The Apache Sunrise Ceremony

She has been awake since before the stars faded.

In the hours before the ceremony begins, her sponsor — the woman who has been chosen to guide her through the four days — has dressed her in the special buckskin dress, the one decorated with fringe and yellow pollen, the one that maps the cosmos on its surface. Her face has been painted with white clay, the color of White Painted Woman, the color of dawn. Her hair has been dressed in the traditional style that marks her as someone who is between what she was and what she will be.

She stands at the east side of the ceremonial space and waits for the exact moment when the first light touches the horizon.

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When it comes, she runs toward it.

This is the run that is the heart of the ceremony: the young woman sprinting eastward toward the dawn, toward the light, toward the direction of new beginnings. She runs as far as she can and returns, and does this again, and again, and each run is longer as the ceremony progresses. The family and community watch the runs, calling encouragement, sometimes running with her.

In running, she is Changing Woman.

Not symbolically, not metaphorically — she is the embodiment of the being who changes with the seasons, who is young in spring and old in autumn and young again in the following spring, whose body is the earth and whose running is the renewal of the world. Every person who watches her run is watching the earth renew itself. The ceremony is cosmological: the world is being maintained through the girl’s running.

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The four days are structured around the medicine man’s songs.

He sings throughout the night — songs that trace the life of White Painted Woman, songs that name the qualities the young woman is now embodying, songs that call the crown dancers (the Gaan) who represent the mountain spirits. The Gaan dance in headdresses of painted wood that spread above their heads like the antlers of deer, their bodies painted, their movements precise and ancient.

People come from many miles to attend. A girl’s sunrise ceremony is the community’s ceremony — it belongs to the extended family, the clan, the whole village. The feast that accompanies it, the preparations that precede it, the joyful gathering of people across generations — these are also part of the ceremony’s purpose. The ceremony makes the community visible to itself.

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By the fourth morning, when the final run is made, the young woman has not fully slept in four days. She has been in ceremony for the entire time: singing, praying, being molded by the sponsor’s hands (who literally molds her body during key moments, shaping her into the form that Changing Woman inhabits).

She is given gifts. The people who brought gifts receive her blessing — the pollen from her hands, the touch of her hands on their heads, her blessing on their children. Because she is Changing Woman for these four days, her touch carries healing and prosperity.

After the ceremony, she is herself again. Not the girl who entered. Not quite Changing Woman. Someone who has been both, who carries the knowledge of that embodiment in her body for the rest of her life.

The sunrise ceremony has been suppressed, mocked, legally threatened, and survived all of it.

It is still happening, in the mountains of Arizona and New Mexico, whenever a girl becomes a woman and a family calls the medicine man and the sponsor and the community together to make the cosmological event correctly.

The earth renews itself.

It always renews itself.