biological and agricultural matter is integral to the recipe. In addition to ground yellow and white corn, the cake includes flour, brown sugar, wheat germ, raisins - and, at key points of the ceremony, corn pollen spat from the mouth of the girl. A cadre of indigenous women, Navajo and Apache, are brought into the process in the final few days to support Delshay in the creation of the cake. They grind and mix the corn and flour and stir the mixture into hot water, creating a vat of alkaad batter that will be lathered into the superheated fire pit, cleared of ash, on a bed of interwoven corn husks, then buried to bake.

Leading this cadre is a Navajo-Apache woman named Shahin Yazzie. In preparation for Delshay’s kinaaldá, her family selected Shahin as her shimá, or godmother. In Navajo tradition, this godmother supports and guides the young woman through the trials of the ceremony, which start on the first morning when Shahin washes Delshay’s hair with warm water and yucca oil and ties it into a simple Navajo ponytail, and end four mornings later when Shahin again washes Delshay’s hair with yucca oil and finalizes Delshay’s transformation into a woman by letting her ponytail down and retying it into a maternal Navajo bun.

Crucial to the family’s selection of Delshay’s shimá is the consideration of what values she can imbue into the young woman. The quality of Shahin’s heart is immediately apparent. She is kind to humans and good toward animals. She is also daring and tough, having ridden steers and bulls in her youth. Dwayne, Delshay’s father, also reckoned with the fact that if both parents were to pass to the underworld, Shahin would be a worthy guardian in their stead.

In the quiet darkness around midnight on the final night, Delshay, her shimá, her parents, key members of the community, and two spiritual leaders known as hataalii, or medicine men, gather inside the hogan and sit along its eight walls around the central ash pile. The perpetual fire, smoldering orange in the pale, crackles softly just outside.

An array of Delshay’s possessions rest displayed on a traditional rug; these objects include her volleyball kit, prize saddles from rodeos, and the feminine tools of Navajo domestic life like the metate. Delshay herself sits facing east on a stack of rugs that resembles a throne. Her seat is inward from the wall, and she must sit upright for the songs provided by the hataalii throughout the night.

The hataalii have curated their songs based on the life Delshay has lived and hopes to live; there are songs about the hogan and other aspects of traditional Navajo life, but also songs about horses. The songs are rhythmic and repetitive, almost like chants, as they trod along their melodies. Those gathered in the hogan close their eyes as they sing along. Eventually, as the hours slide away and late night becomes early morning, it seems almost as if the songs themselves are what is keeping those in attendance awake, combating exhaustion and tethering consciousness to their very recitation. Then, finally, with the fire still crackling outside, Shahin washes Delshay’s hair a second time in warm water and yucca oil, and ties it into a maternal Navajo bun. 

And so, on the final morning, her hair cleaned and retied, fatigued from the all-night ceremony with the haatalii, exhausted from four days of the domestic labor and hospitality expected from a Navajo woman, and sore from the repeated horizon-bound runs, Delshay bursts through the east-facing door, her band of brothers and cousins hot on her heels whooping and hollering in announcement to the spirits of her approach. But this morning is different - in the distance, to the north, are tendrils of rainfall draped off of stormy clouds. In Navajo parlance this is a female rain, calmer and gentler than the blustering tempests known as male rains. The vertical tendrils resemble a woman’s hair let down from a ponytail - appropriate for a young woman who just transitioned into maturity through the reconfiguration of her own hair. Indeed, an auspicious sign.

Some cakes bake poorly in the ground, a devastating realization for the young woman and her family. But Delshay’s cake is good - firm and moist, with muted earthy flavors that pair well with a steaming hot cup of coffee. The cake is unearthed, cut, and distributed among the gathered family and friends. 

Earlier, while tending the fire and staring pensively into its rippling flames, Delshay’s father Dwayne reflects on the events that led to these moments in his and his daughter’s lives, the events that have shaped the arc of his family. When the two Peshlakai Angels were killed in the tragic accident in March of 2010, Delshay, born in January that year, was only two months old. Dwayne saw, as only a father could, the best qualities of the two girls manifest in his daughter. He finds the timing comforting, and alludes, without stating outright, to a belief in reincarnation. 

The Navajo hogan, domed and octagonal, is symbolic of the womb. Having emerged reborn a woman, and with a community of strong, kind, and good women around her, and perhaps within her, it seems as if Delshay is blessed with more than just a single shimá - but rather the whole of Navajo womanhood.