Yei Bi Chei (Yebichai) Night Chant-Third Day

It is understood that the patient has been sweated in the morning, as on the second day.

Navajo Medicine Man

Photo of Navajo Medicine Man

Sources of Information for the Article:

The Night Chant, A Navaho Ceremony. By Washington Matthews – May, 1902.
Legend Of The Night Chant- The North American Indian By Edward S. Curtis 1907
The Nightway:A History and a History of Documentation of a Navajo Ceremonial by: James C. Faris – 1990.
Earth is My Mother, Sky is my Father, by Trudy Griffin-Pierce, 1992

On this night he is dressed in spruce boughs by the assisting medicine-man, bound around the wrists, arms, ankles, legs, and body, and fastened on the head in the form of a turban.

After several songs, Nayenezgani and Tobadzischini cut the boughs from the body, using a stone arrow-point as a knife. Then the boughs are cut into fragments over the patient’s head, after which the singer takes a feather wand, points it toward the four cardinal points above the fire, and brushes the patient, chanting meanwhile.

At the end of the brushing he points the wand out of the smoke-hole, at the same time blowing the dust from it out into the open air.

See the Yei Bi Chei Ceremony now going on in Shiprock at  the Northern Navajo Nation Fair

 

Tobadzischini – Born From Water – Navajo Mask

This is Born From Water, the second of the twin miracle-performing sons of Yolkai Estsan, the White-Shell Woman. His brother is Nayenezgani.

Tobadzischini - Born From Water - Mask
Mask representing the younger twin, known both as Na?ídígishí, He Who Cuts Life Out of the Enemy, and Tóbájíshchíní, Born of Water. Mask used in Night Chant Ceremony, recorded by Matthews in 1902

The mask is the usual inverted bag made of set sacred buckskin. It is the painted with red ocher all except a space over the face, triangular informed with round corners.

This space is black bordered with white and large enough to include eye-holes and a mouthful. On the ground of the red ocher, both the front in the back of the mask are painted a number of few symbols in white. These vary in number, position, and arrangement on different mask in at each new painting of the mask but the number is always a multiple of four.

To an angle of each mouthful and I whole is all diamond shaped is attached a white shell. A fringe of red or yellow here are wool, either staff or flowing is attached to the seam across the crown from side to side.. A turkey feather and a eagle feather are fixed to the top of the mass, to one side of the center. It collar is a fox skin.