Monument Valley (Tsé Biiʼ Ndzisgaii)
You’ve seen this place before. It’s been in many movies, photos, games, and advertisements. It lends its name to a popular puzzle game. Wile E. Coyote chased the Road Runner many miles through here. But to be in this place is to enter something totally unfamiliar.
I didn’t realize till last week that this is Navajo land. All of it. It’s not a US National Park, it’s a Navajo Tribal Park. It’s right in the middle of the yards and homes of Navajo people that live there, as they have since time immemorial.
It’s not a particularly holy place in Navajo tradition, as far as we could learn. Or maybe, it is just as holy to them as every other square inch of their homeland. It is beautiful, and they know it, and steward it as a preserve. When it was made a park, it was set aside so people could not move onto the park land. But some families had their ancestral homes in the park boundaries, and chose to remain. They’re still there. No running water, no grid power. Life proceeds in a mix of ancient and modern ways. I suppose it is much like any rez in the southwest in that way.
The Navajo nation, being an independent nation though inside the boundaries of the US, have their own COVID restrictions. While US National Parks have mostly remained open, Tribal Parks are not, so the visitor’s center, some of the more famous views, and the road into the middle of the monuments were all closed. The nature of the valley means that you could still see them perfectly well, just from further away, and no visitors center. Kind of a bummer. But it sure wasn’t crowded.
Being extra-closed for COVID is a smart call on their part, as this whole place is incredibly remote. They used to have a small but well-equipped hospital here, a legacy of Harry Goulding’s, but they could no longer afford to pay the staff, so it closed some decades ago. The building, which is right next to the RV park, is now classroom space for a university extension program.
Speaking of Harry Goulding, he’s the reason this place is well-known. In the brief window between when this land was the Paiute reservation and when it was Navajo reservation, Harry and his wife moved here and bought a bunch of land, just because they loved it. When the depression hit in 1928, things got real bad around there, and Harry had the bright idea to pitch the area as a filming location. It took a lot of hard work, but in the end he was right, and once John Ford started using it the popularity took off, and the money allowed Goulding and the Navajo to improve their situation.
Sadly, the current owners have not been as generous as Harry was to the Navajo people. It’s true that as the popularity of Westerns faded, the tourism and movie money hasn’t been as easily made. But I think if one is to profit from tourists on land that is not really yours, try to be a gracious guest.
Since the park was closed, the best way to see and learn about the place was guided tours. We took two, one on a truck and one on horseback.
The truck tour was quite educational, including a display of a traditional hogan (pronounced ho-gone), and a drive down a long sandy road to a natural arch viewpoint so photogenic, the selfies looked fake. Our guide was “from here,” he spoke Navajo (a rare skill anymore) and had plenty of good stories about the history, the movies filmed here, and what life is like for residents. For example, land ownership: the US government lets you “walk around on” the land, but no Navajo really owns it, except as it relates to other tribe members recognizing their use and control. They can’t sell it outside the tribe, and within the tribe it stays with a maternal line indefinitely. (For more on this, see this fascinating paper.)
The horseback tour was probably the best way to get close to the monuments with the park being closed. This was a birthday present for Audrey (and maybe Kristin too). The wrangler was a wonderful guide, but COVID and the associated drop in tourism has been particularly hard on him. He wasn’t a Goulding’s employee like the truck tour, just an independent horseman trying to make a go of it out here. It was a bittersweet tour, getting to see up close both the land, and the challenge of trying to survive off of it any way you can in a pandemic. In any case, the horses were well loved, even if there were fewer of them now. If you’re in the Monument Valley area, we can highly recommend Joe at Wild West Trail Rides (joatene@yahoo.com or 435-459-2626).
In a cosmic coincidence, one day we saw this rig pull in:
Of course we had to introduce ourselves and well, it gets weirder. They’re another family of 4 from Oregon, full-timing, with the same RV only one year older, almost the same truck, and get this - the husband went to high school with Kristin! So we got to hang out and swap stories, and the kids had playmates for the last bit of our stay.
With just a week here, we really maximized what we could do, and I felt like we had learned a great deal about a place that looks familiar… until you go there.
