Tséyiʼ
“So, what brings you to Canyon de Chelly?” His manner of speech of slow and measured. can-YOHN doo SHEY.
When I arrived at the parking lot for Junction Overlook on the South Rim Road, I saw a lone man, slightly stooped and heavyset and picking up bottles and bits of abundant trash. There had been warnings that there were robberies and theft of items from cars, which put me on edge. After all, the Roo-Hab had already been my home for the past ten days. Everything that I had in support of this trip was in the car. The loss of any item could possibly mean discomfort and disruption of an already tight timeline for travel. I still chose to go to the overlook. The setting sun was casting long shadows down the length of the canyon. It would be good light, perhaps if I just kept my distance everything would be ok.
I reached the overlook at the end of the path. The man must have seen my approach because he stopped collecting bottles and began unwrapping small objects and laying them out. They were painted stones and pieces of wood, covered with pictographs and unfamiliar scenes. He was selling home made art. “Hello. Would you be interested in any of these. I made them. Ten dollars”. My guess is that he was in his mid forties, though ageless as the rocks and the sky above. He wore a heavy coat against the cool wind, his thick black hair blown back from a beautifully lined face, browned by the sun and thousands of years of adaptation to life in a land equally shaped by the sun and the wind.
I literally had only five dollars back in the car and I doubted that he took credit cards, so I apologized, politely declining his sale. “So, what brings you to Canyon de Chelly?” “I am on a cross country road trip headed to New Mexico, then turning east again. This was on the way and something that I had to see. This is amazing”. I raised my Nikon with a 200-500mm lens attached, taking photos of the various shapes down the canyon. “Do you see over there?”, he pointed a finger to the opposite wall and a voice that was as cautious of me as I was of him when I first walked up, “There’s a ruin”. I swung my camera to the right, and zoomed in. Tucked inside a delicate arch in the red and white rock trailed with desert varnish were a series of structures, stone upon stone slowly crumbling from the weight of time. “This place is where Canyon del Muerto and Canyon de Chelly come together. My grandmother grew up inside the canyon”. “Do people still live inside the canyon?”, I asked, “I noticed that there are farms on the canyon floor”. He said that not as many people live in the canyon as there used to be, but there are still a few. He began shuffling his paintings around, and they became a map as he told me of ruins in the canyon, and other features such as Spider Rock. In this way, his artwork made sense. They were a map of the stories and places he grew up with and had been given by his elders. The light was waning, but I asked him to wait for a moment as I hurriedly went back to the car. I grabbed the five dollars and returned to the canyon edge. He had bundled up his artwork and started picking up more trash left by thoughtless people. I handed him five one dollar bills, “Thank you very much for telling me about this place”. He didn't seem to be offended by the tip thankfully. As I returned up the path to the parking lot, I too started to pick up trash on the side of the trail. I felt like I had been given a special moment with a steward of this place, and that I too should take on stewardship in thanks.
As I drove into Chinle earlier in the day, my first impression was that is a small town, bordering on the lands of the Navajo Nation, or in the name that they gave themselves, the Diné. Chinle is full of fast food restaurants catering to tourists and residents alike, along with community health services and diabetic clinics, no doubt the result of a diet provided by convenience and poverty. It’s surrounded by endless sculpted red rock, cottonwoods, and tourist traps. Straddling US 191 , it serves as the gateway to Canyon de Chelly National Monument, and is my first national monument that I have visited. The land outside of Chinle was dotted with what most would consider a comfortable home, some with a hooghan (also called a hogan), often multi sided, made of wood and packed earth, serving as traditional homes and ceremonial spaces. Other homes were something that many of us outside of the area would consider to be uninhabitable, surrounded by scrap metal and feral dogs. This was the res, and poverty is something you can taste in the sand dry air.
Dinner at the Junction Restaurant in the parking lot of the Best Western was a strange dichotomy. The food, while adequate and welcome after many hours on the road, was an eclectic blend of First Nation cuisine stylized for weary travelers and standard Americana that can be found in just about every roadside diner anywhere in the United States. Somehow the attached Pizza Hut seemed to be out of place here. This would just be the prelude to the contradiction of this miraculous place.
Traveling with a dog is not necessarily the easiest of things. She had already become tired of being in the car since Livingston, and she made it abundantly known. This is the longest she had ever been in a car. Perhaps if she still had her eyesight and hearing, it would have been easier for her, but her sniffer still functions just as good as the day she was born. Thankfully the Thunderbird Lodge right at the entrance of the canyon permitted dogs. The lodge also appeared to be a space outside of time, much like the rest of the surrounding landscape. It probably hasn’t changed since the mid fifties when my father would have taken a family trip like this. The sliding glass window in the room didn’t lock and semi-feral dogs roamed the grounds. Unable to tell if friend or foe, it was best to remain wary of them.
The first stop after entering the Monument was Tunnel Overlook, a short walk down a path that lead to a platform overlooking a steep drop off into rock and sand. One of the first things that you notice is that there are roads and farms in the bottom of the canyon. I didn’t quite understand until a little later the reason why. The next overlook was Tségi overlook. Tségi or Tséyi’ in Diné means “within the rock”…or simply put, a canyon. The sun was still shining brightly though edging toward the horizon. The cottonwoods were burning bonfires in the light, and a muddy creek wound its way along the canyon floor. Somewhere in the depths, a cow was lowing. Here there were a few other visitors, bedecked in cameras, some in RVs, clearly spending the night in the parking lot on the canyon rim, likely hoping for a fantastic sunrise. I ventured out to the ledge and sat down. I have been to the Grand Canyon once, it’s immensity stretching out to the horizon, so big that you cannot see the bottom, the Colorado River having cut terraces into the eons. But here, my feet were dangling over a drop off of one thousand feet. You can see the bottom. There is nothing to stop your body from kissing the earth were you to slip.
Junction Overlook is where I met my brief guide. In retrospect I wish I had asked him if I could take his portrait, though I don’t know what the cultural norms are when approaching someone of the First Nations for a photograph. However, the moment has been with me since that evening. Beyond Junction is White House Overlook which serves as the only entry point to the floor of the canyon, and another set of ruins, however it was closed primarily due to the previously mentioned criminal activities. Driving past, there was quite a bit of distance until the next overlook, Sliding House Overlook, another set of ruins. There are homes here along Rt 7 that serve as the road accessing the southern rim. One of them had a brush fire, apparently unattended. The evening ended with a 911 call regarding the fire, something that could spell destruction of hundreds of acres and loss of homes in a place where people cannot afford to lose them.
It turned out that the Thunderbird Lodge was plenty safe and comfortable, reminiscent of mid-century roadside Americana, not too dissimilar to the hotel in Carlsbad, NM that I stayed in a scant half year before. The feral dogs wandering the grounds were plenty friendly, and there was little to fear when the light of day returned. This day was going to be short, after all the plan was to continue to Ganado and then make it all the way to Morenci, the largest open pit copper mine in the United States. The sun had already risen, and the decision to return to the South Rim Road made the most sense, but beyond Sliding House Overlook where the trip ended the night before.
The winding road lead further to Face Rock overlook and to the iconic Spider Rock Overlook where according to stories handed down, the Spiderwoman resides. She is a powerful teacher and healer. She taught people to spin and weave thread, something that I appreciate as a spinner of yarn and a knitter. She taught people to make cloth, which would only make more sense when I later went to the Hubbell Trading Post National Historic Site, in Ganado and had the extraordinary experience of watching a Diné elder give a private demonstration of weaving a rug. I gained a brief glimpse into a culture and a way of being that was a gift to an outsider, and I wanted and still want more. Not just as a photographer, but an experience to a culture much deeper and older than my own.
Leaving Canyon de Chelly and Ganado, I purposefully flipped through radio stations so I could listen to one that was in the language of the Diné. After all, I recognize that I was in their land. What they did for the United States as Codetalkers during World War II, and all of the other conflicts that we have since faced, was nothing short of patriotism. To see the poverty that so many of the peoples of the Four Corners live with is not commensurate with the land, nor the people themselves. I want to go back, and see the canyon through the eyes of a man who grew up with a grandmother who lived in the Tséyi’, and the weathered hands of a woman who weaves rugs like the Spiderwoman. A place that has so much poverty, but is abundantly rich in history and one of the most beautiful places on Earth.