Tséyi’
Canyon de Chelly is a place of great historical significance to the Diné. I have recently been thinking about that canyon, called Tséyi’ in Navajo, because my work takes me there from time to time. We are preparing for a multi-year Russian Olive removal project deep in the canyon. What a complex irony: a group of natives kids removing invasive tree species from a canyon which was a stronghold for our ancestors. But the nuance of invasive species management is only a part of our subject here.
The canyon breathes history. I am half Diné and half Hopi. I introduce my Hopi side as Kiis’áanii. My Hopi identity is mediated via my Diné identity. There, in Tséyi’ lives the history of both: the White House of my Pueblo ancestors and the settlements of my Diné relatives, both of whom still live there today. This is what we mean by contingency, I suppose: had my Pueblo ancestors not left (yet they did not completely leave), leaving their symbols, would my Diné ancestors have come here? The stories would all be different. Hwéeldi would have been somewhere else. But in a way, we are still at Hwéeldi.
Tséyi’ was the site of the final battle of the Navajo Wars, the final resistance before my ancestors were set upon the Long Walk. I was never told the stories of our great leaders Manuelito and Barboncito, but I feel them. I am still coming back from the Bosque. I do, however, read in glimpses. Tiana Bighorse recounted her father’s experiences as a warrior during the Navajo Wars against Kit Carson and removal in Bighorse the Warrior. In an excerpt in the recently published The Diné Reader, Tiana relives her father’s stories of hiding in Canyon de Chelly, resisting the US Army, and the dwindling hope that our land would not be taken from us. By passing on her father’s stories, we see the context of the individual’s place in the larger fight against colonization. I am here only because of a series of resistances, separations, and repatriations.
The body is a gear of oral history. The stories are themselves the machines, creating and re-creating. The Indigenous body cannot be fully destroyed because these stories breathe in and out. The gears and components change over time, but the stories persist. My body is here to tell stories but I am sometimes overtaken by a Western headwind.
I am overwhelmed by history like my ancestors were overwhelmed by greed manifested and dressed in Army uniforms, on horseback. But defeat and setbacks are temporary. I am on my way back. Tsoodził is just over the horizon. Tiana’s father told her, “Sometimes I think the Great Spirit is guiding me, telling me, ‘Don’t go there, go this way.’ I think it is my father’s spirit guiding me. I mean my real father — and my Father Sky” (Bighorse 1994). We are guided by our ancestors and our world, our history, to “go this way.” This voice tells us how we can make it home. Future is history.
Tséyi’ is a sacred place of hiding and safety. Again, complexity prevails, because we did not fall there; Canyon de Chelly is a beat in the narrative. As a Diné man getting to know my forebears more and more, I see Tséyi’ not as the onset of defeat, but as a living symbol of survival because in there, “no enemies will kill all [Mother Earth’s] children” (Bighorse 1994).
Our stories, our ways, our language: these are all our children.
