GEOG NAVAJO NATIONS

The Navajo Nation is the Navajo Reservation; it is located in the four-corners area. This is the one place in the world where four states: Utah, Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona meet, creating a perfect square. The image of four separate identities meeting seems to embody the Navajo Nation. This is a place for differences to meet: the ancestors, tourists, locals, and clans; the Navajo religious tradition, Catholics, Mormons, and modern technology; the desert, mountains, snow, and heat. Unlike other boundaries that a separated by a common river or are divided by a vast ocean, the differences seem to face each other as abruptly as each of the four states. Compared to the skyscrapers and freeway entrances surrounding the Navajo Nation, it seems that change on the reservation happens as slowly as the arches that appear in the sandstone. Yet, the location, physical and cultural characteristics, human-environment interactions, population movement, and topography of the region have changed over the years. In a place where so many differences are face to face, change is unavoidable.

Some of the changes on the Navajo Nation have seemed to happen as slowly as the formation of window rock, while other changes are like the long stretches of high way that extend from one end of the reservation to the other without seeming to end and begin. Still some of the changes are as drastic as the first snow fall: cold, harsh, and slowly melted by the sun. The truth is that in a place with so many differences change is inevitable. One family vacation, I remember feeling the four metallic state line markers trace across my back as I laid on the four-corner plaque smiling for the camera. My heart felt as if it was pounding so deep into the earth that if I stood up I might just lift the whole earth up with me, and I only rolled over off the plaque when my brother insisted it was his turn to try. The plaque itself was hard and the metal pocked and probed me; I had lain with my arms and legs spread out hundreds of times on picnic blankets—why I can still remember that summer vacation was because I knew I was at a place where differences were meeting. When I was there I could not help but to feel a part of the earth and a part of something grander than myself. The Navajo Nations gives me this same feeling, the sensation that beauty can only come at the place were differences can meet.