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Chinle, Arizona

Placing value on family and harmony with the earth

By Kate Siber

"The more we explored, the more we realized how unusual this place was."

VISITING NAVAJO COUNTRY

CHINLE AND CANYON DE CHELLY

Transportation: Chinle is in the center of the big, empty desert — and near just about nada. Access it from Gallup, 90 miles southwest, by routes 264 and 191. Some Canyon de Chelly guides will offer a discount on tours if you bring your own four-wheel-drive vehicle.

Stay: Near the monument’s visitor center, there are free campsites amid the cottonwoods at aptly named Cottonwood Campground. Just outside the park boundary, Thunderbird Lodge, an old trading post originally built in 1896, offers simple adobe rooms in a pleasant, quiet setting (from $101; 928-674-5841, www.tbirdlodge.com).

Eat: No trip to Chinle is complete without a stop at the Junction Restaurant for a Navajo taco. It’s also one of the few eating establishments in town.

See Canyon de Chelly: Visitors may drive along the rim of the canyon on one of two scenic drives with lookout points over different ruins and landmarks, like Spider Rock (928-674-5500, www.nps.gov/cach). To access the bottom of the canyon by Jeep, on horseback or on foot, visitors must hire a Navajo guide. Thunderbird Lodge offers interpretive tours of Canyon de Chelly and Canyon del Muerto on six-wheel-drive trucks ($40 for a half day tour; 928-674-5841, www.tbirdlodge.com). Totsonii Ranch offers guided horseback rides through the monument-try the four-hour ride to ruins, wall paintings, and Spider Rock ($15 per person per hour plus $15 per hour for the guide; 928-755-6209, www.totsoniiranch.com). The monument’s visitor center can arrange guided day hikes.

Do Hubbell Trading Post: About 30 miles south of Chinle in the town of Ganado, Hubbell Trading Post (928-755-3475, www.nps.gov/hutr) stands as an understated testament to the region’s history. Stand in the nearly empty parking lot and squint with the sun low in the sky and the dust kicking up in an afternoon storm; It’s not hard to imagine what this place would have looked like a century ago. Take away the National Park Service signs and you’re looking at it. Find Navajo rugs, baskets and pottery for sale alongside beef jerky and salted nuts. In the visitor’s center, you can watch Navajo women weave rugs as you ponder the ride home, which presumably you’ll take by car rather than on horseback. — K.S.

After a three-hour drive through the starry desert from our home in Durango, Colorado, Jeff and I arrived bleary-eyed in a surreal oasis of orange and white street lamps, floating in the black like buoys of light. We had arrived in the center of Chinle, Arizona, in the heart of the Navajo reservation, the largest tract of tribal land in the country.
It didn't look like much. Beyond the Taco Bell, Burger King, and Holiday Inn, the desert expanse was broken by silhouettes of trailers, barbed wire fences, dogs prowling, and horses snoozing. Though it was only three hours from our house, it felt like another country. And in some ways, it is another country.
Chinle is not the capitol of the Navajo Nation, but it is the geographical center and a cultural gathering spot. But you can't fully understand Chinle until you understand its more international claim to fame: its proximity to Canyon de Chelly National Monument, a puzzle of red sandstone chasms dotted with petroglyphs and ancient Anasazi dwellings.
The canyon has been dwelled for nearly 5,000 years and now the remnants of its diverse civilizations - from early basket-makers to cliff-dwelling Anasazi, Hopi, and finally Navajo - and its utter natural beauty draw more than 800,000 visitors every year. Since the monument resides on Navajo Tribal Trust Land, Navajos live there and guide there and visitor services are operated by the Forest Service in agreement with the tribe.
Navajos only started dwelling the canyon in the 18th century, but many still live on the canyon bottom, tending rustically beautiful homesteads, raising livestock, and growing corn and other crops, much like their recent ancestors did. Some live right below ancient dwellings; Others live 30 miles up the canyon, their remote homes only accessible via flood-prone washes with a heavy-duty pick-up truck. Other Navajos guide some 18,000 tourists per year through the maze of canyons to see vestiges of the past. (Many more visitors view the canyon from the two scenic rim drives, which don't require a guide.) Still others sell crafts-pottery, rugs, or hand-made jewelry-near points of interest, like Antelope House. Undoubtedly, the canyon is a major source of economic income for the Navajos in the area, but it also seems to be an integral part of their community's strong cultural identity. And so to begin to understand the town and its people, Jeff and I sought to understand the canyon.
On our tour of the canyon by Jeep on a Saturday in March - all tours must be led by a Navajo guide since the park resides on Navajo Tribal Trust Land - we felt both awed and dispirited. The monument is undeniably beautiful. Chugging up sandy, mucky drainages, we admired the sculpted red-sandstone canyon walls stained with desert varnish-streaks of black formed by rain that look like long black hairs brushed smooth on a red back. On the canyon floor, the cottonwoods, Russian olives, and tamarisk blended into shades of terracotta, sage, and lime. Little can survive in the canyon's cyclic extremes of dryness and flooding, but we saw the occasional raven or hawk.
Our guide, Davidson, pointed out petroglyphs of diamondback snakes, hunters, and prey. He told us stories of Navajo stand-offs with the Spanish at Fortress Rock and of Spider Woman, a deity who, the Navajo believe, taught women how to weave and lives on top of the inspiring 800-foot-tall Spider Rock.
In some ways the development of the canyon, a place of almost spiritual beauty, as a tourist attraction seemed grotesque. Dwellings that had stood silent and alone for centuries observed a charade of tourists purchasing cheap souvenirs in their front yards, and the impacts of visitors were visible on multiple levels, from rutted four-wheel-drive tracks through the washes to uncollected trash. On the other hand, the canyon is a valuable source of revenue for a struggling community that hasn't embraced revenue sources typical of other Native American tribes.
To uneducated observers, like we were, these kinds of contrasts aren't just visible in the canyon. They're everywhere in Chinle. The neon lights of fast-food chains jar against the stark natural beauty of the desert and the canyon. The Tseyi Shopping Center, where locals buy potato chips, sodas and canned meat, sits next to expansive ranges, where flocks of sheep graze like they have for centuries. At the Junction Restaurant, you might eat a Pizza Hut pizza, a cheeseburger wrapped in fry bread, or a traditional mutton stew. The more we explored, the more we realized how unusual this place was. We began to see a fascinating mix of old and new - of inspiringly vibrant traditions, strong community values, and the unsightly rot of modern American culture.
Relative to some of the canyon dwellings, Chinle is new. Still, some say the Navajo have a great sense of attachment to the land, perhaps because it was taken away not long ago. During the Long Walk in the early 1860s, the Navajo were forced to walk more than 300 miles to Fort Sumner, New Mexico, where they were interned under harsh conditions. It wasn't until 1868 that they were allowed back to their land to rebuild their communities. Until the middle of the 20th century, a system of trading posts developed, where tribe members would come to swap crafts and goods.
On Saturday afternoon, Jeff and I drove 30 miles south to Hubbell Trading Post, a historic store where Natives from hundreds of miles away would ride on horseback to trade. As soon as we cruised past the last trailers and outlying buildings of Chinle, it felt as if the landscape of small mesas, wide desert and interminable sky hadn't changed in millennia.
The trading post was at its prime about one hundred years ago. Still, it felt like we just as easily could have tied our horses out front, as opposed to unceremoniously parked my Honda Civic. Women sold jewelry, pottery, baskets and rugs-which came with Polaroids of the weaver-in rooms with floorboards that groaned as if speaking some defunct ancient language. Old artifacts, like woven baskets and saddles, hung from the ceilings and the old weights, measures and wood-burning stove still stood in their original positions. The likes of Theodore Roosevelt and Maynard Dixon spent the night there, since it was the gathering center of Navajo country.
Now the trading post sells packets of Big Red, cans of chili, Spam, Jell-o and pancake mix rather than loose tobacco, flour, and feed. But farther down the driveway from the store, we peered into the barn, where old carriages still stood, ready to be harnessed at any moment.
It wasn't hard to imagine people from the Chinle area traveling down here to trade. Today, Navajo crafts still help the tribe survive and similar trading posts are still alive and flourishing. In fact, Chinle likely hasn't changed a whole lot in the last 100 years. Only about three roads are paved in the town, which has a population of about 8,000. Beyond the fast food places, the Best Western, and the Tseyi Shopping Center, the sparsely developed outpost consists of a community center, several schools, a hospital, and craft shops that sell pottery, rugs, and other crafts to visitors.
Beyond the service industry that caters to tourists, the largest employers in town are the hospital, the public schools, and governmental services. Without a doubt, Chinle is poor. As many as 70 percent of its residents are unemployed, and there are few industries to attract to the area beyond tourism. Though the destitution seems obvious to an outsider who notices the stray dogs and roadside litter, it's not seen in the same way by a resident.
"The values are different here," says Keith Adcock, who is half Navajo, half African American, and has lived in town for about nine years. "There isn't much value placed on development and the sort of American dream of getting ahead. There's more value placed on helping your family and living in harmony with the earth." He also believes that the fact that the reservation hasn't been developed has preserved the quality of open space and helped attract tourists to the area.
That's not to say that some development hasn't happened or that some people don't hope more will happen in the coming years. A new high school pavilion and swimming pool are currently being constructed, for example. Some community members have advocated building a Walmart in town to attract jobs and provide residents with certain necessities they currently have to buy in Gallup, about an hour and a half away.
"Some of the older Navajos don't want a Walmart," said Davidson Descheenie, a local Navajo who guides Jeep tours in Canyon de Chelly. "They say ?this is my land, this is where I live, where I raise my family, where I graze my livestock.'" Descheenie himself, however, wasn't bothered by the possibility of a big-box store coming to town to provide jobs and services for this remote outpost. But the company would have to get its proposal through the tribal council. The fact that it would not be able to own the land it was on-land on the reservation is owned collectively by the tribe and residents and businesses lease it-would also pose a unique obstacle. And no tribe members seem to feel like relinquishing any grazing rights to make way for the store.
In short, things are done differently here, and our first impression wasn't totally off: In some ways, it really is like another country. As Larry DiLucchio, a white resident who has lived in Chinle for 22 years, says, people don't simply have the green light to come here. In some instances, Navajo police have escorted unwelcome visitors off the reservation. Still, even as an outsider, DiLucchio and other non-Navajo residents feel that the community, which is 95 percent Navajo, is accepting of other individuals who are respectful of their culture and community.
"Here, it depends how you treat other people," says DiLucchio. "It depends on how open-minded and accepting you are of other people's culture and how confident you are in your own. You just have to learn to take people for who they are and shut up and listen sometimes."
As for Jeff and I, we were just weekend drive-by tourists exploring what we could with our limited time. We had heard from Davidson that there would be a pow wow at the community center on Saturday night and figured this might be our best opportunity.
The center looked like any high school gym from the outside. But as we walked into the nondescript building from the packed parking lot, several young Navajo men stood outside in full costume-paint, feathers and all. At first, with all the energy and the people, the place felt like a high-school pep rally in my hometown. We sat on bleachers next to couples with small children, teenagers flirting and horsing around, and a young mom with a baby wrapped to a board.
But what was different was that everyone was involved. A teenage boy dressed in baggy black jeans and a cap skewed sideways chanted and drummed. The bass reverberated through my body and I wondered how it would sound coming from deep in the canyon. Two-year-olds spun and twirled in bright, beautiful costumes in a dance contest. Older women paraded in beaded moccasins and dresses, adorned in make-up and jewelry. Men in turquoise, red, green, yellow, feathers and bells whirled and stamped in a language of movement we had never been taught to recognize.
Though we didn't feel like we belonged, we felt welcome, magnanimously. And deciphering the meaning of an event that had never been part of our childhoods or adolescence-like basketball tournaments and Christmas pageants-was mind-opening. It gave us hope that despite our first impressions, Chinle was vibrantly alive with cultural traditions. Would it be the same in 20 years?
"Honestly, I think Chinle will stay mostly the same," says Keith Adcock. "It's difficult for big change to happen here. It has to be approved by a lot of people." Still, to many, including Adcock, this is not a drawback to living here. "I've had exposure to big city life and what you lack here as far as convenience, you really gain in your culture and knowing where you're from."
As Jeff and I departed town and headed north along route 191, we noticed more than the run-down trailer homes and the barbed-wire fences tangled with plastic bags. Beside nearly every house, no matter what size, shape or magnitude of orderliness, were hogans. Next to trailers, old clapboard homesteads, and new houses they stood, as if a prideful statement for anyone breezing by to notice. We watched them go by past our windows, one after another after another, as we slowly made our way across the blank-slate desert.

Kate Siber is a freelance writer based in Durango, Colorado.