Irene, Navajo Guide

Spider Rock“The wind people have been busy here,” Irene said, scanning the steep redrock cliffs, contorted and swirly, the sculpted walls and buttes of Canyon de Chelly in northeastern Arizona. 

Carved by wind and water from ancient rock called Navajo sandstone, the deep canyon is sacred to Irene’s people, the Dine, as the Navajo call themselves.  Spider Rock, giant red twin towers deep within the canyon, is the center and source of the Navajo universe.  Atop these spires Spider Grandmother spun the world into being, flinging her web wet with dew into the sky.  Dewdrops became stars. 

Our week in southwest canyons began and ended at US national parks; Grand Canyon and Zion.  In between we traveled to a different country, the large, tri-state semi-autonomous Navajo Nation. Canyon de Chelly was designated a US National Monument in 1931, to protect it from bounty hunters scavenging the ruins left by 5 different native peoples who have made the canyon their home over 2000 years.  US Park Service employees run the visitors center at the entrance.  (Like all national parks it was closed for a few weeks early this month thanks to Sen. Ted Cruz and the Tea Party.) 

But the Navajo Nation itself manages the canyon.  Like so many aspects of the tense and tragic relationship between the US and native peoples, there are written and unspoken rules about who can and can’t do what.  It took us a while to figure out how to contact the required Navajo guide in order to visit the canyon floor.  Luckily for us, that meant we got to spend four hours with Navajo elder Irene as she skillfully maneuvered her Chevy Suburban through the deeply rutted sand and slippery washes and told stories of this sacred place.

Irene was our Spider Grandmother, spinning tales of wonder about the canyon and her life and her people.

Monument ValleyAs a child she spent summers there helping her family tend the sheep that are central to the Navajo way of life.  (Sheep were everywhere; we saw beautiful woven blankets and ate delicious mutton stew during our stay inside the park at the Sacred Canyon Lodge, the first Navajo-run concession in the park.)  To become a certified guide she took some courses in geology and archeology, but she pointed out that her knowledge of the quicksand places came from kid knowledge, fooling around in the sandy unpredictable streams.  Likewise she knew history from sitting at desks and on grandmothers’ laps.

“In high school they taught us the Spanish explorers sought the three G’s: Glory, God and Gold.”  “But,” she added, “I think they left out one of the G’s: Girls.”  The all-male Spanish bands raided native villages for women; violent counter-raids by the Pueblo and then Navajo led to centuries of warfare.  Irene also took us up a side canyon, Canyon del Muerto, named for an 1805 massacre by Spanish invaders.  By 1863, when the US had acquired the land, Army officer Kit Carson led an attack on the remaining Navajo and marched them away to an internment camp at Fort Sumner, New Mexico.  In the canyon he destroyed their homes and fields, and cut down their precious peach trees.  (In a desert barren landscape this canyon can be surprisingly fertile in summer, except for drought years, which are more and more frequent.)  Four years later the relocation was deemed a failure and, unlike many forced relocations of native folks, the Navajo were allowed to return to their cherished homeland, Canyon de Chelly. Irene said the scars of these “Long Walks” still sting, but the shared identity and unity from that ordeal helped bring about the semi-autonomous Navajo Nation. Families live deeper in the canyon than Irene took us. They have been replanting peach trees.

Irene lives in many worlds.  Navajo. American.  She also repeated stories told her by visitors from Europe and China.  She always bought it back to stories, her own stories, her daughters and grandchildren, and her people’s stories, like the story of the wind people who shaped and carved the canyon. 

Canyon de Chelly, "Navajo in the Canyon" by Edward Curtis, 1904I thought of Irene the next day at the Visitor’s Center at nearby Monument Valley, another Navajo-run concession on a federal site.  A display about the dramatic rock formations there included an official sign explaining the local geology in two paragraphs.  One described sedimentary rock, volcanic rock, erosion.  The next told a story about the ancestors and the wind people and the rain people.  

One last thought on the tense and tragic and complicated relationships between peoples in this region.  The Monument Valley Visitor’s Center devoted a large section to cowboy actor John Wayne, whose many films made in that Valley celebrated the violent victories of cowboy and cavalry over the native folks.  I guess the Navajos are happy to make money off him as well as their fine blankets. 

But why was Irene wearing a team sports jacket that read across her back, “Cowboys”? 

Did anyone win?

Copyright © 2013 Deborah Streeter