.
.
Readers with an interest in the National Park-, State Park-,
and Navajo Tribal Park-sites of
Northeastern Arizona and adjacent states, like
Canyon de Chelly, the
Petrified Forest,
Navajo
NM, the Painted Desert,
Monument
Valley, etc., will be able to find a wealth of detail on
the Net, with any search engine, by going to the
National Park Service, or at
many commercial travel
services, and at various archaeologic pages. There is one
geographic region, however, in the
center of all these wondrous locations, that has received
little attention from the standard Web
creators. Until recently, a Web search for the words "Black
Mesa" generally turned up more data on topographic
features in Oklahoma or Colorado than it did on the central
portion of Northeastern Arizona.
This seems to be changing as the Web services in Arizona expand,
and reach onto the Reservations.
The Black Mesa is a topographic highland in the center of a
structural low in northeastern
Arizona. The central portion of the Colorado Plateau in
northeastern Arizona has remained stable
for a geologically long period of time, over 100-million years,
while surrounding areas, like the
San Francisco peaks, Mogollon Rim, White Mountains, Defiance
Uplift, Tyende saddle, Monument
Uplift, Shonto Plateau, and Gray Mountain structures have risen
or been cut by and built up through
volcanic activity. The Black Mesa has lain quiescent and
passively in the center of all this deformation and
volcanism. The northern and eastern portions of the mesa are
the abode of scattered Navajo, and
the site of a large coal-mining operation by the Peabody Corp.
The southern cliffs of the mesa are
the traditional home of the Hopi, having been occupied
continuously by an Anasazi/Hopi
community since at least around the year 1000 AD.
A highly-talented college professor, Dr. Karen Strom has
constructed a wonderfully colorful and
elaborate weave of Web work that includes references to,
discussion of, and great pictures of the
Black Mesa region (most taken by her husband), as well as the
surrounding Four Corners
features. She has put together a
fantastic Web document,
Voyage To Another Universe -
1994, about a 1994 trip around and
through the Navajo Country and Hopiland, the Four Corners area.
Anyone with an interest in the
Four Corners area should take a look at the Southwestern US
portion of the prolific Web-work of
Dr. Strom. To see some
samples of her work, click
here for a photo of the highest, northeastern
corner of the Black Mesa. This area is between Tsegi Canyon
(
Click here to see Karen's Tsegi
page) and Kayenta.
This is an example of one of distinctive touches Karen uses
, throughout her Web documents, in this case a town map for
Kayenta. She has scattered a multitude of such extra touches,
including multimedia features, throughout her pages.
Navajo homes can be found scattered across the flats,
throughout this
countryside. They tend to cluster near water sources at the
foot of the cliffs. Drainage, springs, and runoff from the
cliffs has generally provided sufficient water for grazing and
small-scale farming on the plains.
Home craft industries are supported through sales at the nearby
Canyon de Chelly, Monument
Valley, stores in Kayenta and Chinle, and, now, even through the
Internet. The large Peabody coal-mining operations are located
near this area, straight ahead from this perspective, hidden on
the interior of the mesa, behind the cliffs.
The Navajo still build their hogans or homes in styles that pay
respect to old traditions. The door of a Navajo home always
faces East, to honor the Sun, and greet it each morning. An
example of the strength of these patterns can be seen on the
northwest side of Route 160, between Tuba City and Tsegi. Four
or five house trailers, on the Reservation and obviously owned
by Navajo, probably a family group, have been set up just a few
feet apart from each other, a short distance off the road.
Instead of being grouped around a common front yard or driveway,
as would be common in an Anglo trailer park, each mobile home is
strung out in a seemingly impractical line, wasting space
(although it must be admitted that there is plenty of space
available to "waste" in this region) and isolating the homes
from each other. The trailers appear to be arranged at an exact
interval, to the inch, and are all on the same exact angle with
respect to due north. The cant of the dwellings looks odd, and
makes little sense to the Anglo eye that is accustomed to
driveways and sidewalks.
The outsider might think that the extended family cluster is
having an internal feud, and that the residents don't want to
have to look at each other when they come to their front doors.
The physical closeness of the building could suggest that the
bitter family could only afford so much land and had to live
close to each other, but set up their homes for maximum
isolation, in minimum space.
The reality is quite different. For the Navajo, proximity
brings sufficient intimacy and feeling of family. A common
courtyard is an unknown concept to the tribe, and unnecessary for
the demonstration of family love. Religion and honor to the Sun
are the dominating factors in this group, and have determined
the pattern of the layout. Each trailer, a quintessential
Twentieth-Century Anglo creation, has been accepted by the Navajo
as a substitute for the traditional hogan. Each trailer is set
up with the doorway facing exactly toward the East, with total
disregard to the alignment of the local highway and the family's
driveway.
When some local residents were asked about the spacing of the
trailers, nobody seemed to know for sure why the pattern was so
regular, so exact, and so close. Alternative explanations were
given for the spacing between the trailers. It was suggested that
the family really wanted to be
close together, but that there was a local regulation dictating
the minimum spacing between dwellings. In this case the distance
was a minimum, imposed on the family by outsiders. It was also
explained that the interval could relate to the local water line.
It might be that multiple taps from the local "city" water line
were presumed to be for a single dwelling, just as long as they
were not more than "X" feet apart. By locating within this
distance, the family was able to get a "two fer," two trailers on
the line for the price of one. In this case, the distance was a
maximum, still imposed on the family by outsiders. By this time
the trailers were far behind in the distance, making it difficult
to check, but the impression was strong that there was no "city"
waterline this far out in the middle of nowhere. A third
possibility is that the trailers were served by a well or
windmill with limited pumping strength, and that the water taps
had to be concentrated within a limited pipe length. Whatever
the real explanation, the geometry of the layout was strikingly
different from the norm to the Anglo eye.
Click
here for a photo of some of the lowland farm terraces of the
Hopi, near Moenkopi, northwest of the main cluster of Hopi
villages. These or similar terraces are easily visible from
Highway 264, at Moenkopi, when looking to the west. Many people
express surprise to find the Hopi so far from their "traditional
homeland." They think Hopiland = high land. This is not true.
Prior to the arrival of the Spanish in the 16th-Century, many of
the Hopi lived on and farmed the flats surrounding the Black
Mesa. The Pages, in Hopi, and
Frederick Dockstader, in an essay in the Smithsonian catalog of
Joseph Mora's work, Year of the Hopi,
state that, with the exception of Oraibi, many or most of the
Hopi did not move to the tops of the mesas until they were
threatened by the arrival of the Spaniards and increasing numbers
of Navajo raiders during the 16th Century. This does not
correspond with the picture painted in Waters' Book
of the Hopi or James' Pages From Hopi
History.
The Anasazi/Hopi have managed to survive in the harsh climate of
the Four Corners for more than a millennium by being flexible and
diversified in their pursuits. The Hopi have typically farmed
high and low lands, to ensure the survival of a crop somewhere,
in wet or dry years. Anglo historians and anthropologists have
referred to Moenkopi as a recent development, founded as an
outpost or "colony" of Oraibi. This ignores the broad span of
the Anasazi/Hopi, both in time and geography. In the
larger/longer-term view, the home range of the Kayenta Anasazi
stretched well northward of the Black Mesa, well into Utah, to
the San Juan River. The farming plans of these people have long
included "crop rotation" and "resting their fields" on a grand
scale. A shift of some farmers to the Moenkopi region was little
more than a move by some of the Hopi back toward the "old family
homestead" in the Tsegi area, although it would not have done to
try to refarm "tired ground," a part of the Earth Mother that
still was still due a rest after having nourished the nation for
many years.
To fully appreciate this fecund landscape, one must realize
just how close one is to large areas of bare rock and dune sands
that show up on land-use and geologic maps of the area. These
dunes are composed of loose sand with so little moisture that
effectively nothing is able to grow, so the grains simply blow
around in the wind. In this desert, the Hopi have terraced and
constructed the extensive flat areas seen in the photo. The
varieties of "brush" and "weeds" have been selected to serve a
purpose. They have wide, shallow roots that can hold soil and
break the wind, while consuming a minimum amount of precious
water. Even the "stray" pebbles and cobbles around the fields
have been shifted and set by the Hopi, with a long term plan to
construct tiny "dams" to slow runoff, allowing more rain to soak
into the soils of the fields. With this care and these
techniques, a variety of crops, and even fruit can be raised in
the dry climate. Karen's husband, Stephen, has documented a
modern example of the practices that have kept these farmers
successful through the centuries, for over a millennium.
The incorporation of great photos into the pages are not the
only thing Karen has done. Click
here to see her complete page on the Black Mesa. The thing
that sets this intricate work apart from most other Four-Corners
Web pages, or other Web pages in general, is the concentration on
non-commercial, off-the-beaten track locations that she has
visited, around the Four Corners, and the incredible wealth of
unusual side elements, such as Navajo words and sound-clip
pronunciations, maps, satellite photos, links, geological
descriptions, background discussions and explanations, and on and
on, that she incorporates into her work.
Dr. Strom is a Research Professor in the Department of Physics
and Astronomy at the University of Massachusetts at Amherst, who
has spent considerable time in the Four Corners. She is the
distinguished Webmaster (Webmistress?) for several organizations
and sites, an expert on what can be accomplished using
HTML (as well as what should NOT be attempted), and extremely
skillful in the fine art of linking a multitude of topics and
things in an interesting way. For people who enjoyed James
Burke's PBS series Connections, Karen's
multitude of jumps and links will provide fond reminiscences.
Voyage To
Another Universe - 1994
tells of personal experiences and impressions, and focuses on the
non-commercial, often-overlooked aspects of the region. Her
pages include pictures of the standard tourist sites, as well as
the more idiosyncratic (like a straightaway roadside shot, with
the carcass of a dead animal stuck on a pole by the pavement) and
some personal material (such the saga of a flat tire). The
photography and developing of the pictures are quite good, and
the scanning of the images is high resolution. Many of the
photos were taken with low-cost, disposable panoramic cameras,
but the picture quality leaves little to be desired. The URL for
the title page for her trip log is
http://hanksville.phast.umass.edu/title.html. To go there, click
here.
(She's the one on the right.) Visit her site, but a word of
caution, budget a couple weeks of vacation time if you expect to
do justice to the amount of information and links available here.
At some point, please remember to return to
this
document.
For people who like to decipher URLs, "hanksville" is a wide
spot in the road at the junction of the Muddy and Fremont Rivers
in Wayne County, Utah. If you would like to relocate, rest
assured that just like Kansas City, everything is up to date in
Hanksville. The settlement has had two water wells since the New
Deal days, plus electricity. The latter was introduced in 1960.
The two-room schoolhouse was replaced with a larger building in
1959 (Although high school students still have to take the bus to
greater metropolitan Bicknell). For a brief history of
Hanksville from the University of Utah and KUED, Public
Television for Salt Lake City, click
here.
To continue with the URL, "phast" stands for
Physics and
Astronomy. "umass" is the
University of
Massachusetts, at Amherst.
Karen's husband is also an astronomer, and chair of the
Department for the
Five College Astronomy Program. Karen's page is
here. Their work frequently takes them to the high
altitudes, thin air, and clear skies of the Southwest. (And they
get paid for this? At least in the old days, Astronomers had to
miss a lot of sleep, staying up all night. Now days, they often
just program their computers to do the work while they are
getting a good night's rest. {This comment is said with ;-) a wink,
and in a humerous tone of voice. })
Karen's interest in and predilection for the cultures of the
Four Corners may have been inherited, or, perhaps, absorbed by
osmosis from her
Grandmother who had worked with the native inhabitants of New
Mexico and Arizona prior to Karen's birth. Several links to this
thread can be found in the
Dedication section of the Voyage report. Adding to
the process of sensitization, Karen grew up in Oklahoma, a state
that still has many cornerstones and lintels inscribed "Year,
Town Name, I. T." (for Indian Territory).
Oklahoma was the 46th state admitted to the Union.
It wasn't granted statehood until 1907, long after all
surrounding states. In many of the Counties in Oklahoma, the
majority of the population is of Native American origin. In many
places in the state, daily commerce is still dominated by
interactions with members of one tribe or another. A childhood
in Oklahoma can give a person a good understanding of and
appreciation for other cultures. Ancient traditions are
frequently expressed in pow-wows across the state. A perceptive
individual growing up in Oklahoma has opportunities for
cross-cultural understanding seldom available in most other
states.
While Karen may have inherited her interest in Native
cultures, it is safe to assume that her Grandmother was not an
expert at computers or HTML editing, and that Karen did not
directly inherit her abilities in this realm. Karen has
obviously come by her writing/editing/compositional skills by
dint of years of hard work, study, and practice. The wealth and
variety of links demonstrate a great breadth of knowledge of what
is out there on the web, plus true imagination in creating
interesting and varied links that would never have occurred to
most people.
Whatever the origins or influences (nature or nurture), Karen has a well-developed affinity for and understanding of the land and people of the Four Corners. Her travels and work have taken her and her husband across a large part of the Four Corners, often for extended stays. Anyone interested in the cultures and accomplishments of the Anasazi, Hopi, and Navajo should visit Karen's site, then return here.
.
.
Follow scholar Kokopelli to the Suggested
Reading List
Return with Kokopelli to the hogan page, the
Table of Contents
.
Black Mesa Highlighted by Sunlight on a Stormy Day
.
to
treeves@ionet.net
.
.
Contents, including illustrations, copyright T. K. Reeves, 1997.
These Petroglyphs and diggings into the history of northeastern
Arizona were last revised
on 5 April, 1997.
