Day 11

Day Eleven – Friday 25^th April

Marble Canyon

(Display from Navajo Museum in Tuba City)

Nakai is the Navajo word for the Spanish, meaning those who wander around, which demonstrates how strange the Spanish must have seemed to the Dine, as they prefer to be called. Here were a group of people who were just aimlessly exploring the new continent, looking for treasure and laying claim to the Dine’s land, moving around with no real purpose, the Navajo were semi-nomadic people, hunters and gatherers who only moved with the seasons. The Spaniards expeditions must have seemed like oddballs and lunatics to the Dine, thus the playful name.

            As we drove around the reservation you began to notice a pattern with the houses, which on first glance look really run down, with all sorts of rubbish like old car parts making a sort of trash garden, but then you start to notice that the cars parked outside the houses are on the whole really nice. Suggesting that the Dine people take more pride in their vehicles than they do in their homes. Almost all the houses had a traditional Hogan built nearby, which are used for ceremonial purposes, showing that the ancestral beliefs and traditions still remain a strong part of modern Dine culture.

             The tiny town of Marble Canyon, population 31, served in my opinion as a great demonstration of the massive distances in the South West. While driving down the highway with no sign of life for miles showed the scale of distances, the fact that this town was 90 miles away from any other form of civilisation, which became apparent when the waitress told how the lodge burnt down and it took 2 hours before a fire engine arrived. Just highlighting the vast distances that the South West and America as a whole cover.