Changing Woman

Changing Woman appears in many of the North American Tribal Pantheons but most prominently in the Navajo and Apache.  In the Navajo she created the four original clans of the Dine Nation and taught the people how to live in harmony and beauty.  She is born of the meeting of dark and dawn, is impregnated by water and sunlight, and gives birth to the warrior twins.  She does not need a husband and creates the people by simply rubbing her skin into little balls which are mixed with white shell. She lives in halls made of turquoise in the west and the east, and is akin to Amaterasu, who lives in a palace of jade.  In Apache lore she is honoured through extensive puberty rites lasting up to four days, and can be seen as the sacramental keeper of hormonal stages and birthing mysteries.  

I have walked with her myself on many occasions, and I love her dearly. In my experience of her she is a young woman in her first feathers and earrings in the east, moves into maturity and encounters her transformative powers in the south, bears fruit and then becomes old in the west, and dissolves into wind in the north.  She sometimes has a white dog at her side who walks with me and her songs blow softly past my ears with the lilt of pollen in the wind.  In 1999 I co-created a dance for her with my dear friend Lawrence.  An apron of turquoise draped across my body and a sash of gold hung across the top of the stage.  I walked with tiny graceful steps a path of spirals, I met my animal helpers through her, and I was simply vulnerable and real on the stage set, giving birth, struggling, encountering the duality of humanity in my twins. Because of her connection to white shell and the seas of the east and west I used an abalone shell for burning sage.

Many women love and venerate her, paintings, sculptures, and songs abound in her honour, and my daughter is named after her: Aurora, goddess of the dawn.

"After some period of time a child was heard crying for four days. First Man succeeded in finding a mysterious baby girl.  Below her stretched a Dawn Cord from the east and from the south a Sky Blue Cord, from the west a Twilight Cord and from the north a Cord of Turquoise.  The child was rocking on Dawn and Turquoise Rainbows, supported by these cords. First Man recognized that Darkness was her mother and Dawn her father, and when he took her in his arms he found a small White Wind in her right and a small Dark Wind in her left ear, placed there by her parents.  She was Changing Woman." From Changing Woman and Her Sisters by Sheila Moon, 1984.  

I love her.