ABSTRACT
Although Navajo healing ceremonials have received attention from scholars for more than 100 years, their associated dances have gone, until now, unanalyzed. In the triple role of cultural anthropologist, registered nurse, and dancer, I documented the dances of the powerful Nightway ceremony and posed basic questions about dance content and function. Using labanotation scores supplemented by information obtained from field interviews, films, sacred texts, and the anthropological literature, I addressed the following questions: What is dance (alzhish)? What is the ceremonial purpose of alzhish? How is that purpose accomplished? The focal question of my research is: How can a dance make a person well?
