Turtle Talk

From the NYTs:

ON the road through the tree-studded high desert toward the small town of Chinle, Ariz., the car radio was bringing in the local Navajo station, with a playlist heavy in Top 40 hits, peppered with Navajo-language station breaks and car commercials. The sky was a cloudless blue, and I was on my way, with my childhood friend Esther Chak, to Canyon de Chelly, a geologic maze of towering red cliffs and deep-cut gorges dotted with pictographs and ruins of ancient cliffside villages. Lying in the heart of the 21st-century Navajo Nation, it is one of the oldest continuously inhabited places in North America, a window into both an ancient world and a modern one.

It was late afternoon when we reached the mouth of the canyon. As we stood at the visitors’ entrance, dazzled by the 360-degree horizon beckoning us from every direction, Merlin Yazzie, a cherub-faced park ranger with a ponytail, gave us a friendly wave.

“Is this your first visit to the area?” he said. “Welcome to Navajoland.”

The stereotypes of glitzy casinos and a kitschy cowboys-and-Indians past have long dominated popular notions about visiting Native American lands. Even where the more genuine attractions are obvious, as at the majesticMonument Valley straddling Arizona and Utah, it has often been difficult for outsiders to find an accessible and comfortable way into the nuanced realities of Indian country: its venerable history and distinct cultures; its remote, rugged natural beauty.

It was an emerging change in this old pattern that had brought us to Canyon de Chelly (pronounced de SHAY). A new generation of Indian entrepreneurs and leaders is making its influence felt in tourism, bringing a sensitive, updated sensibility to hospitality, along with a renewed emphasis on authenticity. In some of the most gorgeous, intriguing and remote places of Native American territory, the focus is shifting toward a more modern and higher-end travel experience.

In three days at Canyon de Chelly, we found that shift playing out at the Thunderbird Lodge, a historic trading post renovated into a modern hotel run by an all-Navajo staff, and in well-designed tours led by knowledgeable Navajo guides. Our room was one of 73, all with wireless Internet and simply but tastefully decorated, with prints and paintings by Navajo artists on the walls, and curtains and bedcovers patterned in tribal motifs.

About 150 miles away, a hotel has appeared for the first time in the Monument Valley Navajo Tribal Park. Aptly named the View, it is owned by a local Navajo family and designed with meticulous care to blend into and capitalize on the splendor of the landscape.

Rust-colored and avowedly eco-sensitive, it frames the iconic Mitten and Merrick Buttes with its balconies, and it is furnished with a carefully curated collection of rugs, pottery and jewelry by Native American artisans. Its chef, MacNeal Crank, 33, reinterprets Navajo recipes he learned from his grandmother with the help of training at the Cooking and Hospitality Institute of Chicago’s Le Cordon Bleu program.

In New Mexico, a new cultural center and restaurant serving Native American and New Mexican cuisine has opened at the foot of Acoma Pueblo, or Sky City, a traditional Pueblo community perched high on a mesa. The center offers tours through the pueblo. Elsewhere, Indian tour companies have sprung up to guide travelers through off-reservation sites that also offer insight into Indian life and the Native American past.

And in Canada, the new tribal tourism is showing itself in Wendake territory just north of Quebec, where a strikingly modern hotel-museum has been constructed of glass and wood to emphasize the Huron Wendat tribe’s concept of “absence of limit” — the connection between human beings and the natural world. Its 55 rooms and interpretive biking trails are on the banks of the Akiawenrahk (a k a St.-Charles) River.

In all of these instances, a respect for heritage and environmental consciousness has been blended harmoniously with 21st-century sophistication. The trend reflects not just the new ideas and marketing savvy of Indian entrepreneurs, but a new pool of customers that is eager to engage with the Native American world.

“People are a little more open-minded these days when it comes to visiting Native America,” said Sarah Chapman, international coordinator for Go Native America, a Montana-based tour company featuring indigenous guides and interpreters. “On the one hand, you have that flashy eco-building endeavor going — that’s very much the case with younger people in tribal tourism — but I think the other new flashy thing going on here is that people want to connect more.”

Go Native America was founded 15 years ago by Ms. Chapman’s husband, Serle Chapman, a writer and photographer of Cheyenne and other tribal heritage. One of its trips, called Yellowstone Is Indian Country, visits ancestral sites and explains origin stories in Yellowstone National Park.

OF course, sites like Canyon de Chelly and Monument Valley have long been familiar icons. Monument Valley served as the backdrop for many of John Ford and John Wayne’s Westerns. (Ms. Chapman says she usually spends about five minutes apprising each new group of tourists of “John Wayne’s irrelevance to Native American history.”) And Ansel Adams’s 1940s-era photograph of the 13th-century White House ruins in Canyon de Chelly is one of his most spellbinding images of the American Southwest.

The canyon — actually a system of interconnected canyons — was established as Canyon de Chelly National Monument in 1931 and is officially part of the national park system even though it is not on federal property. Encompassing 83,840 acres (131 square miles, roughly the size of Philadelphia) of Navajo tribal trust land, it is home to a living community of some 80 Indian families and is managed jointly by the National Park Service and the Navajo Nation.

Mr. Yazzie, the ranger, told us that the visitor center gets only about 300 or 400 visitors a day — “a drop in the bucket compared to the Grand Canyon.” No tour buses caravan through Canyon de Chelly. Except for one trail, visitors are allowed to enter the canyon backcountry only with a Navajo guide.

Besides Thunderbird Lodge, the single other option for staying within the park is a campground adjacent to the inn, though some guided overnight trips to the canyon floor also allow you to pitch a tent. But the appealing comfort of a well-maintained hotel and restaurant makes a longer, more meaningful stay in this remote region accessible to more visitors. And it is well worth the stay to experience a deeper interpretation of place.

THUNDERBIRD offers daily group tours of the canyons in rugged four-wheel-drive vehicles, but Esther and I chose to explore on horseback with the help of Cedric Aragon, the 28-year-old co-owner of Totsonii Ranch, which is reached by a dirt road off the South Rim Drive. The relaxed rhythm of horseback made it easy to talk and exchange cultural anecdotes, and with Mr. Aragon, the access we had to the ruins and prehistoric sites was immediate and stunning.

With the horses balancing nimbly along narrow cliff trails, we picked our way down 1,100 feet to the canyon floor. Through cottonwoods and silvery stands of Russian olive trees, the vertiginous views of sky and rock were mesmerizing.

At the base of Spider Rock, a sheer-walled 800-foot sandstone pinnacle that shoots up out of Canyon de Chelly near its intersection with Bat and Monument Canyons, Mr. Aragon motioned to a shallow cave just behind us. There on the wall above our heads was a series of cave paintings, white pictographs probably made sometime between A.D. 1 and 1300 by the Anasazi, the ancient predecessors of the Hopi and other Pueblo people.

Mingled among these paintings were darker ash drawings of horses running across the red sandstone, done more recently by the Navajo, who entered Canyon de Chelly some 300 years ago; first introduced to horses by the Spanish, the Navajo soon became skilled riders and herders themselves. A rock overhang was marked with black X’s, signifying the stars in the sky.

After peering up at the drawings, the three of us climbed down to a nearby rock, where I soon found myself in a shouting match with Mr. Aragon.

“Hooeee!” he bellowed. A hundred other Cedric Aragons, planted at various locations around the 20-mile-long canyon branch, shouted back.

The real one sat back, pleased, on a red sandstone boulder, and said, “Now you.”

I took a deep breath before letting loose with a holler. My alter egos answered back promptly, if a bit anemically.

“They might be able to hear you over at the next overlook, but they’d never be able to find you,” Mr. Aragon said. “That’s the beauty of these canyons — they protected our people for a long time.”

I stared up at the rust-colored spires juxtaposed against a brilliantly blue spring sky. We were the only people for miles around.

Making the canyons yell back was tradition for Mr. Aragon, whose family land is near the lip of the canyon that overlooks Spider Rock. Given the fact that people have been living there continuously for about 4,000 years, it seemed right to call on them. Their spirits were still around, he told us, not to mention the physical evidence of their lives.

Hundreds of feet up, the superbly preserved ruins of multistory villages and ceremonial sites were tucked away on rock ledges and alcoves that appeared all but impossible to get to. The ancients, it seems, were pretty amazing climbers.

When we had entered the park the previous day, we had stopped to look at the example there of a hogan, the traditional Navajo home built with logs and mud. Mr. Yazzie had explained the traditional design: a whorled pattern of logs on the roof representing the heavens, crossed logs by the doorway to resemble a mother’s folded hands, door to the east to greet the rising sun.

Now, as we traveled across the landscape on horseback, we saw many a modern hogan, some built with plywood or aluminum. Mr. Aragon pointed out wooden sweat lodges, recently used, and explained the uses of desert plants and trees, from yucca to pine and sagebrush, for food, medicine, herbs, dyes.

Mr. Aragon told us about his grandfathers, Navajo code talkers during World War II, who provided encoded information for Marine units using Navajo words. I asked whether he preferred to be called Navajo or Diné.

“I’m very proud to be Diné,” he said thoughtfully. “That’s what we call ourselves — it means ‘the people.’ ”

In getting to know these people, in listening to their stories of local life, exploring the ancient canyonlands and relaxing in our comfortable room, we found our expectations for a new kind of travel well met.

“We would welcome anyone who came here with a good heart and honest interest,” Mr. Aragon told us. “I like to be a part of people’s memories.”