Introduction

Watch the music video for the song “Shine” by the Diné/Navajo band Sihasin.

Identify the musical elements that sound familiar to you that you normally hear in your favorite songs. Listen to it again and identify parts of the music that seem different than what you usually hear. As you watch the video ask yourself how this video compares to other music videos you’ve enjoyed. Does it show the same images you are used to? Describe anything in this video you don’t normally see in music videos.

The group Sihasin consists of brother and sister Clayton and Jeneda Benally, who also perform traditional Navajo songs and dances with the Benally Family Dancers. “Shine”, like many that Sihasin records, combines traditional Navajo singing and contemporary punk/rock musical elements.

In this chapter we will explore the indigenous traits commonly used in the punk/rock music of Sihasin and traditional Navajo music.

Who are the Navajo?

The Navajo are one of the largest indigenous native nations in the United States, both geographically and demographically. They live on the largest American reservation – one that straddles Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. The Diné Nation has over 300,000 members, over half of whom live on the reservation. This link takes you to a map of the reservation produced by the Navajo Land Department and shows where the reservation is in the Southwest. The Diné (“Diné,” which means “the people,” is the word in the Navajo language they use to refer to themselves) group themselves by maternal clan affiliation: children are the same clan as their mother. These clans are so important that Diné always include their clan information when they introduce themselves. Many Navajos are bilingual in English and in Navajo, which is taught in the schools. Use the links below to watch two short videos about Diné life today as well as some of their history, as told by young members of the Diné Nation. As you watch these, take notes about how they mix traditions into contemporary life and balance both Diné and American cultures.

Diné culture revolves around balance and hózhó. This Diné word, hózhó, has no adequate translation into English. It means balance and beauty, but it encompasses activities and ways of being that promote health, harmony and goodness. It is a complete philosophy that governs personal and community health (Kahn-John Diné and Koithan 2015). Personal and community health depend upon being in balance and beauty with the world – hózhó. Many of the oldest traditional Diné songs are still performed for their original functions, which is to heal. Diné musical and ritual life revolves around ceremonies containing many songs that address specific problems and return people and the universe to beauty, and serve to maintain balance. These ceremonies are called “ways.” These ‘ways’ include the “Blessingway,” “Nightway,” and “Holyway” among others. Today there are over twenty separate ceremonies. Some of these such as the “Blessingway” are performed as celebrations to build good fortune for important life cycle events, such as the Kinaalda, a girl’s coming-of-age ceremony. Others, such as “Holyway” are specifically healing ceremonies. Some can be performed at any time of the year, while others can be performed only during specific seasons.

Participants use a variety of instruments in these ceremonies, including drums, rattles, scrapers, and bullroarers, and each ceremony requires a very specific set of instruments. Because the Diné live in the Southwest, their instruments are made of materials found in that region. A bullroarer is made of string or thong with a flat heavy oval of wood at the end. When it is whirled fast on the thong, it makes a continuous ‘roar’ sound. A bullroarer is used in the Holyway ceremonies, including the Shootingway, Windway, and Red Antway ceremonies. Scrapers are long, skinny, notched pieces of wood that are scraped with shorter sticks. The Diné use scrapers that are 13-15 inches long and placed in sets of four over shallow ceremonial baskets in the Nightway and Mountainway ceremonies. Rattles are used in most ceremonies. They are made from a variety of materials depending on the ceremony. For example, a gourd rattle is used in the Nightway; a hide rattle filled with precious stones is used in the Beautyway, Shootingway, and Red Antway.

A water drum is used in the Enemyway Ceremony. The Diné water drum has a hollow body made from clay, partially filled with water, and topped by a tightly stretched hide. This short documentary demonstrates and discusses the cultural importance of The Water Drum. Notice that the speaker makes important points about the Diné concept of balance in discussing this drum and the ceremony in which it is used.

Each ceremony is long, lasting anywhere from two days and nights to nine and includes many different parts in addition to specific songs and dances. Each ‘way’ tells a complete unique story containing thousands of lines of memorized poetry and must be completed correctly to have the correct effect. Some songs are performed only during the day, some only during the night. In addition to many different songs and dances, these ceremonies may include ritual bathing, dressing, herb preparation and consumption, story sections acted and recited, and sandpainting, all led by the Hataalii. Some of the songs and dances in the ceremonies can only be performed in the context of the ceremony because their power might go astray and do damage. Other songs from ceremonies can be taken out of context and performed for anybody. The text of these might include vocables rather than words that have meaning that would be lost outside their context. These are the songs that are sung on recordings and in educational performances.

Because each ceremony contains thousands of lines of poetry, many different songs, specific sand-painting pictures, and particular medicinal herb mixtures, individual Hataalli only learn and perform a limited number of ceremonies. In the Diné belief system, the Way ceremonies and songs hold immense power, which can damage as well as heal.

Because the ceremonies in the songs have such great power, they must only be performed correctly. Incorrect performances may cause the power to go astray and damage rather than heal, so the training to become a Hataalli, which is in the form of an individual apprenticeship, is long and intense. Apprentices spend years learning one specific ceremony because they are so long and involved. Training is hands-on and through oral tradition, where the apprentice learns directly from the master and practices passages of poetry and music for hours to get it just right. In addition to passing on the specifics of the ceremony, traditional singers and dancers teach their children and grandchildren the songs and healing lore in the same way. Jones Benally learned his arts from his elders, has passed it down to his children, and continues to teach traditional songs, dances, and medicinal lore to his grandchildren.

The Benally Family

The Benally Family Dancers from the Black Mesa Navajo Reservation in Arizona contains three generations of singers and dancers. The eldest member, Jones Benally, is a traditional Hataali, or singer/healer/medicine man. He has performed traditional songs and dances all over the world for decades. His children, Jeneda, Klee, and Clayson began traveling and performing with him when they were children, and now their own daughters are traveling and performing with both generations of adults. Jeneda and Clayson Benally also perform professionally as the punk rock group Sihasin.

In addition to teaching non-natives off reservation, the Benally family perform and teach in Navajo communities as well. This serves the important function of maintaining tradition since not all Native Americans have access to their own cultural traditions. For over 100 years, governmental schools forcibly separated native American children from their families with the express purpose of assimilating them into mainstream American culture and eliminating access to their own cultural traditions. Beginning in the 1860s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs established Schools for Native American children; in the 1870s they built boarding schools to take the children off the reservation. This removes the children from the cultural knowledge of the languages, arts, songs, dances, and ceremonies that they would have learned from their families and tribal elders. Native children were prohibited from speaking languages other than English, and were taught American songs. Native American parents were not legally allowed to keep the children out of the boarding schools until new laws were passed in 1978. Additionally, beginning in the mid-20th century the Church of Latter Day Saints initiated the Mormon Placement Program. Many Navajo children travel to Utah, fostered by non-native Mormon families to attend middle and high school. While not all Diné Lost their traditional language and culture, many did, and are thus unable to pass it on to their own children.

The 2020 COVID-19 pandemic further threatened traditional ceremonies and songs. Since older people are much more susceptible to the virus, their culture-bearers were especially threatened. Because the songs and details of each ceremony are known by only one or two culture bearers, losing an elder might mean losing those ceremonies completely. New measures to ensure the transmission of cultural knowledge were instituted (Morales 2020). This increases the importance of traditional musicians and culture bearers like the Benally Family.

In this short documentary, Clayson Benally describes the process of “Becoming a Diné Navajo Medicine Man” and describes some of the training process. In the Diné belief system an individual’s health can be damaged before birth, so women are discouraged from becoming Hataalii for fear of harming future offspring. Jones Benally, the head of the Benally Family Dancers, is both a hataalii and an award-winning hoop dancer.

Diné Hoop Dance

The music video for “Shine” features a Hoop Dance intercut with footage of the musicians. The Hoop Dance is common to several Indigenous Nations in the Southwest as part of their own cultural traditions. For the Diné it belongs to one of their sacred healing ceremonies, as Klee Benally explains in this short documentary about the Navajo Hoop Dance. He also explains that they are performing it in the video to ‘express that our culture is still alive.” His brother Clayson, who is in the band Sihasin, goes on to explain that traditions connect people to their world. When you watch this video you can see that parts of the choreography of the dance uses hoops to become birds, animals, and the world. If you return to the “Shine” video, you will see some of these formations – including a flying bird when the lyrics say ‘broken wings start to fly.”

While originally part of older ceremonial traditions, Today the Hoop dance is inter-tribal. The word inter-tribal means common and popular among any and all indigenous cultures and an important part of contemporary indigenous cultural life. The Hoop Dance has become today a Native American competitive art and sport. Each year, the Heard Museum in Pheonix, Arizona hosts the World Hoop Dance Contest. There is no uniform choreography to the Hoop Dance.  Instead, the dancers combine steps and movements from different traditional dances to create individual unique choreographies. The dancers manipulate anywhere from 5 to 50 hoops. In competitions, dancers are judged on artistry, speed, and agility. Originally only men danced, but today both men and women compete.

There are many reasons musicians perform traditional works today. The Benally Family travels widely performing traditional songs and dances to educate people about Navajo Culture. Recordings are made by organizations like Smithsonian Folkways Recordings for the same purposes. It is a process of “opening people’s minds and building bridges of respect,” Jeneda Benally told the Arizona Daily Sun (Golightly 2018). In less public venues, traditional songs and dances maintain cultural identity.

“The Hoop Dance” sung by Jones Benally and his family is a portion of a healing ceremony that can be sung publicly outside the healing context. Like other traditional indigenous American songs this hoop dance song consists of a melody sung to a drum beat, and includes many repetitions in the tune. The drum that the Benally Family Dancers use to accompany the hoop dance can be seen in the short documentary above (use this link) and also in a longer full performance of the dance beginning at 57:00 from a performance they gave for the Library of Congress in 2019 (Use this link. The hoop dance starts at 57:00). This drum is a frame drum made from a wooden circular frame with a hide stretched over it.

Musical traits connected to the Five Ws: The Hoop Dance performed by The Benally Family Dancers

This recording of the Hoop Dance was produced for the recording Tribal Gatherings: Native American Indian Inter-Tribal Music published by the label Music of the World (Catalogue number MOW 154) in 1999. The company Music of the World was established “to promote and produce musicians from diverse traditional backgrounds” (“Music of the World” n.d.) Their goals, then, combined commerce and education. The Benally Family Dancers, all of them have been trained from a young age in the ancient musical traditions of the Diné, perform traditional songs like the hoop dance to educate wide audiences about Diné music and at the same time to celebrate their culture. The musical traits then emphasize the cultural traditions of the performers. Traditional Diné music has a single tune accompanied by percussion. The melody has a small range with many repetitions, and a text with vocables (text syllables that have no specific meaning- see Chapter 3) rather than English language lyrics. During the first half of the twentieth century many Native Americans recorded their songs for non-native music scholars in their homes rather than in music studios. These recordings are called ‘field recordings.’ The fidelity of these recordings is different than studio recordings. Compare the background and music sounds in this field recording from 1940 of “Yeibichai Song: Talking God’s Song” to the studio recording of the Hoop Dance that you heard earlier. The “Hoop Dance” sounds clearer because it was recorded in a studio.

Sihasin

Jeneda, Klee, and Clayson started their first punk group, Blackfire, in 1989, which soon got the attention of the Ramones.

Joey Ramone recorded 2 songs with Blackfire for their album One Nation Under. This album won “Best Pop/Rock Album of the Year” at the 2002 Native American Music Awards. The main focus of Blackfire was to protest and express outrage at the poverty and inequities that many indigenous people suffer. They disbanded Blackfire after Joey Ramone died, and in 2002 Jeneda and Clayson founded the group Sihasin, whose name is the Diné word for Hope. Sihasin has a different focus than Blackfire, moving away from anger. “I want my children to have hope,” Jeneda told NPR in 2015. “I see the world as a different place. And I recognize that we have every possibility to make positive change” (Morales 2015). In the group Sihasin Jeneda plays electric bass, Clayson plays a drum set that combines indigenous drums and rock drums, and they both sing and write their songs. In some songs, their father Jones sings with them.

Sihasin recorded “Shine” on the album Fight like a Woman in 2018. In 2019 the group was named best debut group of the year, and won Best Rock Recording” from the Native American Music Awards. The week of July 11, 2020 “Shine” reached top billing on the Indigenous Music Countdown.

Because their musical life includes both traditional and contemporary types, the music of Sihasin fuses traditional and contemporary sounds. “For us to find a positive solution and to understand our own identity,” Clasyon Benally told NPR , “it’s this synthesis that has to occur” (Morales 2015). This aesthetic can easily be seen in the video to the song “Shine” which features both Clayson and Jones dancing a traditional Hoop Dance in traditional regalia accompanied by rock music. The music Sihasin makes not only incorporates traditional vocables and melodic styles together with that sounds punk rock, but the music also continues to serve the traditional purpose of healing. “Music is powerful,” Jeneda told NPR “Music can absolutely save lives.” (Morales 2015).

Although the musical expressions have changed from Blackfire’s anger to Sihasin’s hope, the songs remain socially engaged and the band members are activists as well as educators. In addition to traveling with their father performing worldwide, they teach songwriting as a tool for personal empowerment to Diné high school students. Jeneda acted in a Navajo-themed film The 6th World, for which she also created and sang some of the music. The song that she sings at the end of the film is based on the Hoop Dance Song discussed below, bringing an old tradition into a modern art form.

During the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic lock down, Sihasin performed from their home via streaming media for the American Folklife Center of the Library of Congress’s homegrown concert series. They performed in a COVID-relief benefit concert (The group appears at time marker 3:06:59) as well as other streaming concerts to add music to the well-being of the community, as in their song “Gentler than Night.” So well-known are they in their community that they served as spokesperson in an early August television segment on the national Today Show about the impact of COVID-19 in the Navajo Nation. They speak out on important social issues because, as their brother Klee, who performed with them in Blackfire, explains, there is no difference between art, culture, and activism (Malkin 2020).

“Shine” was recorded in a professional studio like other punk rock and was produced by the Ramones producer Ed Stasium. Instruments and equipment are standard for punk and rock, with the addition of native drums to a standard rock drum set, as can be seen in these videos from their 2020 homegrown concert performance, and on the Millennium Stage at the Kennedy Center in Washington DC in a concert that combines traditional and contemporary songs. The group markets and distributes their music through the most common mainstream platforms. The official music video of “Shine” is available on both Vimeo and YouTube. The album Fight Like a Woman can be purchased on amazon and iTunes, streamed on Spotify, and heard on SiriusXM.

Musical traits connected to the Five W’s:  “Shine” by Sihasin

The who and why of our 5W’s strongly influenced the sound of “Shine.” As mentioned above, the musicians, Clayson and Jeneda Benally are committed to fusing rock and traditional musical elements. As the video for the song shows Jones and Clayson performing a traditional Hoop Dance, the music combines the rock sound of bass guitar, drum set and English lyrics with traditional vocables and a traditional jingle rattle. As mentioned in Chapter 3, traditional Native American melodies frequently have a small range and much repetition. The melody that carries the vocables in “Shine” also has a small range and lots of repetition.

The melody that sets the English text of this song emphasizes the hopeful/healing message of the lyrics when the title word ‘Shine” within chorus lyrics ‘I wanna see you shine’ is set off by an initial pause before the word and a long held note with an echo holding the word out. The quick tempo and loud volume add to the upbeat message.

Because “Shine” is a contemporary commercial song, the ‘where’, ‘when’ and ‘how’ belong to commercial rock. It was recorded in a studio, and can be heard through the modern commercial music platforms. The bass and drums sound like any other rock song,

Conclusions:

Consider again the beginning of Chapter 4 where you were asked to think about the familiar and unfamiliar sounds in “Shine.” Listen to the song again. What sounds more familiar to you now than when you first listened to the song? What are the traditional influences that you hear in this modern rock song?

In this chapter we have explored examples of music within the Diné culture. We analyzed the “Hoop Dance” song, which has a short, single melody repeated six times over a constant drumbeat. This simple style aligns well with an aesthetic that focuses on the function of the music more than the sounds. The most important function of traditional Diné music is to heal, and the main goal of the Benally Family Dancers, and the rock group Sihasin, is to heal our society by teaching about Diné culture through traditional music and dance as well as through contemporary punk rock. We analyzed “Shine” and explored the fusion of traditional musical elements with punk rock and connected their music to their cultural values. As members of both the ancient Diné culture and contemporary American society, the Benally Family Dancers and Sihasin make traditional and rock music to reflect and express their lives.

Finally

Before you leave this chapter, go to Spotify, YouTube, or SoundCloud.com and find another song recorded by Sihasin. Listen to the song and describe the musical elements that you hear in the song you chose. Review what you have learned about Navajo music and culture, and think about how the sounds of their music connect to their cultural values.

Works Cited

Golightly, Sean (2018). “The Benally family: A picture of resilience:” Arizona Daily Sun· Nov 22, 2018. https://azdailysun.com/flaglive/features/stage/the-benally-family-a-picture-of-resilience/article_43cb8c58-f35b-5fc9-ba83-88dc95e47a4b.html

Kahn-John Diné, Michelle, and Mary Koithan (2015). “Living in health, harmony, and beauty: the diné (Navajo) hózhó wellness philosophy.” Global advances in health and medicine vol. 4,3 (2015): 24-30. doi:10.7453/gahmj.2015.044 (Kahn-John Diné and Koithan 2015)

Malkin, John (2020). “Prayer in Action: Klee Benally.” Spirituality and Health 15 May 2020. https://spiritualityhealth.com/articles/2020/05/15/every-action-is-a-prayer-navajo-musician-activist-klee-benally-on-the-front-line-in-navajo-nation)

Morales, Laurel. (2015) “Bringing Music And A Message Of Hope To Native American Youth.” All things Considered. NPR May 31, 2015. https://www.npr.org/2015/05/31/410983820/bringing-music-and-a-message-of-hope-to-native-american-youth

Morales, Laurel. (2020) “Navajo Nation Loses Elders And Tradition To COVID-19” NPR Weekend Edition Sunday May 31, 2020. https://www.npr.org/2020/05/31/865540308/navajo-nation-loses-elders-and-tradition-to-covid-19

Music of the World (n.d.) “About” http://www.musicoftheworld.com/about/

Wyman, Leland C (1983). “Navajo ceremonial system” in Handbook of the North American Indians. William C. Sturtevant, General editor. Volume 10: Southwest. Alfonzo Ortiz, volume editor. Smithsonian Institution, Washington DC 1983. p. 536- 557.

Yurco, Cherie (2013). “Ancient World Meets Punk.” Making Music. 9: 6 (2013): 14-15.