"We aren't designed for war"
Traveling through Arizona deserts, while absorbing news of war. This is at Petrified National Forest.
Last week’s winter break was surreal — looming reminders of deep time and eons of Earth’s history on one hand and rumblings of fresh war on the other. We took a meandering family trip through Arizona’s river-carved canyons, wind-blown plateaus and otherworldly sandstone monoliths that took millions of years to form, while discussing the Russia-Ukraine war that is reshaping global geopolitics in just days.
“It doesn’t make sense,” said our nine-year-old while we toured the 50,000 year old Barringer meteor crater in Winslow. “Shouldn’t humans be saving their weapons for things that can destroy Earth like comets?”
“We aren’t designed for war,” added our six-year-old, pointing to his feet. “They’re not like, you know, a mountain lion’s.” He’s been watching a lot of Wild Kratts lately and is all about creature adaptations.
I told my boys that our bodies aren’t designed for war perhaps, but our minds are. What I hope to explain better as they grow older is that our minds are designed for the greatest kindness and nobility, but also the most venomous greed and lust for power. That the ego is a fragile thing — it can be fanned into one as dangerous as that of Russian President Vladimir Putin, but can also be nurtured into enduring wisdom and peacefulness, such as His Holiness the Dalai Llama, who exhibits astounding compassion and patience with the Chinese occupation of Tibet.
There are other things I’d like my boys to understand — that even the land we were holidaying in the American west was once grabbed from the various indigenous tribes that lived there, and eventually, only partially returned.
Our most memorable stop was Monument Valley, straddling the border between Arizona and Utah. Its uplifted domes and towering spires have served as the dramatic setting for many movies — from classic 1950s-60s John Wayne westerns such as The Searchers (1956) directed by John Ford, to more recent films like Forrest Gump (1994), Back to the Future Part III (1990), Mission: Impossible 2 (2000) and Transformers: Age of Extinction (2014).
Ancient butte formations that have served as the backdrop for many films set in Monument Valley, Arizona
Long before this gorgeous, camera-friendly landscape captured filmmakers and moviegoers’ imaginations, it had already inspired Navajo legends. The Navajo people have lived in the Southwest for about 800–1000 years according to anthropologists, preceding the Spaniards and new Americans.
In 1863, American frontiersman and soldier Kit Carlson began a “scorched earth” campaign to subdue the Navajo — burning their fields and homes, killing livestock. After the Navajo surrendered in 1864, they were forced to march in the dead of winter to Fort Sumner, 300 miles across the desert in New Mexico. Many died along the way, and according to Navajo historians, the old and weak were shot for not keeping up.
Seared in their memory as collective trauma, the Navajo call this tragic march, “The Long Walk.” At Fort Sumner, considered one of the first concentration camps on U.S. soil, the Navajo people, including children, struggled for food and basic necessities. Following public outry, the U.S. signed a peace treaty with the remaining Navajo in 1868, and they were able to return to lands designated as reservations.
Now the Navajo are the largest Indian American tribe in the U.S. and the Navajo Nation extends into three states — Arizona, Utah, and New Mexico. Spanning about 27,000 square miles, their land is bigger than ten of the fifty states of America.
It was while visiting Navajo Nation in Monument Valley that we finally got the chance to stay overnight on tribal land, at a hotel owned by a part-Navajo family. The View Hotel overlooks some of the most stunning panoramas on the planet — colossal monuments rise abruptly from the crimson-orange desert like giant ghosts and are framed by vast, open skies.
The walls of the hotel are adorned with vibrant Navajo art — delicate sand paintings; collages of plants and shrubs used in rituals and medicine; oil paintings depicting tribal stories and legends. Trading Post, the hotel’s gift shop sells dreamcatchers, exquisite pottery, handwoven rugs and kachina dolls that are considered a bridge between the spiritual world and mortals. Earth symbolism and the cyclical spirit of nature is abundant in Navajo imagery — thunderbird, lightning, feathers, sun, moon, wolves, bears, the elements.
Kachina dolls at The View Hotel, with Monument Valley in the background.
When we drive through ground considered sacred by the Navajo, with Marcus Atenb, our Navajo guide, I am able to better understand the magic. We stare at tall, steep-sided towers of rock, known as buttes, which erosion has contorted into fascinating shapes such as a totem pole, an Indian chief’s headdress, a pair of mittens, a bear, a rabbit, and a stagecoach.
Then there are flat, elevated areas known as mesas, which are considerably larger than buttes, and also form curious shapes, like sleeping dragons, and standing elephants.
The rust-coloured paths between these fascinating formations were once walked upon by the Anasazi people, who lived here even before the Navajo. They left petroglyph rock art carvings of big horn sheep, humans and other, strange figures, on the sandstone rocks.
We stare at massive stone arches, our voices echoing through the curved masterpieces. There’s even a perfect oval face rock formation that looks like it is watching us.
My nine-year-old dwarfed by the massive sandstone formations at Monument Valley
Between volcanic plugs, cinder cones, and shutter-friendly tourist stops such as John Ford Point, tumbleweed dances in the wind, juniper trees reach out their gnarled branches, and the white snow of winter contrasts beautifully with arid earth tones.
Atenb speaks prosaically, even stoically about the Navajo today, telling us how the younger generation understands the Navajo language but doesn’t speak it; how no matter which big city the Navajo move to for jobs, they always return to their ancestral lands for ceremonies and gatherings.
When I ask about the Great Wall of 1864 and the spilling of blood, I can’t detect anger, or even resentment. It has been too long perhaps — there is an acceptance of history, even traces of the famous Navajo wry humor.
What Atenb doesn’t tell me, and which I learn more about from the Indian Health Service (the federal health program for American Indians and Alaska natives) is that “Navajos are faced with large unemployment rates.” Also, maintaining oral native history is becoming increasing challenging when younger generations don’t speak the native language fluently.
All three of Atenb’s daughters live in distant cities, while he has returned to Goulding’s, a tiny town that once served as a trading post between American frontierspeople and the Navajo. Atenb prefers the echoing quiet of these wide vistas to metropolitan bustle, and now makes a living from tourism.
At the end of our drive through his people’s sacred land, Atenb utters a portion of this key Navajo prayer:
“Beauty before me,
With it I wander.
Beauty behind me,
With it I wander.
Beauty before me,
With it I wander.
Beauty below me,
With it I wander.
Beauty above me,
With it I wander.
Beauty all around me,
With it I wander.
In old age traveling,
With it I wander.
On the beautiful trail I am,
With it I wander.”
It’s a quiet prayer steeped in reverence for the natural world, a prayer that stays with me as I fly back to New York. I utter the same prayer now as we enter the second week of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. I replace the word beauty with peace. Peace for the Ukrainians, for the Russians, for Europe, for the world. For an absence of war, for elementary schools and apartment buildings not being blown apart, for humans having a right over their land.
For all of us — walking in peace.
I also pray that deep time, the kind of time that lasts far beyond human lifetimes, and reshapes continents and mountains, will see this war as an unruly blip in centuries of peace upon the planet.
My hope is that human consciousness will accept unity, rather than separation, and guide its collective ego towards reconciliation, rather than one-upmanship and war.
And when there is peace, when the continents have again shifted, and humans have perhaps flown to other planets, that they will carry that same spirit of kindness into interstellar space, that our species will choose love and respect, not violence and contempt for life.
Arizona’s meditative landscape and the Navajo culture here reminds us that that forgiveness, acceptance, and joy in the wizardry of nature, forms our true inheritance.
So, perhaps, a little boy’s darling observation that we humans aren’t designed for war, will also one day become our enduring, deep time truth.
For this, I pray, even as I also pray that Ukrainian refugees, now scattered across Europe, will soon walk back home, as will Russian soldiers.
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In Peace,
Natasha