Revisionist History

We’re  home again after 6,267 miles of driving since leaving January 30th.  We changed plans in Arizona while visiting Steve’s sister.  We took a look at the weather and decided not to drive home via Utah and Idaho to visit my friend Becky.  She was in agreement with our assessment of the snow factor on that route, being deluged yet again by another deep snowfall that was coming on as we spoke.  So we drove the warmer route north via Los Angeles.  We took the coastal route on the first day, enjoying a spectacular sunset as we passed Santa Barbara and then moved inland to spend the night in San Luis Obispo.  Steve remarked that the scenery seemed to look like photos we’ve seen of Hawaii, with green mountains dropping to the sea.  I don’t suppose they are always green but everything on the Pacific coast is green and soggy right now.   In fact we changed our plans, avoiding the rest of the coastal Route 101 due to mudslides.  And as we made our way north on I-5 we observed the Shasta Lake canyon of the Sacramento River was full of water this time as opposed to last year when it was nearly empty.  So we’re not complaining about our lovely green sogginess back here in Tacoma.  As Steve says, it has to rain in order for paradise to be green. And the drought in California is officially over at long last.

We made a trip last week to one of my “bucket list” destinations, Chaco Canyon.  It wasn’t too far from Steve’s sister’s home in Arizona so we had earlier made the decision to go both places before heading home.  Don't ask me why but I get annoyed by being swindled of my meager memories of history by revisionists.  I'm not a serious history buff like my dad was.  I can recall him getting furious with my textbook in ninth grade Washington State History class.  He retained what he voluminously read and even wrote essays which were published  based on his sources.  Unlike me he was a true scholar.  I'm mildly curious about cultural history when I visit a new place and have a chance to stay awhile.  I read an occasional book about my travels.   When we  were in Alaska, I was curious about the widespread cultural connections that seemed odd to me regarding Athabascans, Navajos, and Apaches.  I recall reading that the first language is the same between them all, as well as the historic custom of putting vertical lines of beauty tattoos on the chins of women.  So when I looked into it I found that Athabascans who later evolved to become Navajos and Apaches, made their way from the sub-arctic areas to the southwest at the same time as the Spaniards.  That far-flung Jungian coincidence stuck in my mind for a good long time.   I think I was kind of proud of myself for remembering it all twenty years later.  I visited a museum in Phoenix in 2003 and found, much to my surprise, that the Navajo, and Apache were both claiming to have been in the area forever.  The museum, as I recall, empowered each tribe to separately represent it’s own version of its history.  I got strangely enraged by that.  I'm still not sure what difference it should make to me what's true and what's not about what happened five hundred years ago.  Then this year I ran into it again.  We got to Chaco Canyon, Arizona and I found the same nonsense disseminated by the National Park Service.  Chaco Canyon is a marvelous place.  I kept finding similarities to the remains of the cradle of Anglo-Saxon civilization, Roman ruins I visited in England.  Here they seemed comparable as the similarly constructed remains of the cradle of the civilizations that emerged and fanned out from this area, with tribal links to the ruins of sophisticated communities in surrounding regions of the Four Corners.  But I wasn't expecting another big lie about who came first and when.  I guess I need to chill out a bit about it.  When does religion become lie?  The archaeologists found DNA from the predecessors of the Pueblos,  Hopis, Zunis, and Navajos on the site.  The thorny part is who came first.  Of course I know the answer.  The ruins date back to 800 AD and the site was abandoned in around 1350 AD.  Here's what I found from the Archaeology Archive website, a publication of the Archaeological Institute of America, in an article by Keith Kloor:

The scientific consensus is that the Navajo belong to the Athabascan language group, whose members are found mainly in Alaska and Canada (the Apache are also Athabascan). It's thought that the ancestors of the modern Navajo didn't even enter the Four Corners until about the 1500s, almost 300 years after Chaco was abandoned. The NPS (National Park Service), for its part, has been forced to walk a tightrope between science and respect for Navajo traditions, whatever their origins may be.   Archaeological evidence for the Navajo's prehistoric ties to Chaco was cited in the decision. Rather, the NPS relied largely on Navajo oral history. The story of the Gambler, and its significance in Navajo culture, was cited specifically.  Richard Wilshusen, now an adjunct curator at the University of Colorado's Natural History Museum in Boulder, was part of a research team investigating hundreds of these sites in the 1990s.   In a forthcoming study, he argues that a wealth of new archaeological data, combined with other lines of evidence, show that the Navajo didn't emerge as a distinct cultural group until between 1600 and 1650, at least 100 years after scholars once thought.  As Wilshusen delicately points out, they're missing one piece of crucial evidence. "I'd be very interested to see the archaeology," he says. "There just isn't evidence that Athabascans were there."

Native Americans have many not-so-ancient bones to pick with Eurocentric historians .   A lot of it still makes me livid and who knows how much more angry the Navajos remain today.  When I consider all that was stolen from Chaco Canyon by looters calling themselves archaeologists and how they felt entitled to cut holes in the walls of these ruins to get to the “antiquities”, I feel morally soiled by walking in their footsteps.  So I can get over it.  Have your way with your history/religious beliefs, Navajos.  It’s not hard to get to the truth if one is really interested.  It’s all over the internet with ample websites showing studies documented with carbon-dating.

This is a cross section of the beam construction of a ceiling for one of the floors in a great house.

There are petroglyphs here.  Can you find them?