Spring Break! A Day in the Navajo Nation

We felt like intruders. Because we were.

Monument Valley – or Tsé Bii’ Ndzisgaii (Valley of the Rocks) – is part of the Navajo Nation. We’d gotten up early to drive the 17-mile dirt road through its red-orange towers of stone and scrubland before heading on to our next destination.

But as we rolled along in our miniature rental car, we passed small houses. Horses, roaming, clearly someone’s. This valley was someone’s home, and we were driving through it at seven in the morning, gawking tourists objectifying its stark beauty as a vacation destination.

To visit as a white person is a confrontation with land ownership. Culturally, we like to imagine that our beautiful National Parks and Federally-owned lands are “unspoilt” by man, which erases the reality that Indigenous peoples have been shaping the landscape forever, and that the land was stolen from them. It is impossible to erase the Navajo people from their land here, on Native-controlled land, not with all the reminders of their presence. I’m glad there are still places in the US that feel like they belong to Indigenous people — because it makes me think of all the places Indigenous people have been erased from their ancestral homes and sacred sites.

In my memory of this place, I cannot separate the land from the people who live there. And that is as it should be.