Identity and Healing in Three Navajo Religious Traditions: Sa'ah Naagháí Bik'eh Hózho

Abstract

In this article, we elucidate how the Navajo synthetic principle sa'ah naagháí bik'eh hózh [symbol: see text] (SNBH) is understood, demonstrated, and elaborated in three different Navajo healing traditions. We conducted interviews with Navajo healers and their patients affiliated with Traditional Navajo religion, the Native American Church, and Pentecostal Christianity. Their narratives provide access to cultural themes of identity and healing that invoke elements of SNBH. SNBH specifies that the conditions for health and well-being are harmony within and connection to the physical/spiritual world. Specifically, each religious healing tradition encourages affective engagement, proper family relations, an understanding of one's cultural and spiritual histories, and the use of kinship terms to establish affective bonds with one's family and with the spiritual world. People's relationships within this common behavioral environment are integral to their self-orientations, to their identities as Navajos, and to the therapeutic process. The disruption and restoration of these relationships constitute an important affective dimension in Navajo distress and healing.

Cultural elements underlying the community health representative – client relationship on Navajo Nation

“…CHRs often experience loss and develop their own approaches to managing grief. Ultimately, a client’s death helps bring the community together through spirituality, tradition, and prayer [19]. …”

Culture and Context: Buffering the Relationship Between Stressful Life Events and Risky Behaviors in American Indian Youth

“…Incorporating local cultural traditions into AI/AN substance user programs has become increasingly popular since the early 1990s (Noe, Fleming, & Manson, 2003). Spiritual identity is also considered by many AIs and some researchers to be very important for both health and healing (Lewton & Bydone, 2000). AIs base their belief system on balance and demonstrate a wealth of knowledge and experience with many healing practices (O'Brien, Anslow, Begay, Pereira, & Sullivan, 2002).…”

Trials of Navajo Youth: Identity, Healing, and the Struggle for Maturity

“…In fact, this provides a unique position from which to understand the experience of Navajo youth, and it directly relates us to questions of cultural identity formation and reproduction. As has been noted elsewhere, ritual healing on the reservation is a contentious ground where Navajo identity is played out along multiple axes of social significance (Gsordas 1999;Lewton and Bydone 2000). In this regard, it offers not just a window onto larger processes-such as the reproduction of Navajo culture-but is quite central to these processes.…”

“…Gsordas (1999) and Lewton and Bydone (2000) have considered this topic in some depth and addressed the particular ways in which different modalities of Navajo religious healing intersect with processes of personal and collective identity production. For instance, Gsordas argues that Navajo ritual healing articulates a series of identity politics in regards to both a personal politics of collective identity and a collective politics of personal identity (1999).…”