45. The preludes and refrains here referred to are found, with rare exceptions, in every stanza and in every song. Although they are all either totally meaningless or only partly significant, they are the most characteristic parts of the poems, and the singer cons the preludes over when he wishes to call to mind any particular composition, just as we often remember a poem or song by means of the first line. They are rarely or never quite alike in any two songs, and great ingenuity is often displayed in giving them variety.
46. There is yet another burden laid on the memory of the singer of sacred songs, and this is the order of their arrangement. The songs of each ceremony are divided into groups which must follow one another in an established order, and each song has, in the group to which it belongs, a place that must not be changed under penalty of divine displeasure. To sing, during the progress of a rite, the sixth Song of the Whirling Sticks before the fifth song is sung, would be a sacrilege as great as to chant the syllables óhohohó, in place of éhehehé. To remember this exact order of sequence in a set of two hundred or three hundred songs is no easy task.[322]
47. But it may be said: “Perhaps things were different with the Navahoes in Dr. Letherman’s day. May they not have learned from other tribes, or have themselves invented all this ceremony and song since he knew them?” The reply to this is, that it is absurd to suppose that such an elaborate system of rites and songs could have grown up among an illiterate people in the twenty-five years that elapsed between Dr. Letherman’s departure from the Navaho country and the author’s arrival there. Besides, the latter obtained his information from men of advanced age—from sixty to eighty years old—who practised these rites and sang these songs in their youth, and who in turn learned them from men of a departed generation. The shamans who conduct these ceremonies, tell these tales, and sing these songs are scattered widely over the Navaho country. Men who are scarcely acquainted with one another, and who learned from different preceptors, will sing the same sacred songs and to exactly the same tune. All the lore of the Navaho priesthood was undoubtedly extant in Dr. Letherman’s time and for ages before.
48. Songless Women.—It is remarkable that, while the Navaho men are such fruitful composers of song and such ardent singers, the women, as a rule, do not sing. Among the wild hunting tribes of the North, as the author knew them thirty years ago, the women not only had songs of their own, but they took part in the ceremonial songs of the men. The Pueblo Indian women of New Mexico, neighbors of the Navahoes, have many fine songs, the song of the corn-grinders, often heard in Zuñi, being especially wild and musical. But usually the Navaho woman is songless. The writer tried a long time to find a woman who could sing, and offered good pecuniary inducements before he got one. She came from a distance of thirty miles. She knew no songs peculiar to her sex, but her father was a medicine-man, who frequently repeated his songs at home in order to familiarize himself with them, and she gradually picked up several of them. She sang in a musical soprano with much spirit, and was one of the most pleasing singers heard in the tribe.
49. Figures of Speech.—It is probable that all rhetorical figures of speech known to our poets may be found in these simple compositions of the Navahoes. But in many cases the allusions are to such recondite matters of symbolism, or incidents in their myths, that they could be made plain, if at all, only by a tedious recital. Thus it would not be easy to make clear in a few words why, when the goddess Estsánatlehi, in one of the songs to her honor, is spoken of as climbing a wand of turquoise, we know the poet means to say she is ascending San Mateo Mountain, in New Mexico, or why, when he speaks of her as climbing a wand of haliotis shell, he is endeavoring to tell us that she is ascending the peak of San Francisco in Arizona. Yet we may gain some idea of the meaning by referring to the myth ([par. 193]).
50. But some of the metaphors and similes are not so hard to understand. Here is a translation of the Dove Song, one of the gambling songs sung in the game of kĕsĭtsé:—
Wos Wos picks them up (seeds),
Wos Wos picks them up,
Glossy Locks picks them up,
Red Moccasin picks them up,