The Kinaalda and Navajo Personhood

Maureen Trudelle Schwarz's ethnographic study of Navajo views on the body and personhood, titled directly for this figure, documents how thoroughly Changing Woman's story shapes lived Navajo religious practice specifically through the Kinaalda, the multi-day puberty ceremony held for a Navajo girl at her first menstruation, in which the girl is ritually identified with Changing Woman herself, running toward the sun, having her body moulded and blessed by an older female relative, and baking a large ceremonial corn cake, all reenacting elements of Changing Woman's own origin story so that the young woman's transition to maturity is understood as a genuine participation in the Holy Person's own renewing power rather than merely a symbolic reference to it. This direct ritual identification of an ordinary Navajo girl with the tradition's central creative figure is a distinctive and well documented feature of Navajo religious practice, and the Kinaalda continues to be performed by Navajo families today, making Changing Woman's presence in Navajo religious life an active, continuing reality rather than a figure known only from recorded mythology.