The Navaho Fire Dance

The Fire Dance is the ceremony performed during the ninth night of the Mountainway. The purpose of these last night's rites is to accumulate power, to help to restore the individual patient; to give strength to the spectators who have gathered in big crowds during the last night and to convey fertility to soil and animal and abundance to crop and game. The signal features of the Fire Dance are the erection of the sacred enclosure, the kindling of the huge central fire, and the performance of group dances, executed by medicine men who have been ceremonially invited from far distant places. Some of these dances are exclusively part of the Mountain Way, as for example the dance of the fire dancers whose task it is to replace a burned-off feather by a new one, a trick which symbolizes "restoration". Other group dances are taken from the Shooting-Chant (the Whirling Feather) or from the Nightway (the Masked Dancers). Berard Haile bases his account partly on personal observations, partly on the word of informants, and, to some extent, on the description of the ceremony of the Mountain Chant as given by Washington Matthews.