On my first visit to Utah, as previously mentioned, I was slowly recovering my strength from a hip-replacement operation. I was not looking for very testing walking, and did some of the waymarked trails in the foothills of the Wasatch Mountains around Ogden. My host in Ogden, Mikel, was a great devotee of these trails, getting up most mornings at dawn for a walk on one of them with Janis his wife, and he had taken a big part in helping to get them initially established and subsequently maintained. One of these was called Indian Trail. We were driven round to Ogden Canyon and dropped there to make our way back over the contour line of the mountains, to Ogden itself. I asked Mikel about the trail, and he told me it was an old hunting route into the mountain interior, used by the Ute Indians, the tribe which had given the state of Utah its name. It was an easy trail of about five miles, moving in and out of the timber line, and with grand views away over the Great Salt Lake. The Ute no longer inhabit the area hereabouts, though Mikel showed me a couple of sites where they had carved their pictographs. Unlike the Anasazi though, the Ute did not disappear completely from Utah.
The first white man to encounter the Ute was Escalante, the pioneering Spanish priest who explored the region of the Colorado Plateau in the 1770s, and the tribesmen were helpful to him as guides. By this time the Ute, who had originally hailed from further east, had been in the area for about 250 years, and they were the dominant tribe in the region that was later to become known as Utah. They were hunter-gatherers, who moved around the area, following the buffalo and living off the land. It is difficult, indeed impossible, to say how many Ute there were when the first Mormon settlers started to arrive in the 1840s, but estimates vary from 10-25,000 spread widely throughout the region. Smallpox, brought by the white man, did as much as alcohol or the wiping out of the buffalo, to weaken the Native Americans and to reduce the population, though the disease is not often mentioned as a contribution to how the West was won. Now there are only 3500 Northern Ute left (there is another group, the Southern Ute, located in Colorado) almost all of whom are living in the Uinta-Ouray Reservation in north-east Utah. And even that low number is an increase from about 2000 in the 1970s.
The Ute had had their scuffles with the Mountain Men, the trappers who came in from about 1820 in pursuit of the beaver. But the trappers were so few that these scuffles didn’t amount to much, and many Mountain Men themselves went native, taking Indian wives. With the coming of the Mormons, and later other white men, things gradually changed and larger-scale conflicts emerged. Initially though there was much less hostility towards the Indians from the Mormon settlers than there was generally from white westward-bound migrants. One of the factors behind this was that the LDS regarded the Indians as descendants, however degenerated, of the Lost Tribe of the Jews, which had later been converted to Christianity in America, long before the arrival of the Spaniards – this according to the Book of Mormon. Modern scholarship, as I have pointed out in an earlier chapter, has demonstrated, to all but adherents of the LDS Church and its apologists, that not only does no language of any North-American native people bear any relation to any Jewish or other Middle-Eastern language (even to Reformed Egyptian, the alleged language of the Book of Mormon) but also that the DNA profile of Native Americans is 99% shared with peoples from east-central Asia, not the Middle East. For pointing out these unwelcome facts and many other arguments for the impossibility of regarding the Book of Mormon as literal truth in Losing a Lost Tribe (2004), geneticist and ertswhile LDS member Simon Southern was expelled from the Church (allegedly for immorality). A whole lost tribe of scholars at BYU University spend their time elaborating ingenious – although mostly ingenuous – arguments as to why the genetic and other evidence actually points the other way, and towards a literal interpretation of Mormon scriptures, convincing no one but themselves.
As the Native Americans were seen by the LDS as the fallen descendants of a former Christian civilisation, there was therefore a fair chance of reconverting them to the true faith. It is true that Mormon actions towards the Native Americans were not blameless, but they were possibly more humane than that of the majority of the white men who came west, and the Mormon settlers generally attempted to carry out a policy of co-existence with the Ute, Navajo and other indigenous tribes. Brigham Young himself showed more than a passing interest in the anthropology of the Native American peoples, seeking to discover evidence in their culture and languages for the revealed truths of the Book of Mormon. Partly based on this belief as to the origins of the Native American tribes, and partly from pragmatism – for he was nothing if not a pragmatist – Brigham Young famously urged his Mormon followers to, ‘Feed them, not Fight them’, in relation to the Ute and other peoples they found inhabiting the area in the Great Basin that the Siants were colonising.
But as the settlers expanded their farming and grazing lands, fencing these off and cutting across them with irrigation canals, the lands where the Ute could practice their nomadic hunting and gathering culture were whittled down, and they began to face starvation. Brigham Young responded by trying to establish Indian farms where they could grow crops and feed themselves, but these were failures, and by the 1860s most of the Ute were living in squatters’ camps outside Mormon villages, subsisting on charity from the settlers supplemented by occasional cattle rustling. The Ute regarded the settlers’ cattle as they did the buffalo – as food to be taken when required. Skirmishes led to the so-called Walker War of 1853-5, a series of clashes between with Ute and the Mormons, with relatively low casualties on each side. The worst incident in this conflict was when a party of US Government surveyors was killed in the Gunnison Massacre of 1853, carried out by the Ute, though Mormon involvement was alleged at the time and subsequently. As the Mormons resented the encroachment of the US Government into their ‘Deseret’, it can be surmised that the Saints shed few tears over the Gunnison Massacre.
The Mormon policy of feeding not fighting the Ute appeared to be working for a while when peace was made after the Walker War and indeed the two groups were allies in carrying out the infamous Mountain Meadows Massacre in 1857 when a group of ‘Gentile’ migrants was wiped out in south-west Utah. But therein lay the weakness of the Ute and all such tribal societies, their inability to form coherent inter-tribal alliances against the white man. The Ute were later to collaborate with the US Army, for example, in fighting the Apache, and then some of them fought with the Apache against the Mormons in the Black Hawk War of 1865-72. But as with the Scottish clans in the Highlands, any unity between the Indian tribes was always short-lived, and their defeat by the ever increasing tides of pale-faced immigrants was a foregone conclusion.
The white man on the other hand could sink his differences when faced with the Native American threat. Colonel Patrick Connor brought US troops into Utah in 1857, leading to the so-called Mormon War. Connor and his ‘Gentile’ troops were hated by the Mormons, but when they moved into neighbouring Idaho in 1863 to deal with the Shoshone who were killing migrants and Mormon settlers, the LDS newspaper, Deseret News encouraged Connor to wipe them out. He duly obliged and at the Battle (actually Massacre) of Bear River in 1863 slaughtered 250 Shoshone, (who thought he had come to negotiate and were unprepared for battle) mutilating prisoners and raping captured women. For what was to be the greatest massacre of Native Americans in the entire course of the Indian wars, Connor was publicly thanked by the Mormon settlers in Cache Valley.
Abraham Lincoln had laid aside a large part of north-east Utah in 1861 for the Ute people, but this was a barren area with little game, and many who were relocated there slipped towards near starvation – and then subsequently left the reservation. By this time Mormon settlement had become a flood rather than a trickle and they were establishing themselves in all far-flung parts of Utah, including the south-east. Desperation drove the Ute to rebellion. After a very severe winter in 1864-5, and led by the able warrior Black Hawk, many of the Ute – and some others from different tribes – began rounding up large numbers of the Mormon settlers’ cattle and horses. In the initial skirmishes the settlers were generally frustrated in their efforts to pursue the Ute and regain their stock. Brigham Young first of all tried a policy of conciliation, but after a series of killings of LDS members, including women and children, by Blackhawk’s braves, he authorised the Nauvoo Legion, the Mormon para-military force, to suppress the rebellion.
The Black Hawk War was fought with much more ferocity than the Walker War, and with undeniable atrocities committed on both sides, including most infamously the Circleville Massacre of 1866. Paranoia had led the local Mormon militia in the town to round up a group of about two-dozen peaceful Ute squatting outside Circleville and to take them into protective custody. Later, with rumours of an imminent attack by Blackhawk’s forces, all of the Ute men were shot in cold blood, and the women and children had their throats cut. Those involved pledged themselves to secrecy over the event, and no one was ever brought to book for the atrocity.
Most of the fighting centred in and around the area of present-day Sanpete County and initially Black Hawk went from success to success, and the Mormons retreated to the larger villages with their livestock, and fortified the settlements. This policy, which prevented the Indians raiding successfully as much as the military reverses they began to suffer, led to Black Hawk suing for peace in 1867 and the war coming to an end. In an interesting codicil to the peace that was signed, Black Hawk, who was dying, asked to be allowed to tour the places he had attacked during the war and to be allowed to ask for forgiveness. Brigham Young gave him permission and safe passage, and the extraordinary end to this tale was the sight of the Indian chief asking for forgiveness in Mormon churches up and down Sanpete County, and – generally – being given it, and being asked for it in return. Most of the Ute were then forcibly relocated to the arid reservation lands of north-east Utah. This is so remote and unforgiving an area that few travellers visit there even now, and the result is that in most of Utah the presence of the Native American – unlike in New Mexico or Arizona – is conspicuous to any visitor by its absence. To encounter more palpable examples of the Native Americans’ past – and the reality of their present – we have to head southwards from Sanpete County.
From Moab the road goes through recognisably Mormon towns which become ever smaller – Monticello, Blanding, Bluff, and finally Mexican Hat – still recognisably Mormon at that, despite seeming to consist of just three motels, no houses but still having its ubiquitous LDS church. Then at the San Juan River everything changes. Crossing the road bridge you rise up onto a dessicated plateau and all signs of human habitation along the roadside vanish. But across the plateau you can see evidence of people living here, where there are clusters of huts and trailers in the distance with beat-up trucks alongside them. On the roadside now and again are stalls advertising crafts and jewellery for sale, but on both my out-of-season visits most of them were unoccupied. After about 15 miles the road rises to Monument Pass, with the summit of Stagecoach Mountain at over 6600 ft on your left. Through the pass you come upon one of the most iconic and marvellous views on earth, the sight of Monument Valley. Another five miles of wonder and rising excitement, and you are there. Although you are still in Utah, you have actually entered another country, that of the Navajo Nation.
The Navajo Nation stretches for 26,000 square miles over southern Utah, northern Arizona and western New Mexico and within its tribal lands, which are about the same size as Scotland, live the 300,000 Navajo – or the Dine (the People), as they designate themselves. This is far and away the largest tribal area in the USA, and the Navajo are by a long shot the most numerous of all the tribes of Native American peoples remaining, amounting to one-seventh of the two million of their number in the USA. Indeed, this is more than a reservation and to a considerable extent the Navajo are a self-governing entity within the US, the term ‘Nation’ being adopted in 1969 to reflect this. As well as having their own cultural traditions, they have in addition their own government, their own laws – and police force – and their own schools. In addition they have gained the rights to the exploitation of the natural resources which lie within the boundaries of the Navajo territories. They actually have almost the same powers as has the Scottish Government under devolution legislation.
One of the laws of the Navajo is the banning of the sale of alcohol within the Nation, a ban their Mormon neighbours to the north have long ago abandoned. Alcohol (‘White Man’s Firewater’) as much as military force won the West, as the Native Americans’ capacity for the absorption of alcohol is lower than that of those who sold it to them. But the ban on alcohol means that the Navajo simply drive out of the tribal area, buy alcohol and then drive back, leading to both the littering the roadside with an incredible number of empty bottles and cans (recycling these would be a good business opportunity) and contributing to a high death toll through drink driving. To this toll I was nearly added as a statistic at Monument Pass, as a crazy, drunken driver swerved wildly to avoid my (off-road) parked car. Sixty per cent of Navajo males have alcohol-related issues, and the depressing figures don’t stop there. A similar amount of the population have no employment and live below the poverty line.
Other figures are equally chastening. Between 1944 and 1989 over 1000 uranium mines were established in the Navajo Nation, often employing Navajo workers who were given no protective equipment nor told about the dangers involved. As well as such direct exposure, ground water was contaminated by radioactivity and even building materials. Cancer was almost unknown historically in the Dine, but at present stomach cancer levels are 15 times the US average and reproductive cancers in teenage girls over 17 times national rates. Diabetes too is a new disease for the Dine as sedentary lives and increased carbohydrate consumption lead to obesity, and this is seen as a possible reason for a diabetes level 400% higher than the national rate. One could go on …
Most of those Dine who have employment work for the Navajo tribal authorities in one form or another, or in the small tourist sector (such as the Monument Valley Park) or in the casinos which are one of the main income generators here. The mineral rights are leased to outside operators, and employ few, and these are mostly outside workers who commute to the mines, such as that operated by Peabody Coal. This provides income, but little local employment. The Dine are beginning however to appreciate the opportunities for the development of alternative energy sources on their lands, for example wind power and especially solar power, which could provide income in a non-harmful way, though it is again difficult to see how many jobs this would provide locally.
It would be easy to be negative about the situation here, but the Dine are a resilient people who have survived much and today they still cherish many of their traditional tribal ceremonies and religious practices which help give them a sense of community. It is incredibly difficult for outsiders to get a real feel for this, and to enter in any more than the most superficial way into this society other than as a souvenier-buying tourist. But in the novels of crime writer Tony Hillerman we can possibly get a glimpse of Navajo life in some of its more positive aspects. Though not one of the Navajo himself he has been honoured by them with the title of Special Friend of the Dine which means that his view of tribal life – seen through the eyes of the characters of the Navajo Tribal Police in Hillerman’s novels – is not viewed as hostile by those it describes. From The Blessing Way (1970) to The Shape Shifter (2006), completed a couple of years before his death, Hillerman wrote many intriguing works where the protagonists confront the issues of the Navajo present in the context of the influences of the past.
I have been to Monument Valley twice. The first time it was late autumn and it was still baking hot, the quintessence of a Western movie scene. The second time was in January, the ground was powdered in snow, the land transformed into something hyperboreal. And it was cold. Something that surprised me was that on neither occasion did I encounter any American citizens, only Europeans. Maybe this was an accident, or maybe it is the fact that the US National Park Pass doesn’t get you free into Monument Valley, or maybe it was something deeper. Possibly, it occurred to me, Americans are uncomfortable visiting the Navajo Nation, which recalls so many past atrocities committed by them against the Native Americans, and that the Navajo are (literally) in charge, and in charge of how their own history is presented. Monument Valley is the National Park of the Navajo Nation, not an American National Park, and is in some ways different from the other national parks I have visited in America.
There is an easy-going, pleasantly scruffy feel about the place. Monument Valley is no theme park. It is also a lot less accessible than many other parks, as some of the religious sights of the Dine are out-of-bounds to visitors, as are the little farmsteads dotted through the park where people still live and work. These small plots are hereditary property but the vast bulk of the land in the Navajo Nation is communally owned. The qualities of the American entrepreneurial acquisitive spirit are still alien to the Navajo. There is a dirt-track drive round the main features of the park which visitors can take, but going off this means you have to employ a Navajo guide, a reasonable means of ensuring some local employment and income. The shop at the rather understated visitor centre also sells many Navajo crafts, such as blankets and jewellery, the products of domestic industry, with stated assurances that the bulk of the income goes to the producers, and is not creamed off by middlemen, as can often happen with goods sold at the various trading posts. I bought a horse-blanket. I don’t have a horse, but it still looks good on my bedroom wall.
The Mitten Buttes, Rain God Mesa, the Totem Pole and other features in Monument Valley are all mind-blowing, but the trouble is, having seen these images so many times on cinema screens we struggle to rid ourselves of the view we are on a film set, and to remember that we are actually in a place sacred to the Navajo. This is especially true as most of the Westerns associated with the place portray Native Americans in a negative light, for example in the John Ford/John Wayne movie The Searchers. It is a savage irony that, due to their poverty, the Navajo felt obliged not only to allow Hollywood to use this place as a staging ground for films with a racist message, but also that many of the Navajo themselves acted out the parts in the films of the villainous Indians. I do not for a moment blame the Navajo for doing this, they had then little choice. The blame rests squarely on those who put them in this invidious position, and then exploited them in their subordination. As a consequence, this is a place where the sense of wonder at the scenery and respect for the Navajo religious heritage, mingles with a sense of the profane as well.
The scenery in Monument Valley is truly spellbinding, but many other parts of the Navajo Nation are not so pleasing on the eye, consisting of large areas of barren, semi-desert, upland plateau which is clearly of as little economic value as it is possessed of visual attraction. Monument Valley itself actually straddles the Utah-Arizona border, though I doubt if the Dine take much cognisance of the state line. Southwards we are in Arizona proper as we head towards Kayenta, which is, along with Tuba City and Window Rock (the tribal capital) one of the main settlements within the Nation, with about 5,000 people. Kayenta is a depressing place, blighted by coal mining and the spoils of former uranium extraction, and not one that encourages you to linger. Many Americans are quick to talk of the blight of the Chinese occupation of Tibet and, though never having been there, I am sure that much of their criticism is valid. However, when I see the plight of the Navajo I find it difficult to believe that it is any better that than of the Tibetans. But however depressing their situation is today, it is a vast improvement on what it was in the past, as I was to discover when heading for my next port of call, the Canyon de Chelly, or Chinle (pronounced Shay), which lies eastwards towards the border of Arizona with New Mexico.
Canyon de Chelly has an enormous significance for the Navajo, and given what happened there the visitor can only feel humble and gratified that bitterness at events there 150 years ago have receded enough for access to non-Dine to be allowed. For it was here that the Navajo made their last unavailing stand against the military forces marshalled to subdue them by the US state. The Navajo had moved into this area about 500 years ago and unlike many Native Americans were willing to learn from the Pueblo culture which they encountered, adopting agriculture and stock-rearing as well as the traditional hunting, gathering (and raiding) lifestyle of the plains’ Indians. This possibly gave them a much more rooted sense of place than other tribes, such as the Apache, possessed. Not that they were without their conflicts with their neighbours, including the Spaniards, as a visit to Massacre Cave in the canyon revealed. Here in 1805 Spanish soldiers killed 100 Navajo – warriors they said, women and children, say the Navajo. But though they could cope with the declining power of the Spanish Empire to the south, the Navajo were to meet their nemesis at the hands of the more powerful United States coming from the east.
There had been skirmishes, Navajo Wars, in the 1840s, but full-scale conflict erupted 20 years later. The commander of the New Mexico Territory (which included Arizona at this time) was Major Carleton and he ordered the famous mountain man Kit Carson into Navajo Territory in 1861 with quite explicit orders to commit genocide (Carleton had heard that the Navajo lands were gold-rich, and wanted the tribe removed). Though no Injun Lover himself, Carson appears to have been appalled by the orders given him, and he strove to mitigate them when he invaded Navajo territory with the US cavalry, detachments of New Mexico militiamen and groups of Ute Indians who saw a chance to plunder their enemies. Carson attempted to round up and then deport the Navajo, but his atrocities, though less genocidal than his orders, were also appalling. A scorched earth policy was followed, involving the slaughter of Navajo livestock, the burning of their crops and the destruction of their orchards, to force them to remove from their lands. The Navajo resisted, but were eventually driven back by superior enemy forces, and many took refuge in the redoubt of the Canyon de Chelly.
At the summit of the impregnable Fortress Rock the Navajo had stockpiled food and supplies, and there they retreated hoping to withstand Carson’s siege. But Carson and his troops stayed through a bitter winter of 1863-4 and a steady trickle of Navajo surrendered until, facing certain death from cold and starvation, the bulk of the resistance fighters capitulated, having been given promises of food, shelter and decent treatment. But then started the most infamous episode in Navajo history, the Long Walk, when Carson with 8000 Dine men women and children, went on a forced march to Fort Sumner in New Mexico, 300 miles away from the Canyon de Chelly. Over 300 Navajo died on the walk, as did many hundreds more when they arrived at Bosque Redondo where Carleton – one assumes deliberately – had prepared insufficient shelter and supplies to cater for them. Four years later the remnants of the Navajo at Bosque Redondo, with some other Dine groups who had been relocated elsewhere, were allowed to return to the Canyon de Chelly. Though skirmishes occurred on and off between Navajo, white settlers and US forces henceforth, there was never another full-scale Navajo uprising for the American government to contend with.
Carson has a very high reputation in American frontier mythology, as the noble warrior, though to the Navajo he is quite another figure, the chief author of their misfortunes. Whilst once cannot directly blame him for the policy adopted towards the Navajo, which he tried to mitigate from its initial genocidal intent, nevertheless Carson reminds me of those in the German military commanders in WWII who may have had reservations about the Holocaust, but still herded the Jews onto the cattle trucks heading for the gas chambers. Only in gun-crazy America could such a man be seen as a hero, as he is portrayed in his former house – now a museum – in Taos, New Mexico. Even if he was only ‘obeying orders’, those orders were crimes against humanity, for which he bears culpability, and for which Carson should be execrated.
I arrived at the Canyon de Chelly in as deep a midwinter as that in which Carson had besieged the starving and freezing Navajo on Fortress Rock, with limitless blue skies forming a triptych of colour with the white snow on the ground and the red rock of the canyon walls. I checked into the lodge – no one else was staying there – and decided to go on the Scenic Drive around the rim of the canyon as there was still plenty of light left. This drive trends along the southern edge of the canyon, and allows you to gain views down into its floor, and also of the sandstone towers reaching up from the depths. It truly was a magical sight, equal, but quite different to Monument Valley with the latter’s openness interrupted by the various buttes. I was stopping at the various overlooks, and gaining an increasing anticipation of what tomorrow would bring in the form of a penetration of the canyon, when at Sliding Rock Overlook I encountered another person. Not a tourist, but a lone Navajo young man with – even at this season and in this weather – a stall set out displaying Navajo crafts, and I wandered over to look at his wares. These consisted of blankets, the exquisite Navajo jewellery, and various hand-carved sandstone tablets.
Such situations can be tricky; the gawking tourist attempting clumsy empathy with the native person, but on this occasion Creighton (he gave me his name), removed all awkwardness by his engaging attempts at conversation. (He had a subtext in this, as he had been left there for several hours by his driver, and waiting too long for his return while selling nothing in the deep cold, he was charming me in order to get a lift back down to the village). The jewellery and rugs were beyond my budget. (However don’t think the Navajo make a fortune from their work, some of the rugs can take months to make in the traditional manner.). I bought a sandstone tablet carved with various pictographs, and assured him of his lift. Examining the tablet I noticed, amongst the Navajo drawings, some undeniably Anasazi ones, including the now world-famous flute-player Kokopelli, and quizzed him on this.
‘We respect those who came before us,’ answered Creighton, ‘they lived in the canyon before we came and their ruins are sacred to us, we never touch them or use them.’
Just as the Navajo had borrowed agriculture from the Pueblo people, so too had they borrowed some of their images. Creighton further told me that he lived in the canyon in the summer, (in winter the valley bottom is too cold for human habitation) tending his vegetable patch and herding a few sheep, and living in his hogan. This was the traditional Navajo dwelling, a mud-covered wooden structure which their mythology told them the beaver had showed the Dine how to make. Its door always faces east, to catch the rising sun. Now most Navajo live in houses, but in summer (and for ceremonial and religious) purposes, the hogan is still used.
I did not raise the issue of the sufferings of the Dine, but Creighton himself did, and appeared surprised that I knew something about these already. Most eloquently he talked of the siege of Fortress Rock, and women and children slipping down the precipice under cover of darkness, to gather water for those on the redoubt, and occasionally falling to their deaths. Then he added, the words needing no response from me, the same words – more or less – that I had heard at Taos Pueblo,
‘You have to stop hating, but it is also important never to forget.’
I asked about visiting the canyon and was told that I was not allowed on my own. I would have to use the services of a guide. Creighton left me with details of how to find someone the next day who would take me into the canyon, and I made the arrangements that evening before I went to bed. More than reading any book, this visit to the Canyon de Chelly was to give me an idea of what that winter siege on Fortress Rock must have been like.
It snowed a blizzard during the night, and in the first light I made my way over the unbroken covering of whiteness to the house of my guide. He was still in his bed, and clearly surprised that I had turned up in the appalling weather, which, however, now showed sings of clearing.
‘If you were an American’ he half-grumbled, half-stated in admiration, ‘you would not have turned up on a day like this.’ We got into a truck and picked up another guide, and these two occupied the interior seats. I was relegated to the outside of the truck and given a couple of blankets – alas, not the warm and colourful Navajo blankets but ones that looked as if they might have been of ancient ex-army WWII vintage – and we headed into the canyon. Well was I relieved that I was barred from driving here during this season. The road was a dirt one, often drifted with snow and there were several fords, where the truck’s wheels crushed through the ice as we passed.
The Canyon de Chelly is a place of overwhelming dramatic beauty and my guides were determined to give me the full tour, up the Canyon del Muerto to the Massacre Cave site, back to Fortress Rock and then deep into the Canyon de Chelly itself. As well as the awesome rock pillars and vertiginous canyon walls, there was visual interest everywhere in the Navajo hogans and their cultivated patches and, high in the walls, the splendid examples of former Anasazi dwellings. My guides stopped at various points of interest, allowing me to emerge from the vehicle and stretch my frozen and stiffened limbs, and then moved on, saying very little. I was hoping that as the morning wore on and the sun rose in the sky, its rays would penetrate the canyon – alas, not. The valley floor remained mostly in stygian shadows, and I marvelled at how the Navajo could have spent a winter here, indeed, how even Carson’s men could have camped here and survived the perishing cold. Maybe, even without my guides doing any talking, they could see that I was learning something.
By the time we emerged from the canyon into the sunshine, I was stiffened to a degree I have never been in my life and was more carried out of the back of the truck than climbed down from it. But unlike the Navajo who surrendered in 1864, I had the welcome sight of my room with a hot bath waiting, and the lodge where I could have a late lunch and restore my bodily powers. My guides possibly went to warm up in the Sweat Lodge, a sauna-type construction where water is poured on heated rocks, and which has a therapeutic and religious significance for the Navajo as well as for other native American tribes. But from that, I was excluded. And, I felt, quite rightly. At Canyon de Chelly, more than at Monument Valley, there remains a sense of something sacred, and I for one have no wish to undermine that.
The Navajo have historically been so abominably treated by the US government that it is worth remembering that they made a massive contribution to the triumph of the USA in WWII. This was not so much in the regard that many Navajo volunteered to fight as soldiers, but in the fact that the secret battleground communications system of the USA in the Pacific arena was based on the Navajo language. This was done on the twin assumptions that the Japanese were unfamiliar with the Navajo language and therefore the code would be unbreakable, both of which proved true. In many battles, including Iwo Jima, it is on record that the ‘Code Talkers’ as they were called, contributed greatly to victory and to the overall shortening of the war. Yet it was well into the 1960s before any official US government recognition of this contribution to victory by the Navajo was made. And while the Code Talkers were making this contribution, the Navajo were still being denied voting rights in Arizona. Today there is a fine statue of the Code Talkers at the Dine capital of Window Rock. There are over 300 million American citizens, and only two million of the people whose land they appropriated in a surge of Manifest Destiny. The US political authorities have a profound obligation to treat the remaining Native Americans in a much better manner, before they can earn the right to speak of Tibet. It is better to remove the plank from one’s own eye, before pointing out the mote in one’s neighbour’s.