ABSTRACT
This chapter attempts to sketch an indigenous healing practice on its own terms as much as is possible in writing it down; and outlines the way the West has approached this practice. The empirical material will center on composite and generalized vs. specific Western descriptions of a Navajo healing ceremony, the Nightway, and on the evidences secured by the West of an authentic narrative text founding such a healing ceremony. The Nightway Chant is a Navajo healing practice to reorder, harmonize, beautify a person whose state of disorder, disharmony, and ugliness is usually manifest in physical symptoms about the head: blindness, deafness, some forms of paralysis. The Navajo Nightway narrative, never before concatenated in any form approximating totality and certainly never before written at all, can be written in English, assimilated to the language of the universe, the arrogant comprehension free of cultural experience. It then becomes the contextless text, and curiously, for the West, authentic and founding.
