11 October 2017, Wednesday
After breakfast at the cafeteria in Thunderbird Lodge we go to the Canyon de Chelly visitor center. This national monument is in Navajo territory and just about all of the rangers and volunteers here are Navajo. The canyon has impressive archaeologic sites from past Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloan people. More on the names in a bit. We view the film which centers on a young girl learning to preserve her heritage. There is also a hogan here made of Colorado juniper logs. Hogans are constructed to be as circular as possible to honor Mother Earth. This one has eight sides. The entrance always faces east to catch morning sun. We also see detailed models of the ancient buildings in the canyon which have been constructed by a high school student.
At 1 pm we wander over to Cottonwood Campground, just across from our lodge, to meet Ben Anagal, our Navajo guide, for a personal tour of the canyon. Visitors are only allowed in the canyon if accompanied by a certified Navajo guide or a ranger. Ben drives us into the sandy, deeply rutted canyon bottom in an old four wheel drive jeep. It has almost 120,000 miles on it, but it is more than up to the task at hand. Beauty Way Tours is a Navajo family-run business. At the first stop another, younger guide is pointing out petroglyphs and pictographs. He discusses possible interpretations of the images.
Ben suggests that the young man include us as he describes the pictographs. The young man does so and jokingly suggests that Ben can follow him into the canyon so he doesn’t get lost “again.” Ben laughs. He explains later that he has been a guide since the business started in 1989 and helped train the younger guide. “Navajo always tease each other. It’s good to laugh. You can’t take life too seriously.”
At another stop a third guide shows us an atl-atl he made and demonstrates its use. We have seen these devices in museums, but have never seen one in use. The young man throws three long, feathered shafts in succession. Although his aim is off, the distance travelled by the shafts is amazing.
As we continue our tour, Ben explains that his people don’t like to call the cliff dwellings “ruins” because they are really ancestral homes. He also tells us that the word “Anasazi,” used to describe the ancient people, came from the Navajo. ‘Ana’ means enemy. The name means something like ‘ancient enemy who is no longer here.’ Because the current day Pueblo Indians consider themselves direct descendants of these ancient people they do not accept the term Anasazi. Nowadays it is more correct to refer to the ancient ones as Ancestral Puebloans.
Speaking of names, Ben tells us that Navajo is actually derived from a Spanish word for “blade” referring to the sharp obsidian arrowheads and blades with which his people fought the conquistadors. (Later, when I looked this up on line, I found a reference to the Spanish word, navaja, for a knife held in the hand. I also found a reference that stated the name, Navajo, is derived from the Tewa Pueblo people’s description of the Navajo as ‘the ones who farm in the arroyo.’)
The Navajo call themselves the Dineh (accent on the second syllable) which means the people who emerged from the center of the earth. The Dineh emergence story is that they came from the center of the earth and moved up through black earth, blue earth, yellow earth and are now on white earth, which is the surface of Mother Earth which is below Father Sky. Near the end of the tour Ben shows us a Dineh petroglyph representing this journey. Ben’s own name, Anagal, is a unique Navajo name. Ana is for enemy, just as in Anasazi. The ‘gal’ ending means one who is always on guard against enemies, in other words, a warrior.
Along our tour we stop at the house of Ben’s sister. She weaves in traditional fashion. She raises her own goats and sheep for wool, spins her own yarn and uses native to the canyon vegetable dyes for color. The patterns she weaves represent the canyon walls and the water flowing out. Unfortunately she has gone out of the canyon today for water so she is not at her home to show us her rugs.
Ben was born and raised in Canyon de Chelly. Along with numerous hard to spot ancestral homes and petroglyphs he points out hidden paths on the cliff faces that his people walk to cross the canyon. At one spot is a very steep trail that descends along the canyon wall almost vertically, with a rail as a hand hold. Ben and fellow students would have to walk this precarious path as children when they were allowed to return home from boarding school on weekends. He mentions briefly that life was difficult in these mandatory schools and abuse was common. Before we know it, our five hour tour is over and we are back at Thunderbird Lodge for the evening.