Visits with the Navaho

Canyon de Chelly
Canyon de Chelly, in Northeast Arizona, is a magical place that David and I had visited nearly ten years ago. A beautiful place with over 1000 ruins of ancient peoples who lived there in the past, I felt called to return to explore there again, this time hopefully getting down into the canyon, which one can do only with a Navaho guide.

While in Taos, I had gotton the name of a Navaho man with a spiritual focus who runs a little campground on the edge of Canyon de Chelly, has a sweatlodge there, and serves as a guide at Canyon de Chelly. This is a photo of Howard in front of the little welcome shack he has at Spider Rock Campground, an enchanting little place. Howard and I made a splendid, heart-felt connection and had a wonderful day-hike down to the base of "Spider Rock" and to some ancient petroglyphs in Canyon de Chelly. The ancient peoples (Anasazi) who lived in the Canyon (and Chaco Canyon and 3 other sites that I've visited on this journey) for several hundred years left many ruins and petroglyphs and there is much mystery about their sudden disappearance. The Navaho believe the Anasazi were so spiritually evolved, their consciousness just left their bodies but their spirits still inhabit their ruins and out of respect, the Navaho do not enter the ruins. This is as good a theory as any in my belief system! Certainly both Chaco Canyon and Canyon de Chelly have very spiritual and magical feelings to them.

An all-night Navaho ritual
The most amazing experience that I had while in the Flagstaff area was the oppportunity to go out to the Navaho Reservation and participate in an all-night peyote ritual there. This experience was such a GIFT and PRIVILEGE!! Much of the ritual I've done over the past 10-15 years has elements of native american ritual in it, but I have NEVER participated in a bona fide ritual like this, one where white people are only rarely invited as guests. . It was a most amazing, beautiful experience and it was an answer to a prayer that I had for deeply connecting with native spirituality while i was in the southwest. The experience is still reverberating within me as I'm sure it will for a long time. Here is what I wrote in my journal.

We arrived early and walked into the tipi shortly after the fire was lit. It was already dark and we had been driving on dirt tracks in a vast wilderness of desert scrub and shurbs and open sky to get to the site, a little compound of family houses in the middle of nowhere. The night was clear and star-filled, the milky way arching across the sky. The tipi was so magical an environment, the sweet smell of the oak fire, the firelight on the tipi walls, the way they laid the fire out in a very precise, beautiful manner. People began to arrive and fill up the circle--28 of us all together and only us three whiteys. I was squished between old Jimmy, our Navaho contact and Alan who had brought us there. The 15 year old young man (whose prayer for success with his education in high school was the "intention of this night's meeting) was composed and self-assured, welcoming us and introducing himself. There were mostly men there: young men, old men, boys, fat men, skinny men; all the Navaho men so serious and devoted and emotional with their prayers--it was inspirational! There were also a few women: old women, middle-aged and little girls, including the mother of the young man. Everybody there seem to be related somehow to the young man, except for us.

The skin for the cast-iron drum was soaked in water and then strung over the iron drum-bowl at the onset of the ceremony. It was hit with a stick in a fast shamanic rhythm, the tone of the drum being altered by thumb pressure on the skin and water being sloshed up from inside the bowl. Songs were led by various men as the prayer stick was passed around the circle. The drummer moved around so as to be sitting next to the man who was leading the chants. All night long there were chants with the drum, or long, quiet, emotional prayers in Navaho, directed toward the young man for whom the ritual was intended. Prayers were also done with tobacco smoke, cedar sprinkled on the coals, feather prayer wands, hand gestures of blessing, passing around "the medicine" (a jar of peyote tea). There were two different water blessings too and a blessing for the Navaho's sacred foods. In the morning, after sunrise, we filed out and individually did prayers of greeting to the sun (I watched the others to see how it was done), then returned to the tipi for more long prayers. It was a most beautiful, touching experience, a gift to share in! I was totally alert and engaged for most of the night, only dozing off a few times during the long quiet prayers in Navaho. Jimmy would nudge me awake when I dozed off.