He would have been an Indian of course. All the employees of all the businesses in the Navajo Nation are Indians. This was true at the Wetherill Inn, the motel where I stayed that night. Across much of America, the division of labor in motels is that the management is either white or Indian-from-India, and the housekeeping is Hispanic. On the Indian reservation, both the management and housekeeping was Indian, as in Native America. A novelty to see it this way.
The room at the Wetherill was small but decent. In the morning I drove north out of town, up through the rock formations, towards the Utah state line.
My destination for the day was Monument Valley. I've visited plenty of John Wayne oriented sites during my travels, including taking the Quiet Man Tour in Ireland with my friends in Galway. With all the John Wayne imagery I'd see in southeastern Arizona, it seemed like a side trip to Monument Valley, where John Ford shot so many of his westerns featuring Wayne, was an absolute must for this trip.
It was less an hour's drive to entrance to the Navajo Tribal Park that contains the most famous locales. To get into the entrance, I had to detour into Utah for about twenty seconds, the first time I'd been outside Arizona in a month.
The beautiful visitor's center was about a mile back into Arizona. I parked and bought some souvenirs, including a shot glass for Agnes and Thor, who would appreciate the John Ford-themed gesture. A shot glass seemed the appropriate thing in this case.
From the visitor center, one could see eastward towards several of the most famous formations, including the two Mitten Buttes that are probably the most iconic natural images of the southwestern part of the country. Inside the center was a room with a small sporadic collection of posters and plagues commemorating Ford's movie shots in the valley, the first one of which was famously Stagecoach in 1939, the movie that made John Wayne a legitimate star.
One of the plaques mentioned that Ford's movie company brought many temporary jobs for local Navajos, and a boost to the local economy. But in the last sentence it added that the movie company brought many of its own supplies, implying that somehow the economic boost wasn't as big as it could have been.
It almost seems stereotypical now, when I travel the country. Anything historical about the Indians and white settlers has to take great pains to emphasize the point of view that no matter how else you spin things, whites oppressed Indians, plain and simple.
This kind of viewpoint is so much the norm right now, not just on Indian reservations (where it actually seems much less heavy-handed, ironically). The ones outside Indian reservations sometimes seem to be written to say that nothing good came from white settlement.
It really shows you who is in charge of creating such things. The universities are churning outsuch historians with the "correct" political point of view based on a Marxist version of American history.
I'm convinced that it some future epoch all of this will itself seem outdated, when postmodernity is itself a distant memory. Wow, these people were really ashamed of things that they themselves never did!
The visitor center also had a large room dedicated to the Navajo codetalkers from World War II. I read on the web that there were virtually no commemorations of the codetalkers on the Navajo Nation, but this is clearly outdated. Half the building seemed dedicated to the codetalkers.
Yet I was somewhat disappointed in these exhibits. They dwelled mostly on the personnel, the men who actually served, which is fine of course. But they only briefly mentioned how the Navajo language is unique in a way that made it very hard for the Japanese to break the code. I've always heard this about the Navajo language, and I wanted some examples of just how the language is so different. Yet there were no examples of this to be found. The only thing about the Navajo language I found on the entire reservation were expensive school textbooks in the Hubbel trading post visitor center.
One big negative about the visitor's center: the smashed penny machine required four quarters to operate! This is the first time I've seen it cost a dollar anywhere in the country. Although I realize that the Navajo, despite (or perhaps because of) the federal subsidies, are not a wealthy tribe, and that fifty extra cents is not a lot to contribute in this case, I must state emphatically that I do not like this precedent!
After going back to the counter to get more quarters and satisfy my collector needs for the penny, I went back outside with the resolve to drive the seventeen mile road that went back into the rock formations, in order to get the full experience, and to see the buttes from the sunlit side during the morning.
The man at the gate had warned me the road was rough, and he was right. It snaked down a long hill from the visitor center to the valley floor, over jagged rocks and ruts. After a couple miles of my car bouncing up and down, and my worrying about low clearance on the rocks, I realized that I was torturing the old Bimmer's suspension way too much, so I pulled over and turned around.
But at least it was far enough to see the Mitten Buttes in fill sunlight, and get a good view of some of the other rock formations further into the valley. I'd have to explore further in some other car, at some other time. But for now it was far enough, I decided, to check it off the list of my John Wayne sites.
Included this short clip of the Duke from The American West of John Ford (1971), which I saw in my hotel room after writing this post:
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