Navajo/Dine, Hopi, Zuni, Apache — the peoples of the desert Southwest and the Colorado Plateau.
The American Southwest is a landscape of mesas, canyons, and deserts where human cultures have thrived for millennia. The Hopi village of Oraibi is one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America. The Navajo Nation is the largest reservation in the United States. Their mythologies are inseparable from the land itself — the four sacred mountains, the Grand Canyon emergence point, the painted desert.
7 entries mapped
The place where the Hopi people emerged from the underworld into the current Fourth World
The four sacred mountains that mark the boundaries of the Navajo homeland
The volcanic neck the Navajo call Tse Bit'a'i — the rock with wings — where the people were carried to safety on the back of a great bird
The 800-foot sandstone spire in Canyon de Chelly where Spider Woman taught the Navajo to weave
The cliff palaces of the Ancestral Puebloans, abandoned circa 1300 CE, central to Hopi and Pueblo origin narratives
A UNESCO World Heritage Site with over 1,000 years of continuous habitation — and Blue Lake, the sacred origin site returned to the Pueblo after a 64-year fight
Ancestral Puebloan ceremonial center with astronomical alignments, Sun Dagger sites, and a network of roads connecting outlying communities