Chords for VLog: Navajo Meaning of "Yeha-Noha (Wishes of Happiness & Prosperity)"

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_ [N] Good evening.
So tonight's video is going to be about the song that you just heard.
You probably heard the song and thought, wow, that's a really pretty song.
It's a beautiful
Native American song.
Wonder what it means?
Well, this video is going to tell you what
that song means.
_ Some of you may already know that that song, the words to the song is actually
a shoe game song, a Navajo shoe game song called Kesh-cheh-sem, _ Navajo shoe game songs.
Now for those of you who've never heard of the shoe game, this is the basic gist of the
story.
I'm not going to get into the complex details.
That's way out of the scope of a
video like this.
The story.
_ Back when the animals could talk, the animals played the
shoe game.
They divided themselves up between the day animals and the night animals.
The
day animals were like all the birds, the lizards, the turtle, things that walk around during
the day.
The night animals were everything that traveled at night, like deer, bat, the
bear.
Those are the night animals.
So the day animals played against the night animals.
And as they started playing this game, the game got so intense that people started betting
things like we're going to bet this mountain, whoever wins will own this mountain.
And then
it was like whoever wins this game will _ _ be in control of the weather and the rain and
the wind.
And then eventually it came to the point to where they said, the day animal said,
if we win, it'll be day all the time.
Then the night animal said, if we win, it'll be
night all the time.
So they started playing and the game got really, really intense.
_ And
there's a point in the game to where the night animals started cheating.
_ The owl, Nesha,
he, so essentially in the game, there's four moccasins that are in a row on one side, and
then another group of moccasins, four of them on the other side that are kind of buried
in the ground.
And they hide a yucca ball _ inside the moccasin.
And with an indicator
stick called, you _ _ have to tap the moccasin to say, this is what I think it is.
And based
on how close you are, how correct or how wrong you are, you win so many points and points
are judged by winning yucca sticks.
There's 102 yucca sticks, which essentially represent
the number of trails that the sun travels.
There's 102 _ paths that the sun travels on.
Some people say it represents a person's age, how old a person can get 102 years old.
Essentially,
there's 102 sticks.
Whoever wins all the sticks wins the game.
So one side of the team will
hide the yucca ball in one of the moccasins.
The other team will have to guess what side
it is and hit it.
And they bet, betting back and forth.
You win so many counter sticks
and then you accumulate points and whoever wins all of them wins the game.
So it came
to the point of where the night animals cheated.
The owl didn't hide the yucca ball in the
moccasin instead, he held it in his hand.
So as the animals were trying to guess to
figure out where it was at, _ _ they kept losing because the yucca ball wasn't in any of the
moccasins.
_ So to get to the point of the video, the song is essentially the giant song.
And
this is how the song sounds when it is sung by the Klaagato singers. _ _ _ _ _
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_ _ So as you can see in the song, the animals are singing about the giant, about how when
he was trying to guess which moccasin the ball was hidden and he couldn't figure out
and he couldn't guess what it was, so he was crying.
And that's basically what this song
that you're hearing is.
It's one of these shoe game songs mixed in with a contemporary
sound.
So now let's cut back to the original song that the recording comes from so you
can see the words played out in the remixed song.
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_ _ _ So as you can see, [N] the song is essentially just the shoe game song.
It is the giant song.
Again, each of the animals, they'll have a different song.
The owl has his own song.
The lizards have their own song.
There's a song to open the game.
There's a song to close
the game.
And there's a song for the giant.
So all the animals that were involved in this
game all have a song.
And essentially, the song that you heard is the giant's song.
So
the song that you're hearing is a real traditional Navajo song.
It's been sung for hundreds of
years.
And thanks to this song, it has become available to the public to where everybody
can hear and hear a classic Navajo [Ab] song.
I hope you enjoyed this video.
I hope it helped
explain what the song is, the background behind it.
_ _ If you have any questions, hit me up.
If not, have a nice day. _ _
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[Eb] _ [Ab] _ _ _ _ _ So by the way, there was no winner.
_ The day animals found out that the night animals were
cheating, so basically, to make a long story short, everybody just went home.
If you want
to read about the whole story, you can read about it through the book published by Celina
bookshelf called Je Doit Le Day and Night and it tells the whole story about the shoe game.
There you go, enjoy,