Playing Detective in Monument Valley

After my first visit to Monument Valley and the Four Corners region nearly 20 years ago, the place nagged at me. The vast and haunting landscape where Arizona, New Mexico, Utah, and Colorado meet is sacred territory for the Navajo people. It touched me deeply, and I imagined, on that first visit, coming to understand how the Native Americans feel about this land.

Four Corners is the land of the Navajo: the Diné, or "the people." Navajo territory originally spread over much of the American Southwest, but the inexorable tide of the white man's Manifest Destiny forced them to accept Four Corners as their reservation. "As far as the Anglos were concerned, there was really not much going on out there, just lots of sand and rocks," says Robert S. McPherson, author of "Sacred Land, Sacred View," a book about the Four Corners region.

The Navajo feel differently.

The 25,000-square-mile reservation lies within four mountains considered sacred by the tribe: Blanca Peak, Colo. (Sisnaajinii to the Navajo); Mount Taylor, Ariz. (Tsoodzil); San Francisco Peak, Ariz. (Dook'o'oostiid); and Hesperus Peak, Colo. (Dibé Ntsaa).

McPherson compares the area's remarkable landforms to the stained glass in Europe's cathedrals of the Middle Ages, which helped act as mnemonic devices for the tenets of Christianity. "If you understand Navajo thinking, every place has a name, every place tells a story," says McPherson, who teaches sociology and Native American philosophy and literature at the College of Eastern Utah.

A friend and I--tourists, not scholars--recently visited Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park with the intention of hiring a guide to share those stories with us. It turned out that buying the knowledge we were looking for wasn't so easy.

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