Navajo Nation

When we met him, he was standing behind the counter at his gift shop/convenience store, wearing a crisp sky blue T-shirt and stylish black-rimmed glasses. Tsosie’s a nimble 40- year-old whose quick movements point to the fact that there’s always something more to be done. And while Tsosie, who runs both the store and a tour company, is Navajo through and through, a chief he isn’t. Not through any fault of his, however; the Navajo just don’t have chiefs anymore.

His real name is Ray, but when he was just 13 and working at the posh Lake Powell Resort, his drive earned him the nickname “little chief” among his co-workers. The name stuck, and that same drive led him up the corporate ladder and into a lofty position with a correspondingly handsome salary. Still Tsosie wasn’t satisfied. So one day when the Spirit told him to quit, he did simply that. And when his wife Rosalind cried and asked him why and where the money for the bills would come from, all he could say was that he didn’t know. “I just know I that I was suppose to leave my job,” he told her. “So I did.”

The family was down to their last $74 when a loan from the Navajo Nation that Tsosie had applied for to buy a local tour company finally came through. “And it’s been like candy ever since,” he says.

It’s the taste of candy you get by earning a living in the playground of your childhood. And Tsosie is that rare breed of guide whose sense of wonder is contagious. Walking through Antelope Canyon with him is to feel like a kid again, playing a game in the one of the most fantastical places one could imagine.

Antelope Canyon is by all accounts the most spectacular of the slot canyons in hills around Page It was formed—and continues to be formed—by flood waters that crash down the washes during monsoon season. When the roaring waters hit these big blocks of sandstone, they find narrow slots—hence the name—which in turn further propel the water, creating a pressure so intense that it begins blasting away the interior of the rock. The result is a narrow canyon whose two sides bend, dip, and undulate in a surreal and synchronistic dance with one another.

And then there’s the light. Although the bulbous formations overhead make seeing the sky from the canyon floor difficult, bars of light shoot down as if from a divinely inspired window of yellow-orange stained glass.

Such an artful structure is far from being a secret these days. With some five tour groups operating here, Antelope Canyon draws the sorts of crowds one would expect more in a European art gallery. The narrow alley hums with sounds of different tongues and camera clicks.

It’s hard to imagine that just 30 years earlier the canyon was all but unknown to anyone other than the Navajo. Not that Tsosie longs for a return to the private canyon of his youth. He loves the crowds, and quickly picks out various visitors’ countries of origin, then greets the strangers in their native tongues. If there were any babies, I half expect he’d kiss them.

For all his bustle and congeniality, Tsosie is a man deeply connected to his Navajo roots. Later that evening, he takes us back to the ranch where he was born, raised, and now lives in a new bungalow with Rosalind and their four children. Across the driveway is the small three-room house he grew up in, and where his mother Juanita still lives.

We go inside the older home to sit with her and Tsosie’s Uncle Freddy. Juanita, seated on a worn black sofa, has a TV-dinner tray in front of her that’s filled with the beads and threads she uses to make necklaces and other ornaments. Holding her needlepoint in her hands, she greets us by closing and opening her clear, dark green eyes.

Juanita’s face is inscribed with deep grooves harkening back to the lines in the walls of canyons. Lines that tell of years on the plateaus and in the mountains collecting the multiple leaves and herbs that go into Navajo tea, and the treasured mountain tobacco that grows wild in region.

Eventually Freddy takes out some mountain tobacco and rolls it in a dried and carefully cut corn husk. He shows us how to blow the smoke first to the east, then the south, the west and the north. Then down to the earth then up to the sky. Next he blows the smoke into his left hand and carries it from his toes to his head. He repeats the motion with his right.

He passes it to Juanita. She repeats the ritual and passes the smoke on. Soon all of us have blessed the earth’s six directions and ourselves. Sitting in the small smoked-filled room with the taste of sweetly bitter smoke lingering in my mouth, I think for a fleeting moment that I’ve captured a taste of something more than just the mountain tobacco in the here and now. It’s the flavour of the past, tapped into through a ritual that stretches back in time like one of those deep lines on the canyon walls.

Anthony Vaccaro is a Toronto-based freelance writer. This is his first story for Outpost.

Jason George is a Toronto-based photographer whose professional work can be viewed at www.jasongeorge.com.

This entry was posted on Saturday, January 20th, 2007 at 8:50 pm and is filed under Features. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site. Add to del.icio.us.