Canyon de Chelly

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At the place where two red gorges meet, a single shaft of sandstone stands clear of the canyon wall and climbs some seventy-five stories into the desert light. Its summit is not empty. The Dine hold that Spider Grandmother lives at the top of it, she who once took the first weavers by the hand and showed them the loom; and directly below her, on the floor of the canyon, corn still comes up in rows and sheep still move along the sandy wash. The tower is called Spider Rock. The gorge is one arm of a place the Dine name Tséyiʼ — inside the rock — and it has been lived in for so long that the reckoning strains ordinary measures of a homeland.

Tséyiʼ, the canyon inside the rock

The name in Dine bizaad is Tséyiʼ, sometimes written Tsegi, and it carries the plain sense of inside the rock or rock canyon — a description of the thing itself, sheer walls closing over a narrow floor. It is not a single canyon but a branching system cut into the Defiance Plateau of northeastern Arizona, near the town of Chinle in Apache County: Canyon de Chelly proper, Canyon del Muerto joining it from the north, and Monument Canyon reaching in from the south. The walls are the De Chelly Sandstone, a deep red rock laid down as dunes and later stood on end and worn back by wind and water, so that the spires — Spider Rock chief among them — are the last hard remnants left standing when the softer stone around them washed away.

The English name is a chain of borrowings, each hand passing the word on a little altered. Spanish speakers took the Dine Tséyiʼ and set it down as de Chelly; later Anglophone visitors kept the Spanish spelling but gave it their own sound, so that the canyon is spoken today as də-SHAY, a pronunciation that no longer resembles either the Dine or the Spanish from which it came. The Wikipedia account and the National Park Service both trace this route from Tséyiʼ through the Spanish to the modern spelling and sound. What survives underneath the mispronunciation is a Dine word for the ground the Dine still hold.

Within the tradition the canyon is not scenery. It lies inside Dinétah, the Dine homeland, the country framed by the four sacred mountains that the Holy People set at the world’s corners when they gave this world its order — the shining mountain of the west and the turquoise mountain of the south among them, each a boundary stone of the ordered world. Tséyiʼ is not one of those four bounding mountains, and neither is the winged rock that stands out on the plain to the east; but both lie well inside the country the mountains enclose, and the canyon’s central spire is reckoned the dwelling of one of the Holy People herself. A place like this is kept, not merely admired.

The record of who has lived here runs very deep. The Park Service reckons the canyons inhabited for nearly five thousand years — longer, it holds, than any unbroken human tenancy elsewhere on the Colorado Plateau — and calls Tséyiʼ one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes in North America. The oldest of the visible builders were the ancestral Puebloans, who raised masonry rooms and towers back in the alcoves and under the overhangs, high above the flood line; their walls still stand at White House, at Antelope House, at Mummy Cave. After them, Hopi people are thought to have used the canyon on and off from around 1300 into the early 1700s, planting where they could and leaving their own marks on the rock. The Hopi remember the region in their own clan histories, and the movement was never a simple replacement of one people by the next. In the early 1700s the Dine themselves came into the canyon from the country of northern New Mexico, and made its floor their fields and its alcoves their shelter — the arrival that turned Tséyiʼ into the home the Dine hold to this day. The exact timing and route by which the southern Athabaskan-speaking ancestors of the Dine reached the Southwest is still argued among archaeologists, and the older relationships among the Dine, the Puebloan builders, and the Hopi remain a matter of debate; the canyon’s own answer is simpler, and stands in its fields.

Dine riders on the canyon floor beneath the sheer sandstone walls of Canyon de Chelly, 1904. Edward S. Curtis, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain (Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division).

The tower, the loom, and the keeping of hózhó

The spire at the junction of Canyon de Chelly and Monument Canyon rises, by the measured figure the Park Service and the reference record agree on, 750 feet — about 230 meters — straight up from the wash. It has two heads. In Dine teaching the taller of the two is the home of Naʼashjéʼii Asdzáá, Spider Grandmother, one of the Diyin Dineʼé, the Holy People, and it is she who is remembered as having taught the Dine to weave. The loom she gave is understood in the tradition as more than a tool: its crosspoles and warp are said to be made of the very stuff of the ordered world — sky and earth, sunray and rock crystal — so that to sit down and draw the weft tight is to handle a small model of the cosmos the Holy People set in place. The Holy Person at the top of the tower and the weaver at her loom below belong to one teaching, and the tower stands over the canyon as a daily reminder of where the craft came from. The weaving did not end with the teaching; the geometric rugs and blankets that carry the Dine name around the world are the living continuation of a gift the tradition traces straight to the summit of the spire.

What binds the tower to the fields below it is the word hózhó — the state of beauty, order, and right balance that the whole Dine religion works to keep and, when it slips, to restore. Hózhó is not maintained chiefly by grand ceremony; it is maintained, in a place like Tséyiʼ, by ordinary acts done rightly. Planting corn in the spring floodplain. Tending the peach trees that once filled the canyon floor with orchards. Running sheep — the churro brought in generations ago and long since made Dine — up the side washes to graze. Raising a hogan whose doorway opens to the east, to meet the dawn. Because the Holy People are present in this landscape and not merely remembered here, the canyon is a home to be kept in balance rather than a ruin to be toured; and the ancestral Puebloan dwellings in the cliffs are treated with the respect owed to the places of the ancestors, not as curiosities to be climbed over.

The rock itself keeps a record of all this attention. The canyon walls carry pictographs and petroglyphs from every era of its long tenancy — handprints and spirals from the ancestral builders, later figures on horseback that the Dine painted after the Spanish brought the horse north, the ordinary marks of people who lived here and meant to stay. The famous Standing Cow panel in Canyon del Muerto even sets down, in Dine hand, a column of Spanish cavalry riding through. Sacred ground, in this tradition, is not ground swept clean of human use; it is ground worked with such continuity that the working has become part of what the place is.

Much of what makes Tséyiʼ sacred cannot be set down in a paragraph, and is not meant to be. The songs and prayers proper to the canyon and to the tower are knowledge the Dine hold within their own keeping, carried by the hatáálii, the singers, and shared under conditions that a printed page does not meet. It is possible to say from the public record that Spider Grandmother lives atop Spider Rock and that she taught the loom; it is not the outsider’s place to reproduce the ceremonial words that belong to the canyon, and this account leaves that knowledge where it lives — with the Dine and their singers. The reticence is not a gap in the story. It is part of how the story is kept.

Narbona’s winter and Carson’s

The canyon carries some of the heaviest history in the Dine record, and two winters in particular are cut into its walls. In 1805 a Spanish force under Lieutenant Antonio Narbona came up Canyon del Muerto and trapped a party of Dine — many of them women, children, and the old — sheltering in a high alcove. The documented toll was 115 Dine killed and 33 taken captive. The place is called Massacre Cave, and the whole northern branch of the system took from that day the name it still bears: Canyon del Muerto, the canyon of the dead.

Far heavier in its consequence was the winter of 1863 into 1864. In the United States campaign against the Dine, troops under Colonel Kit Carson moved through the canyon in a deliberate scorched-earth sweep. The record for the Canyon de Chelly action is exact and grim: 23 Dine killed, some 200 sheep seized, and the hogans, the crops, and above all the peach orchards cut down and burned. The orchards were not a military target in any ordinary sense; they were destroyed because destroying them was the point. A people cannot hold a canyon whose food has been put to the torch in the cold months, and the burning of Tséyiʼ was one stroke in a wider starving-out that broke the Dine ability to keep the land and forced their surrender.

The ancestral Puebloan cliff dwelling called White House, set in an alcove of the sheer canyon wall. Timothy H. O’Sullivan, 1873, U.S. Geographical Surveys West of the 100th Meridian, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

What followed the surrender was the ordeal the Dine remember as the Long Walk. Beginning in 1864, some eight to nine thousand Dine were force-marched, in the first of the deportations, roughly three hundred miles east to Bosque Redondo, the barren reservation around Fort Sumner in eastern New Mexico. They were held there for four years in conditions that killed by the thousand — brackish water, alkali soil that would not raise a crop, the cutworm in the corn, disease and exposure and hunger. Bosque Redondo was meant to remake a farming people into wards of the state on ground that could not feed them, and it failed at everything but the dying. The internment ended with the Treaty of 1868, concluded at Fort Sumner on June 1 of that year, which let the survivors go home to a reservation drawn, however narrowly at first, within the four sacred mountains. To return inside those mountains was, in the Dine telling, more than a change of address: it was a return to the country where hózhó can be kept, and so a restoration of the very balance the campaign had tried to break. The fuller account of that march and that return belongs with the Dine themselves; here it is enough to say that the canyon endured it, and that the people came back to plant it again.

The living canyon

Tséyiʼ passed under federal protection in the last century without passing out of Dine hands. Canyon de Chelly National Monument was established on April 1, 1931, and covers 83,840 acres — roughly 339 square kilometers of canyon, rim, and plateau. It is unlike any other unit in the National Park System: the land is not owned by the United States but held in the Navajo Tribal Trust, which makes it the only Park Service unit entirely owned by a tribe, and it is managed cooperatively by the Park Service and the Navajo Nation together. About forty Dine families still live within the monument and farm the canyon floor, wintering on the rim and moving down in the growing season to the fields and the sheep, so that the canyon remains what it has been for three centuries of Dine tenancy — a worked, inhabited place rather than an exhibit. Visitors may walk down among the canyons only in the company of a Navajo guide, with a single exception: the trail to White House Ruin, the one path in the monument a visitor may hike alone. The rule is a small daily assertion that this is somebody’s home. The guides who lead visitors down the switchbacks are for the most part the same families who farm the floor, so that the interpretation of the canyon and the working of it are not two separate trades but one continuous life.

The scholarship on the canyon and its people runs alongside all of this, and must be read for what it is. The nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century record was largely written by outsiders — the Army surgeon Washington Matthews, whose Navaho Legends appeared in 1897; the anthropologist Gladys Reichard, who spent years living in a Dine household, learned to weave, and published Navaho Religion in 1950 — and their books preserved a great deal even as they filtered it through a colonial lens, and sometimes set down in print ceremonial knowledge that had been shared under conditions the printed page did not honor. Dine historians and writers of the present day read that archive critically and set against it their own oral tradition, the account the singers carry, which needs no outside corroboration to be authoritative within the tradition. The two bodies of knowledge do not weigh equally in Tséyiʼ; the canyon’s own testimony is the elder.

That testimony is still being given, in the plainest possible form. The peach orchards Carson’s men cut down are not the last peach trees the canyon will hold; new corn goes into the same red floodplain each spring, and sheep still climb the washes toward the rim. High above the fields the tower stands where it has always stood, its taller head reckoned the house of the one who taught the loom — and the weaving she gave has not stopped coming off Dine looms in the century and a half since the soldiers left. Below Spider Rock, the ground is planted. That is the oldest thing the canyon has to say, and the truest.

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