Dine ceremony is organised into chantways, each a long ordered performance of song, prayer, dry painting, herbs and physical procedure, conducted by a hataalii, a singer, over one, two, five or nine nights. The names indicate what a ceremony treats and where its authority comes from: Blessingway, Hozhooji, the foundation of the system, used for good order, for a house, for a pregnancy, for a departure; Enemyway, for the sickness brought by contact with outsiders and with violence, used for veterans returning from both world wars and from Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan; Nightway, Mountainway, Beautyway, Shootingway and others, each with its own narrative of how a hero obtained it from the Holy People.
The dry painting, made from coloured sand, pollen, charcoal and ground stone on the floor of the hogan, places the patient in the design so that the depicted Holy People act on them, and it is destroyed before the next dawn. The commercial sand paintings sold in the Southwest are deliberately altered so that they are not the real thing.
A hataalii learns a chantway by apprenticeship, memorising hundreds of songs in fixed order over years, in a ceremonial register of the language that is not casual Navajo. Getting it wrong is understood to be dangerous rather than merely ineffective. The number of singers holding a full nine-night ceremony has declined sharply, traceable in large part to the boarding schools that punished the language.
This entry deliberately does not reproduce ceremonial detail. A large body of chantway text, song and painting was recorded and published between the 1890s and the 1950s, some of it by researchers who paid singers in no position to refuse, and much of it restricted by season, by initiation, or absolutely. Reproducing it now, on the excuse that it is already in print, compounds the original act. Dine institutions have worked for decades to restrict circulation of such material and to bring ceremonial objects home under repatriation law.