There is an often used, traditional Navajo prayer that begins, “In beauty, I walk.”
And on this early-September morning, I found myself surrounded by beauty as I roamed the verdant and sandy floor of Canyon de Chelly — a web of deep sandstone gorges that encompasses trails, wildlife, ancient ruins, rock art and miles of sacred land in the heart of the Navajo Nation.
Red and brown cliffs, varnished by thousands of years of high desert weather, towered on either side of me. The crisp, dry air carried the scent of warming earth, a recently emptied riverbed and sun-baked grass. Desert shrubs, cottonwood trees, and yellow and purple wildflowers added splashes of color against the rocky backdrops, nourished by the water that brings life to the canyon floor.
I was on a tour of the canyon with Harold Bia, our Navajo guide, and four other visitors, riding in the back of an open truck. We bumped over dry riverbeds, veered close to the sandstone walls, and glided left and right over sandy dunes like a surfer carving a wave.
We stopped at a set of ancient pictures on a red rock wall. Mr. Bia used a flashlight to illuminate handprints, hunters on horseback and Kokopelli, a flute-playing deity of fertility, nestled in a shady area, as he explained the history of the people who had lived in this sacred place for centuries: the Ancestral Puebloans, Hopi and Navajo.
Next, Mr. Bia said, we would visit First Ruin, a group of dwellings and circular ceremonial structures known as kivas nestled in a hollow crag of a cliff. We jumped back into the vehicle, and we sped off down the trail, deeper into the heart of the canyon, kicking up a swell of sandy dust in our wake.
A fertile cradle
Canyon de Chelly (pronounced de SHAY), a national monument since 1931, sprawls fingerlike across roughly 84,000 acres of northeastern Arizona, near the town of Chinle (CHIN-lee), about a three-and-a-half-hour drive from either Albuquerque or Sedona, Ariz. It lies entirely within the Navajo Nation and is jointly managed by the National Park Service and the tribal government.
The 26-mile series of canyons, whose human presence dates back at least 5,000 years, is believed to be one of the longest continuously inhabited areas on the Colorado Plateau. These deep gorges cradled and nurtured generations of Ancestral Puebloans, also called the Anasazi, who found the canyon floor fertile enough to plant crops and build settlements. The Hopi then arrived, planting crops like corn and peaches. Finally, the Diné, the term the Navajo use to describe themselves and their language, settled in the canyon — between the four sacred mountains of their creation story.
The canyon also has a painful history of clashes between its inhabitants and colonizers, first with the Spanish and then the U.S. military, which displaced and led many Navajo through the canyon on the “Long Walk.” That campaign, which began in 1864, forced thousands of Navajo to march hundreds of miles to Fort Sumner, in what is now eastern New Mexico. Hundreds of Navajo died on the journey, and many more perished in the four years they were interned there before being allowed to return home.
Today, pocket-size family farmsteads on the canyon floor, often tucked against sheer walls, coexist with the ancient ruins and rock art. Horses graze in lush patches behind wire fences. And hogans, six- or eight-sided traditional dwellings whose doors typically face east to welcome the rising sun, sprout up here and there. Some families live in the canyon seasonally, growing corn, alfalfa, apples, peaches, apricots and more.
Sharing and safeguarding
About 333,350 people visited Canyon de Chelly National Monument in 2023, according to the National Park Service, spending about $42.1 million in the area and supporting about 574 jobs. By comparison, Grand Canyon National Park, about a three-hour drive away and outside the Navajo Nation, last year welcomed roughly 4.7 million visitors, who spent $768 million in communities near the park, supporting about 10,100 local jobs.
Places like Canyon de Chelly are at the center of the Navajo Nation’s efforts to rebuild its tourist industry, which cratered during the Covid pandemic, and lift the economic fortunes of the reservation, where many are still struggling. The unemployment rate stands at about 48.5 percent, according to the Navajo Nation Department of Agriculture, and the average household income is about $8,240, well below the federal poverty guidelines.
Officials who work in the nation’s Division of Economic Development see tourism as not only an opportunity to generate income, whether through tourists’ spending or taxes on food, lodging and tours, but also as a way to provide jobs for residents who live near Canyon de Chelly as well as other Navajo Nation tourist sites like Monument Valley, Shiprock and Antelope Canyon.
Many residents of the reservation see two sides to tourism: It’s a welcome opportunity for income and development; at the same time, it can be an infringement on sacred traditions and land.
Bobby Martin, the manager of the Navajo Tourism Department, described his vision as one in which local families supplement their income through Airbnbs and small arts-and-crafts businesses like jewelry making and beadwork even as they cultivate respect for Navajo culture and history, as well as the land itself, among visitors.
“We want to share our culture, because we want people to understand who we are as a people,” Mr. Martin said in his office just outside Window Rock, Ariz., the Navajo capital.
One Native guide, Leander Staley, who runs Beauty Way Jeep Tours, said tourism had helped his family stay in the area. He is the grandson of one of the canyon’s first Navajo tour guides, and his family still farms in the canyon.
“I think tourism is really the main industry on the reservation, and it has allowed me and my family to still live here, where many of our people have left the reservation in search of jobs where the industries are,” Mr. Staley said.
With more tourism jobs for locals and more development, Mr. Staley believes, some Navajo youth might not leave the reservation and some who have left might return to raise families of their own.
The meaning of ‘sacred’
Visitors can enter most of the canyon only with a Navajo guide. I had booked my tour through the Navajo-owned-and-operated Thunderbird Lodge (about $100 a night), the only hotel within Canyon de Chelly park limits. It is the site of a trading post that dates back to 1896. (Tours range from about $70 per person for half day to about $150 for a full day. Private tours are also available for about $350.)
Trucking along on the tour, we swerved around a bend and came upon Antelope House Ruin, a crumbling adobe Ancestral Puebloan communal dwelling. Stones and ancient buildings sprawled along the base of a high cliff. A more recent layer of history was sketched into the stone nearby: a sequence of Navajo drawings of about a dozen antelope.
A small shop advertised jewelry, drinks and fry bread — a doughy staple that is ubiquitous on the reservation — perhaps an example of the kind of small business Mr. Martin of the tourism department envisioned.
The distinctive color of the clay used in construction lent its name to our last stop on the tour, White House Ruin. Most of the structure, formerly a four-story dwelling built about 1,000 years ago, according to the park service, sat at ground level, while the upper — and paler — sections were perched in a cut of sandstone.
Two women were selling jewelry and crafts, their tables featuring beaded earrings, silver and copper bracelets, and carefully painted clay pots. Nearby, a man was painting on flat stones to sell as decorations.
In the quiet and stillness of this place, the ancient past felt eerily near, and in my imagination, I could almost hear the life that once existed in these structures. If I stared long enough, it felt as if I might spot a resident of the dwellings emerge.
As we made our way out of the canyon, a truck passed by, its passengers waving. Moments later, two boys on A.T.V.s came sliding out from another trail, their faces lit up with enjoyment. I thought of the countless generations of people who had spent early-autumn mornings under this same sun and between these same canyon walls.
“I did a tour years ago where I was with the visitor, and I was saying, ‘This place is sacred,’” Mr. Staley, the tour operator, told me the next day. “Finally, the visitor says, ‘What do you mean by sacred?’ They stumped me. I didn’t know how to explain it to somebody who’s not familiar with our culture and tradition.”
Mr. Staley offered a simpler way of thinking about what is considered sacred: to recognize something’s significance. “That’s what that sacred feeling is,” he said. “It’s knowing that some place of value is in existence.”
My last day on the reservation, I drove along the South Rim Drive, one of two public roads above the canyon, in search of a sweeping vista. It was just before dusk, and the sun soaked the land in a warm, golden glow. I started down the path to a viewpoint over one of the canyon’s most famous landmarks: Spider Rock, where folklore has it that a spider woman who lives at the top taught the Navajo how to weave. The lone, roughly 800-foot-tall sandstone spire stretched upward from the canyon floor, looking like a couple of fingers extended toward the sky to feel the wind.
I was alone, save for the occasional scurrying of a rabbit or a chipmunk between desert shrubs and two hawks circling above me.
As the sun began to retreat and the warmth of the canyon rim receded, I closed my eyes and took deep breaths, filling my lungs with the scents of stone, earth and juniper.
I thought of the thousands of years’ worth of lives that had been lived here, and the thousands that may come. Standing at this canyon’s edge, I felt a beauty that I hoped to carry home with me.
During the tour, Mr. Bia had taught us two Diné words: Tséyi nizhóní. The first refers to Canyon de Chelly; the second means beautiful.
Within that beauty, I walked.
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