Canyon de Chelly, AZ (Canyon del Muerto)

DAY 9
FRI 5 OCT 2012

Ben takes us further into the channels of the canyon and we stop at a branch called "Canyon del Muerto." He tells us the story of how his ancestors gouged out toeholds in the rock to climb the ledges. Using ropes and wooden ladders, some Navajos took refuge high up on the large rock formation They would hide fruit, piñon nuts, smoked turkey, and corn to try and outlast the seige of Kit Carson and his men.

In 1864, as the American Civil War was winding down, U.S. Government troops under General James H. Carlton, forced the removal of over 8,500 Navajo from their ancestral homelands, to a reservation on the Pecos River at the Bosque Redondo near Fort Sumner in New Mexico. This infamous journey is known among the Navajo as the “Long Walk,” and figures prominently in their oral history. It is as embedded in their collective consciousness, much the same way as the holocaust is to the Jews.
The Navajo have a strong tradition of oral history, and the events of this terrible past are retold through the elders, from generation to generation.

Recommended Reading: Navajo Stories of the Long Walk Period, pub. by Navajo Community College Press (Dine College), 1973