Find the ancient heart of America on a road trip through the Indigenous southwest

Rain is pounding and the temperature is close to freezing. But the atmosphere inside the powwow tent at the Western Navajo Fair is electric. Here in Tuba City, Arizona, eagle feather headdresses and beaded buckskin skirts move to the beat of a drum. Green, yellow and blue ribbons flit through the air like parakeets. Dresses stitched with metal woosh like running water and silver cuffs studded with turquoise clink like cattle bells.

Keeping the hundreds of competing dancers in rhythm are eight men and two boys with slick black hair plaited to their waists. They’re pounding a deerskin drum so hard it’s shaking the metal bleacher I’m sitting on. They make low, throaty sounds, drowning out the thrashing rain with songs of warriors and changing seasons. Around them, hundreds of spectators — some in woollen shirts embroidered with asymmetrical designs, others in cowboy hats and boots — watch on while eating curly fries and mutton stew.

“Powwows were adopted in the southwest when we couldn’t practise our culture in public,” says my Diné (Navajo) guide Donovan Hanley, who grew up competing in powwows across the American southwest in the late 1980s. We’re here on a new road-tripping tour through the Indigenous heartlands of the southwest to learn from the tribes that have called these iconic landscapes home for thousands of years. “The government forbade us from speaking our language and singing our songs. This was a way for us to celebrate and protect our culture.”

In 1883 — 32 years after Native Americans were forced to live on reservations to make room for white settlers under the Indian Appropriations Act — the US government passed the Code of Indian Offenses, which made practising Indigenous ceremonies punishable by law. What followed was a century-long campaign to rob Native Americans of their livelihoods and culture, including the dispossession of their ancestral lands and forcing children into state-run boarding schools, where speaking their native language and wearing traditional dress was not only forbidden, but cruelly punished. “Boarding schools were there to strip us of our identity and turn us into the workforce of the US economy,” says Donovan, whose parents went to a boarding school near Salt Lake City. He wears an olive, turquoise and salmon-pink beaded necklace and his long black hair is plaited to his waist, like the drummers. “The effects of that time are still with us now — there’s a lot of pain.”

Powwows — where tribes across the US and Canada gather to celebrate Native American dance, song, food and craftsmanship — began in the Great Plains in the 19th century, when forced migration led different tribes to socialise and share traditions. Today, Donovan explains, powwows continue to be a place of cultural exchange and a symbol of Indigenous pride. “We don’t have a bible in Navajo culture. Instead, we have music and dance,” he says, buying a jumbo bag of kettle corn from a passing vendor. “The beat is how we turn the page; how we continue to tell our story. Even though powwows are intertribal, you get to show up as Navajo and share your culture. That’s powerful — it makes us feel proud of who we are.”

On the road

My journey into America’s Indigenous southwest begins 220 miles south of Tuba City, in the state capital of Phoenix. It’s a cloudless, 38C morning — cool by Phoenix standards — when Donovan and I leave for New Mexico. Aircon and the Rolling Stones on full blast, we travel through the cactus-studded Sonoran desert, the ancestral home of the Salt River Pima-Maricopa Indian Community and the Pascua Yaqui further south, on the border with Mexico. Scorched red earth eventually turns to green as we climb to the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forests, where ospreys ride on thermal winds and elk graze on pine needles.

It’s almost sunset when we arrive in Zuni Pueblo — the first place Europeans made contact with Native Americans in the southwest. It’s still home to the A:shiwi (Zuni) people, a tribe descended from the ancient Ancestral Puebloans. I walk along a dried-up Zuni River, which snakes its way through the town and into the Little Colorado River. Along its banks, there’s an A:shiwi man throwing bread into its dusty, weed-matted bottom. He whispers what sounds like a prayer, his words mingling with the song of birds and the chirp of crickets. Above him, a single purple cloud hangs over Dowa Yalanne (Corn Mountain), the town’s sacred flat-topped peak layered in red and yellow-white sandstone.

“We throw bread into the Zuni River because 100 years ago it used to flow into the Little Colorado River, taking our offering to the Grand Canyon,” explains our A:shiwi guide Shaun Latone on a tour of the town the following morning. He’s a retired archaeologist who helped prove that Zuni Pueblo has been inhabited for over 1,000 years after excavations in the area. “A:shiwi people started as salamanders in the Grand Canyon. Then the stars cut away their webbed feet, descaled their skin and stretched their legs so they could find Halona Idiwan’a, the Middle Place of Mother Earth,” he says, explaining local beliefs.

Halona Idiwan’a — the promised land that the A:shiwi spent thousands of years searching for — is where I stand now, or at least on a portion of it. It’s the oldest and most sacred part of town, only open to outsiders with an A:shiwi guide. It’s a small, sand-floor square closed in by buildings made of Chinle rock, the local red sandstone synonymous with the American southwest. One of the buildings houses a kiva, an underground ceremonial room. In the left corner, there’s a wooden ladder that leads to a flat roof, from which priests watch ceremonial dances in the square. “Ceremonies have been performed here since the AD era, when religion was given to man,” says Shaun, scratching his wiry black goatee as a tumbleweed rolls across the square. “Excavations found 10 storeys hidden below these buildings, stretching 100ft deep. This is where the heart of the Water Spider is,” says Shaun, referencing the giant spider — four times bigger than planet Earth — that showed Zuni people where their homeland was by spreading its legs to Earth’s four oceans. According to the Zuni creation story, the spider’s heart marked the centre of Earth, which Zuni call the Middle Place. “This is what showed us that this is our holy place.”

Shaun shows me more of the town, past low-rise homes built of mud and rock, some with dome-shaped adobe ovens for Zuni bread; others with peeling dog houses and rusty bicycles. Outside the crumbling 17th-century Spanish mission, a sign warns this is a ‘culturally sensitive area’ and asks visitors not to take photos. “People think we haven’t been here very long,” says Shaun, when I ask why he brings outsiders to Halona Idiwan’a to share the Zuni creation story. “I want to show the world this has been our home for thousands of years, and that we’re not going anywhere.”

Living culture

The next day, we head north towards Navajo Nation, a 16-million-acre Native American reserve that spans the states of Arizona, New Mexico and Utah. Navajo Nation, or Diné Bikéyah (Navajoland), is the ancestral land of the Navajo, or Diné as they prefer to be called — Navajo was the name given to them by the Spanish. With a population of almost 400,000, they’re one of North America’s largest recognised Indigenous tribes, along with the Cherokee. Donovan has arranged a hike in Canyon de Chelly — an ancient valley inside the reservation that’s been inhabited for almost 5,000 years — with Diné guide Delvonnia Yazzie.

We meet at White House Overlook, on the south side of Canyon de Chelly, where I find Delvonnia with her hair scraped back into a tight ponytail and wearing dazzling midnight-blue contact lenses. The view from up here is spectacular: it starts with a sharp blue sky, followed by clay-red rocks plunging into a lush valley blooming with willow and cottonwood trees, which are just beginning to turn autumn yellow. On the canyon floor, traditional Diné homes — dome-shaped houses made of mud, called hogans — puff with smoke. “What makes this canyon special is that it’s a living, breathing canyon,” says Delvonnia, who grew up herding cows and sheep in Canyon de Chelly. “People still live and farm here, my family included.”

We descend the steep canyon walls along the White House Trail, a herder’s path leading to cave dwellings on the valley floor that date to 1060. On the way down, I see the canyon’s beauty up close: layer upon layer of dusty pink and yellow sandstone shaped into sensuous curves by millions of years of wind and floods, like gallons of Battenburg cake mixture being poured into a tin. Carved into the walls are small caves, some blackened by wood smoke, others mottled with blue mould. “People were rounded up here for the Long Walk,” says Delvonnia as we reach the canyon floor, where medicinal plants like deadly nightshade and snakeweed thrive. “Navajo families hid in the caves, but many were taken, and our homes and farms destroyed.”

The Long Walk was the mass deportation in 1864 of thousands of Diné men, women and children from their ancestral lands to an internment camp called Bosque Redondo in Fort Sumner, New Mexico. The tribe was forced to march 300 miles in the middle of winter, causing hundreds to die. Delvonnia’s father told her the story when she was 10 years old, on one of their stargazing walks in the canyon.“When I’m feeling disconnected, I climb up to the alcoves and look out over the canyon,” she says, pointing up at one of the caves high above us. The wind is rising now, whistling through the cracks in the rocks. “I remember everything that happened here and think: these people never gave up, why should I?”

Four years later, in 1868, Diné families were allowed to return to their lands. But by the mid 20th century, there was a new threat to Navajo Nation — mining. The blue specks on the canyon walls, Delvonnia tells me, were once thought to be cobalt, a metal used to power mobile phones and computers. In 2000, there was talk of drilling the canyon, but the specks were proven to be only bacteria, and mining plans were scrapped. “If they destroyed this place it would break me,” says Delvonnia. “For a lot of visitors, this is a bucket-list destination. But for me, this is my home.”

The next day we drive north west through the reservation towards Monument Valley, keeping the conifer-covered north face of Black Mesa mountain to our left. At its base, between blades of yellow grass and sagebrush, are Diné homes. Some are traditional hogans; others are modern homesteads surrounded by farmland. In the distance, beyond the grazing cows and horses, I see great monoliths rise out of the ground like medieval fortresses and entire mountains shaped like waves. Beyond them, an abandoned power plant and uranium mine from the 1960s — a common sight in Navajo Nation. “The power wasn’t even for Navajo people — it was going to big cities,” says Donovan, whose grandfather, like many Diné who worked in or close to the mines, died from cancer after exposure to uranium. “Yet it was our land they dug, and our people they used to dig it.”

Over the next few days, we travel through the Wild West landscapes my grandad would watch on screen on Sunday afternoons: arid red deserts spiked with buttes — rock formations that look more like castles than hills — and yellow plains rising to forested peaks. In remote desert towns, the few remaining 19th-century Trading Posts — where Native Americans traded their crafts for food and supplies — cling to their peeling timber cladding under the burning sun. “They got it all wrong, you know,” says Donovan, referring to the depiction of Native Americans in John Ford’s westerns. “The language, the songs, the dances…it was all wrong. But it put our homelands on the map, at least.”

Hopi & the Flute clan

As our journey continues, we stop at famous sites like Secret Antelope Canyon, Horseshoe Bend and Monument Valley, where groups of travellers line up for selfies. But the place that leaves a lasting impression on me is Walpi, a Hopi village perched on the top of First Mesa, one of three flat-topped mountains inside the Hopi Reservation — known as Hopitutskwa to the Hopi tribe — a 2,439sq-mile reserve bordered entirely by Navajo Nation. Like A:shiwi, the Hopi are thought to have descended from the ancient Ancestral Puebloans. They’re known for being cautious of outsiders.

Our guide Orlando Torivio, a thin man in his late 50s, meets us at the town’s entrance. “We’re best known for our snake dance,” he says, introducing himself as a member of the Flute clan. He’s referring to an ancient ceremony where men, traditionally from the Snake and Antelope clans, wearing beads and feathers dance with snakes around their necks and in their mouths to help bring rain. “Theodore Roosevelt came here to watch it. But the dance has been lost on First Mesa because the regalia was stolen.” Orlando explains that over centuries of Spanish and American colonisation, precious, one-of-a-kind pieces of ceremonial dress and ornaments were stolen from the village, making certain dances impossible to perform. “Some regalia that ended up in museums has been returned to us,” he says. “But we can’t use them anymore because they’re contaminated with the substances they use to preserve them.”

But it’s not all bad news. Orlando tells me the flute dance — a nine-day ceremony dedicated to the growth of corn, a staple crop for the Hopi — is still going strong. As is the basket dance, practised exclusively by Hopi women. “Don’t ask me what they do though, because I have no idea,” he says, laughing. “Only women are allowed in the kivas for the basket dance.”

Orlando walks us along the ridge of First Mesa, soap bush sprouting from cracks in the stone. On either side, sheer cliff edges plunge hundreds of metres below, eventually plateauing into corn and squash fields. All around us are ancient, sacred landmarks: Black Mesa to my right; San Francisco Peaks, the highest point in Arizona, up ahead. The landscape is yellower here — a stark contrast to the reds and pinks of Monument Valley and Antelope Canyon.

At the very tip of the mesa is Walpi, a cluster of crumbling sandstone homes that have clung to the cliff edge for hundreds of years, their roofs built by hand with wooden beams and willow reeds forested from San Francisco Peaks. Orlando bangs his feet on the ground to show us it’s hollow — there are several bunkers beneath us that he says were built by the Hopi to protect their women and children during the Spanish and American invasions. It’s one of the oldest settlements in the US, and one of the few Hopi villages that remains without running water or electricity. “When the coal mines closed down, we were faced with the issue of: how will we make money?” says Orlando. “A lot of tribes opened casinos. But we didn’t want that.” Instead, First Mesa residents opted for small-scale, cultural tourism, enabling them to earn an income while protecting their traditional way of life. Tourism has also provided a way for the Hopi to share their culture with the outside world, which, Orlando tells me, is often misunderstood by outsiders.

He used to guide bus tours to several Hopi villages out of Sedona and tells me, “People on my tours used to ask me: do you guys have tipis? Where are your buffalo?” He walks us back over the spine of First Mesa to our car. “This is my way of showing people our way of life.” When it’s time to leave, I ask Orlando what goodbye is in Hopilàvayi (Hopi language). “The word goodbye doesn’t exist in our language,” he replies, shaking my hand and smiling wide. “We say asuni — until next time.”

Snaking my way back down First Mesa, I think of Orlando’s story, and the many more I’d heard during my time in America’s southwest. With a constantly shifting political and economic landscape — most recently, a new president — it’s impossible to say what the future holds for Native Americans and their ancestral lands. Like many Indigenous communities around the world, they often face discrimination, poverty and limited access to education and healthcare. Their lands, too, are threatened by mining, pollution and climate change.

But in spending time with Donovan, Delvonnia, Shaun, Orlando and the many other Native Americans I met on the road out of Phoenix, it’s easy to see that there’s hope. While there’s much we may never understand as outsiders, what’s clear when you travel the southwest is that Indigenous pride runs deep in these lands. “All of what you see here is a book,” says Donovan, pointing to the plateaus, mesas and forested peaks spread around us. The village of Walpi is just a speck in the rear-view mirror now. “These rocks, earth, plants and rain — this is our story, our ancestors, prayers and songs. This is our home.”