Navajo Yei Bichei ceremony footage (1904) – Edward S. Curtis.

Precise duration unknown, but probably very short.

Source: Brief passages of this footage are shown in Coming to Light, a PBS television documentary about Curtis’s work directed by Anne Makepeace and released in 2001.

This film can be viewed, albeit under an incorrect title, on YouTube here. The section about Curtis’s filming of the Yei Bichei ceremony is between 14:38 and 17:06 mins., and again between 18:02 and 18:46 mins..

Background: The Navajo Yei Bichei ceremony takes place on the ninth and culminating night of a ritual process, often referred to as the Nightway or Night Chant, aimed at healing a number of major illnesses or conditions, including blindness, deafness and paralysis.

In Navajo, the name of the ceremony literally means ‘Holy People Grandfather’, a reference to the fact that Talking God, referred to as bichei, ‘grandfather’ is thought to preside over the yei, ‘holy people’, embodied on this night by masked impersonators.

But there are many aspects to the Nightway other than masked dancing: it also involves the making of sand paintings and the manufacture of dolls, medicine bundles and other items, over a prolonged period.

Curtis liked to boast that he managed to film the Yei Bichei ceremony in 1904 after representatives of the Smithsonian had tried for decades and failed, and had even come to believe that it was impossible.

But what Curtis filmed was only a very slight simulacrum of what the ceremony both was and continues to be in reality. In fact, his film showed no more than a very brief re-enactment, performed during the day so that it could be filmed, with a reduced number of masked dancers.

The ceremony was also not genuine in the sense that there was no patient being cured. Rather it was performed entirely at Curtis’s request in exchange for payment in the form of silver dollars and rolls of cloth. He does not appear to have filmed any other of the elaborate ritual processes associated with the Nightway ceremonies. 

As this footage is most commonly shown, the dancers are dancing anti-clockwise, contrary to the normally clockwise motion, with their rattles in their left hand, rather than in their right as is customary. Some commentators have detected in these inversions a passive resistance on the part of the performers to Curtis’s attempt to film them.

However, given that such an elaborate subterfuge would have implied the expenditure of a great deal of time and effort for what was, in effect, only a brief and fake performance, it seems more likely that the inversions are merely an effect of the negative having been printed the wrong way round, something that did occasionally happen in early ethnographic filmmaking.

Texts: Gidley 1982: 72; Lyon 1988:266; Overstreet 1992.