Chaco canyon is a place of competing social logics. At once a locale of mystery, or as the state’s moniker implies, one of “enchantment,” but also it has other dimensions less mystical. Indeed, when visiting the area, it is stunning how “big” the sky is there, as tones of azure shift to cerulean due to the gain in elevation entering the dusty high desert. And, at the same time, it is a place in which the conflicted colonial, extractive-industrial relation is quickly made apparent. For, it would be difficult to visit Chaco Canyon without some foreknowledge of the interests converging on it, of the oil and gas industry, of the Navajo and Pueblo Tribes, of the National Park Service and Bureau of Land Management, of UNESCO (an entity that goes unadvertised), and the Office of the Secretary of the Interior, now headed by a Puebloan – Deb Haaland. The so-called “checkerboard” of the region (named so for the maps indicating the various bureaucratic land and resource regimes at work) represents these interests. Following James Scott’s work, the utterly colonial logic, that is, the need to make this landscape legible, becomes entirely evident. Otherwise, what would it be? This distant place, deeply inconvenient to visit, far away, and a place as unconnected to contemporary society in terms of technology or amenities as I have come across. It is a frontier. The strangeness of this type of relationship to the world then becomes evident in Chaco. The need to demarcate the terrain in the way that has been done could only be embarked upon by a disturbed people, perhaps less out of awe, but fear for the expansiveness of the place and for its unknowability, a place that at the same time was once inhabited from 850-1250 by the Chocoans, who carved and cut with precision, bricks and stones for their structures from the surrounding land. And it is in light of these structures that, upon driving out of Chaco, into the so-called buffer zone, that one wonders if in 1,000 years from now, people will visit the majesty of the oil wells, now penetrating into the earth, and already beginning to rust away.
Brian O’Neill, Ph.D.
