A Ceremony Held With Care

The Nightway and the sacred masks used to represent Talking God and the other Yei within it are treated with considerable ceremonial seriousness and, in many respects, restricted or protected status within Navajo tradition, since the masks are understood to hold real sacred power rather than functioning as costume, and their construction, use and care follow specific protocols maintained by trained medicine people rather than being generally accessible knowledge, a pattern this atlas notes without attempting to describe the restricted ceremonial detail itself, consistent with how it treats comparable masked and empowerment-bound material elsewhere. Navajo Sacred Places documents how the Nightway and related ceremonies also connect directly to specific sacred geography within Navajo traditional territory, reinforcing the broader pattern in Navajo religion of major ceremonial traditions being tied to particular places as well as particular Holy People, and the continued regular performance of the Nightway by Navajo medicine people and communities today reflects Talking God's status as an actively venerated figure in a living ceremonial tradition rather than one known only through historical or ethnographic record.