Stand Up for Chaco Canyon
And our Remaining Sacred Places
I had the privilege of visiting the otherworldly Chaco Canyon in NW New Mexico in 2022. An enigmatic and astounding sacred site preserved in its integrity. Ruins and petroglyphs of an ancient civilization over 1000 years ago. It’s kind of like the Egyptian pyramids or Stonehenge... Showcasing extremely advanced and mysterious feats of engineering and astronomical understanding that defy and confound us. That point to a highly advanced society, orienting their civilization around huge inter-tribal ceremonies, and building their structures to map astronomical events that would have required decades of sophisticated observation to pull off. Huge roads connect outlying sites and suggest a unified vision of tracking the heavens that spans hundreds of miles. The roads also indicate massive trades routes, and artifacts suggest Chaco was a meetingplace for tribes as far away as 1000 miles. The celestial alignments of the architecture itself, as well as the coordinated road systems, seem to create a vortex that harnesses natural forces beyond our modern imagination. It remains a sacred ancestral center for contemporary Pueblo tribes.
The fact that Chaco defies the full understanding of so many archeologists, scientists, and sociologists is important. Preserving things that remain a mystery is important because it reminds us of our own rudimentary understanding. While we think we are so smart, the fact that we can’t fully explain or grasp what happened here puts our own ignorance into perspective, and reminds us that there are forces more powerful than us. It is important that we preserve things that continue to humble us in this way. There are legends that the Anasazi or Ancestral Puebloan people went extinct because they started playing God: through human sacrifice in their ceremonies, trying to control the weather through their ceremonies, and empire. I have heard a Navajo elder say that whenever a civilization starts playing God, that leads to their inevitable demise... sound familiar?!?! Chaco remains not only a place of awe and learning, but also a warning about what may become of us if we continue to play God through industry, artificial “intelligence,” and our own empire. Chaco is a powerful inter-generational communication left by ancestors of the land... a communication we should cherish and respect.
In the name of desecrating all that is sacred, the big man in our highest office wants to open up 336,000 acres of the surrounding area to mining. Can you imagine if they were going to desecrate Machu Picchu or the Mayan Temples? We have until July 29th to submit public comment. If not even someplace this special can be protected, nothing is safe. Please advocate and set a precedent for defending the natural, the sacred, and what is so special to Native peoples.
Submit your public comment here by MIDNIGHT OF JULY 29, and thank you!!
