The San Francisco Peaks

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Beginning in the winter of 2012, the snow groomed onto the western slope of the mountain was manufactured. On the coldest nights the guns along the ski runs threw it out of pipes that ran up from Flagstaff, and the water in those pipes had been treated sewage — reclaimed effluent, cleaned to a legal standard and pumped uphill by the millions of gallons to fall as artificial snow across ground that thirteen tribes hold sacred. Four years earlier the full bench of the Ninth Circuit had been asked whether doing this was a “substantial burden” on the religion of the people who pray toward the peak, and had ruled that it was not — that spiritual desecration, short of coercion, did not rise to a burden the law would recognize. To the Diné the mountain is Dookʼoʼoosłííd, the shining mountain of the west, fastened to the earth by the Holy People at the world’s fourth corner; and in the years of that litigation its singers came into federal courtrooms and said so under oath.

Dookʼoʼoosłííd and Nuvatukyaʼovi

The mountain has as many names as it has peoples, and the oldest of them are not the one printed on the maps. In Diné bizaad it is Dookʼoʼoosłííd, a name Diné sources render as the summit that never melts — the shining-on-top mountain, its high snow catching light — and in the four-mountains tradition it is glossed as the Abalone Shell Mountain of the west. To the Hopi, whose mesas lie to the northeast, it is Nuvatukyaʼovi, the place of snow on the very top. Only the last name to arrive is the one in common use: in the seventeenth century Franciscan friars stationed at the Hopi village of Oraibi looked west to the snow-crowned massif and named it San Francisco, for St. Francis of Assisi, the founder of their order. The word for the mountain in English is thus a mission’s tribute laid over ground that already had holy names in at least two languages.

What the name in English covers is a single ruined volcano. Geologically the peaks are the eroded remnant of the former San Francisco Mountain, a stratovolcano of the San Francisco Volcanic Field standing north of Flagstaff in Coconino County. What look today like several separate summits ranged around a high inner basin are the surviving rim of one great cone that collapsed and was worn down; by one estimate the mountain stood near sixteen thousand feet before that ruin, half a mile taller than it is now. The highest of the summits left standing is Humphreys Peak, which the record gives as 12,633 feet — 12,637 feet by the National Geodetic Survey’s NAVD 88 datum — the highest point in the state of Arizona. It rises within the Kachina Peaks Wilderness of the Coconino National Forest, some eleven miles north of Flagstaff, and it carries alpine tundra found almost nowhere else in the Southwest. The physical description and the sacred one do not compete: the same peak the geologist calls a collapsed cone the Diné call a being fastened to the earth, and both accounts are exact within their own terms.

Within the Diné world the mountain is one of four, and it cannot be understood alone. When the Holy People, the Diyin Dineʼé, set the order of this world, they placed four sacred mountains at its cardinal edges to bound the country the Diné were given to live in — Dinétah, the homeland whose whole meaning is that it lies inside these four. Sisnaajiní, Blanca Peak, stands in the east; Tsoodził, the turquoise mountain of the south, Mount Taylor, in the south; Dookʼoʼoosłííd, the San Francisco Peaks, in the west; and Dibé Nitsaa, Hesperus Peak, in the north. To name the four in order is to draw the map of a world, and the western mountain is the evening post of that map — the place toward which the day declines. The Decolonial Atlas and the older ethnography both preserve this framing of the four, each mountain with its direction, its color, and its shell.

The mountain reaches the written record along two very different roads. One is the outsider ethnography of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries — the Army surgeon Washington Matthews, whose Navaho Legends (1897) set down an early version of the origin narrative in which the four mountains are fastened; the anthropologist Gladys Reichard, whose Navaho Religion (1950) drew on years in a Diné household; the priest and philologist Berard Haile. These books preserved a great deal, and they filtered it through a colonial lens, and some of what they printed was ceremonial knowledge entrusted to them under conditions no book was meant to hold. The other road is more recent and, within the tradition, more authoritative: in the decades of litigation over the peaks, Diné singers — the hatáálii — and Hopi religious leaders described the mountain’s place under oath, so that the tradition’s own authorities entered the federal record in their own voices. Where those two roads disagree, the mountain’s own testimony is the elder.

The San Francisco Peaks — the eroded remnant of a single stratovolcano — seen from O’Leary Peak across the volcanic field north of Flagstaff. Brady Smith, Coconino National Forest (U.S. Forest Service), via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.

The evening mountain and the home of the clouds

To the Diné the western mountain is not scenery and not a symbol; it is a living member of the ordered world, adorned and colored and inhabited. In the account the singers carry, Dookʼoʼoosłííd was fastened to the earth with a sunbeam and dressed in abalone shell, covered over with a blanket of yellow evening light — so that the mountain carries the color yellow and the yellow twilight of the west as its own. It is not empty. The tradition names inner-form Holy People who dwell within it, among them Yellow Evening Boy and Yellow Evening Girl, and it binds the western mountain to Changing Woman, Asdzáá Nádleehé, the mother who ages and renews with the seasons and orders the ripening of life — the direction of evening, of the year’s turning toward rest and return. A mountain, in this understanding, is a being with an inner form that gives it power and intelligence; the peak is not a place where a Holy Person lives so much as a Holy Person made visible as a mountain.

The four peaks together are more than the sum of four sacred places. They are gathered into the Blessingway, the central rite by which the Diné keep the world in balance, and their soil is carried in the mountain-soil bundle a singer keeps — a little of each of the four mountains held together, so that to open the bundle is to hold the whole bounded homeland in the hand. To pray toward the four mountains is to pray for hózhó, the state of beauty, order, and right relation that the entire ceremonial system exists to maintain and, when it slips, to restore. The western mountain has its place in that prayer as surely as the evening has its place in the day. What the bundle holds and how it is handled, the songs proper to the mountain and the exact words said toward it, are not set down here. That knowledge lives with the Diné and their singers, and with the Hopi for whom the peaks are the katsinam’s home; the public record is the right distance from which an outsider may speak of it. What the mountain keeps, it keeps deliberately.

The same summits carry a second sacred meaning that belongs to another people. For the Hopi the peaks are Nuvatukyaʼovi, and they are the winter home of the katsinam — the ancestral cloud-beings who dwell among the mountain’s high clouds for half the year. In the Hopi understanding the katsinam come down from the peaks to the mesa villages for the season of ceremony, and when they are honored rightly they return to the mountain and travel out again as clouds, carrying rain and blessing back to the corn of the Hopi fields. The mountain is thus, to the Hopi, the source of the rain and the dwelling of the spirits who bring it — a relationship of exchange kept up through a calendar of observance that is the Hopi’s own and closed to outsiders, and that is named here only from the public record and not opened. Two peoples, then, hold the one mountain by two different theologies, and neither holding is a metaphor for the other.

Nor are they the only two. The San Francisco Peaks are held sacred by thirteen tribes of the region, a fact that makes the mountain a shared holy ground rather than any single people’s alone. Beside the Diné and the Hopi, the peaks are sacred to the Havasupai and the Hualapai of the canyon country to the west, to the Yavapai, to the Zuni of the pueblos to the east, and to the several Apache peoples, among others — thirteen distinct nations, with distinct languages and distinct ceremonies, all turning toward the one massif. It is unusual for so many peoples to converge on a single mountain, and it is the plain reason the disputes over the peak have never been one tribe’s grievance. When the mountain is at issue, it is at issue for thirteen faiths at once.

The snow made from sewage

The modern history of the peaks is a long argument over what may be done to a sacred slope, and it turns on a permit granted almost a century ago. In 1938 the United States Forest Service, which manages the mountain as national forest, allowed the construction of a road and a ski lodge on the western slopes, in a meadow called Hart Prairie. From that permit grew the Arizona Snowbowl, a ski area sitting on ground sacred to thirteen tribes within the Coconino National Forest — a use of the holy mountain authorized, from the start, without the consent of the peoples who hold it holy. An early tribal challenge to the resort’s expansion, Wilson v. Block, was decided against the tribes in 1983: a federal court held that although the development might offend Native religious belief, the Forest Service had met its obligations, and the skiing went on.

The gravest fight came over water. Snowbowl sits low and dry for a ski area, and in 2002 the resort proposed to guarantee its season by making artificial snow — from reclaimed water, the treated sewage effluent of the city of Flagstaff, sprayed as snow across the upper mountain at a rate of some 1.5 million gallons a day. To the tribes this was not a matter of water quality but of desecration: to cover a living sacred mountain, the home of the katsinam and the western post of Dinétah, in snow made from human waste was to defile the holy ground itself and to break the conditions under which the mountain could be prayed to and its plants gathered. The Forest Service approved the plan in 2005, and a coalition of tribes and environmental groups sued under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which forbids the government to place a “substantial burden” on the exercise of religion without compelling cause.

The case, Navajo Nation v. United States Forest Service, became the central modern test of what the law will protect on sacred land. A three-judge panel of the Ninth Circuit ruled for the tribes on March 12, 2007 (479 F.3d 1024), finding that snowmaking with reclaimed water would indeed impose a substantial burden on the tribes’ religious exercise. But the full court reheard the case, and on August 8, 2008 the en banc Ninth Circuit reversed (535 F.3d 1058). Reasoning in the long shadow of Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association — the 1988 decision that let the government run a road through sacred high country because it did not coerce anyone’s belief — the majority held that a burden was “substantial” only when the state forced a person to choose between their faith and a government benefit, or punished them for practicing it. The spiritual harm of a defiled mountain, real as it was, did not meet that test. The Supreme Court declined to hear the case in 2009, and the ruling stood. The law, in the end, could measure coercion but not desecration.

The snow-crowned San Francisco Peaks in winter, the western slope of which carries the Arizona Snowbowl. Martin Ely, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

What the courts allowed then went into the ground. Construction of the pipeline that would carry Flagstaff’s reclaimed water up the mountain began in 2011, and it was met with protest through the summer; some twenty-five people were arrested between May and August of that year for standing in its way. Reclaimed-water snowmaking began in the 2012–2013 ski season, and since then the artificial snow has fallen on the peaks each cold enough winter. The opposition did not end with the pipeline. Coalitions formed under names like Save the Peaks and Protect the Peaks have kept up the fight through demonstrations and appeals, and the mountain remains, decades on, a place where a resort’s snow guns and a living religion’s prayers occupy the same slope. The dispute is not settled by the fact that the snow is made; it is only ongoing on new ground.

The mountain’s meaning is bound, too, to the hardest passage of Diné history, though the western peak carries only its own share of it. When the Long Walk ended and the survivors of the internment at Bosque Redondo were let go under the treaty of 1868, part of what made the return a homecoming rather than a mere relocation was that the reservation was drawn inside the four sacred mountains — Dookʼoʼoosłííd on its western edge. To come back within the four was to come back to the only country where hózhó could be kept, and the western mountain marks one wall of that recovered world. The fuller account of that deportation and return belongs with the Diné themselves and with the canyon where the campaign was fought; here it is enough that the western boundary stone of the homeland is this peak, and that its sacredness and that soberly remembered return are one thing.

The scholarship keeps pace with all of this, and it must be read for what it is. The early record — Matthews, Reichard, Haile — preserved the setting of the four mountains and much else, through an outsider’s eyes and sometimes past the bounds of what should have been printed. The modern anthropology of the Snowbowl dispute, and the study of Nuvatukyaʼovi as a contested sacred site, documents the mountain as a place where Western economies and Native spiritualities have collided in court. But the record is not the mountain, and the scholars are not its authorities. The Diné singers and the Hopi religious leaders who testified are — and their testimony was not that the peak was once holy, but that it is: a living being, wronged and enduring, toward which prayer is still made, from whose slopes plants are still gathered, and to whose summit the clouds still come home each winter to be honored and sent out again as rain.

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