Death follows Navajos

CANYON DEL MUERTO, Ariz. - Death may have found a home in this canyon again, and not just in its name.

A few miles from a two-foot-wide goat trail that winds along the canyon wall lies the rocky grave of 115 Navajos massacred by Spanish soldiers in 1805. A shallow cave where the Indians were trying to hide turned into a trap when the Spaniards spotted and picked them off with muskets one by one from the canyon rim.

Less than six decades later, U.S. Army Col. Kit Carson unleashed his deadly firepower here, including a campaign of starvation that involved cutting down the Navajos’ pride and joy — their peach trees.

And now the canyon’s trees are dying a second death — this time, courtesy of drought, water policies and trade deals.

The two-mile descent into the majestic red sandstone pit is laborious and unpredictable — first a step forward, then a pirouette, and finally a skip to the next firm foothold.

As the traveler descends, the trees start to come into view — a clump of leafless sisters helplessly huddling at the foot of a regal cliff.

“About half of them are already gone,” said a mournful Francis Draper, one of the plucky Navajo farmers who are still fighting for their crops at the bottom of a Y-shaped labyrinth known as Canyon de Chelly National Monument. “The rest will probably follow soon.”

So much has been taken in this unacknowledged burial ground — people, animals, hopes, promises, commitments and the long-established way of life — that death hardly seems to bother with sending out a hearse.

When Carson first descended into these canyons, historians say, he hoped to corner Navajo warriors and force their surrender. He was in for a rude awakening. The Indians, who knew these canyons like the backs of their hands, eluded him, hid in their myriad caverns and alcoves and ambushed Army soldiers with unbridled fury.

The renowned trapper and explorer soon realized the futility of the chase and switched to the only tactic he deemed effective under the circumstances — a scorched-earth policy. Starting in 1863, Navajo cornfields were put to the torch, livestock slaughtered, while orchards containing an estimated 4,000 peach trees were cut down.

Their economic base thus destroyed, the Navajo had no choice but to surrender, which resulted in what went down in history books as their Long Walk into exile at Fort Sumner, N.M., from which they were allowed to return only in 1868. Under a peace treaty that made their return possible, they pledged to stay on their reservation and never to wage war on white settlers.

But the peach trees were gone, as were the sheep, the corn, the horses.

“If you go farther south, to Canyon de Chelly, you still can see some of the tree stumps left by Carson’s soldiers,” said Mr. Draper with a sigh. “But not here. The ones you see here I cut down myself because these peach trees have just withered.”

With an engine rumble and a puff of smoke, neighbor Joe Hubbard, wearing a traditional Navajo headband, straddles his tractor to plow an old alfalfa field in the hope a new crop will not follow the fate of the peach trees.

“We really, really need help,” he said, throwing up his hands.

There were, and still are, lots of people willing to put up a good fight to return to the Navajo their stolen treasures. In the 1980s and early 1990s, groups of school and university students from Colorado replanted scores of peach trees in both Canyon del Muerto and Canyon de Chelly in an effort to undo the damage done by Carson.

“I think we planted more than a thousand peach trees at the time,” recalled Wanda Clark, a local environmental activist and longtime advocate of the economic restoration of the canyons, the spiritual center of Navajo life. “Unfortunately, more than half of them are already dead, and the rest are in danger.”

Fat and smug ravens, perched on juniper trees, seem to be the only ones who get all they want in these parts — from National Park Service Dumpsters.

The Southwest is in the grips of a prolonged drought that has depleted rivers and lakes, killed farm animals and wilted plants with far better resistance than peach trees.

Government water-management policies logically favor more-accessible farms on the plain. A creek that runs into the canyon was dammed in the 1960s, creating Tsaile Lake, which Navajo ranchers up above use to irrigate their lands. But another precious lifeline that had nourished traditional agriculture dried up.

“It has never been the same,” complained Mr. Draper, who is almost 80 but still scales the canyon walls every day. “My parents used water from the creek to irrigate their fields, but now it’s all gone.”

So are the farmers. Thousands of Navajo used to live in the fertile valley at the bottom of the canyons. Only a few remain. Even Mr. Draper, a former rodeo champion who likes to boast that he was raised “the Navajo way,” moved his permanent home up to the rim about a decade ago and now has a horse ranch there.

Apart from the drought, the market economy might not be kind to the Indians’ orchards.

The peaches grown here barely surpass in their size a good plum, and the North American Free Trade Agreement means bigger and cheaper peaches can be easily brought to Navajo children from Mexico.

Will righting historical wrongs be worth all that money?

“Oh, I think it does matter,” protested professor Peter Iverson of Arizona State University, a leading authority on Navajo history. “It’s one of the many things that can’t be decided primarily on economics.”

He said replanting and maintaining peach orchards in the canyon would be very important symbolically because “the events of the 1860s are still remembered through the stories that people tell.”

Professor Harry Walters from nearby Dine College, the Navajos’ main institution of higher learning, thinks preserving the orchards also meant preserving the precious tribal knowledge of farming in dry climates.

“I am over 60, and my generation is probably the last one that has the experience in dry farming,” he sighed. “We know how to plant different crops in different seasons and how to best use what little rain we have.”

With the orchards gone, younger people will never learn, Mr. Walters suggested. A part of Navajo culture will die with them.