The Grand Canyon

The sun was about to slip behind a grove of Ponderosa pines, the sweet-smelling bark of which tinged the air with a scent like butterscotch. The last rays from the West fell on the baby I held in my arms, with hair black as night and skin the color of wheat in the fall.

As stars began to appear one by one, her Navajo mother sighed and said of the child, "There is nothing left for her." It was one of those rare moments when all that is unspeakably beautiful and all that is unspeakably painful seem to collapse into one instant, and truth becomes as clear as the Arizona night sky.

It has been 10 years since I sat in front of their small trailer, watching the stars come out and listening as the coyotes began their night chorus. I don't know what has become of the child or her mother. They were not there when I returned last summer to the Grand Canyon, where I had spent four months as part of the summer ministry staff a decade ago.

But the same sadness that I first saw in the mother's eyes that night was there in the eyes of the Native Americans I met on my return. Many of them sat behind crude wooden stands made from boards nailed together. Before them were spread colorful bits of shell strung together into necklaces, silver rings with inlaid turquoise, strands of black Alaskan pearls. The stands went on for miles, and beside each were round-faced children playing in the dust, and beyond each were miles and miles of rock and brush and canyon.

I once returned to the Grand Canyon in January. The stands stood desolate, wind tearing at their boards, which creaked eerily from the battering. There was a dusting of snow then, and no one around. No children in the dust.

I don't know where the children go in the winter or how they survive. This land produces almost nothing in the summer and is surely useless in the winter.

But there is ore underneath it, I am told. Uranium. And now that we have given our native sisters and brothers the worst of the land, we will take it back, for it is surely the best after all.

TEN YEARS AGO I saw in the distance a Navajo woman dressed in bright blue and red on a dark horse, herding sheep. I wept at the sight. She sat proudly and rode swiftly and seemed like a sign of hope to me then.

I saw no sign of hope this time. Only sadness.

I went to the edge of the canyon and let a flood of memories overtake me. I remembered a 26-mile trek with two friends from the South Rim of the canyon to the North--down the steep switchback trail at night and across the desert floor, past flowering yucca plants twice my height. We waited out the worst heat of the next day beneath a waterfall, winding like a ribbon down the canyon wall, and began the steep ascent up the other side as the night's cool breezes began to stir again.

I thought of the numerous times I had come to the canyon's edge and witnessed spectacular beauty: storms moving across its walls and a double rainbow plunging to its floor, color and shadows at sunset, a full pink moon rising. I recalled an August night I spent at the base of the canyon, serenaded by the sound of the Colorado River. As I drifted toward sleep, a meteor streaked across the opening to the sky between the canyon walls. And then another. And another. I lost count after 25.

As I had marveled at these sights, I often wondered who first saw this place. What native eyes first laid sight on this awesome treasure of God's creation? And then the sadness would come again.

We have stolen so much. And killed so much. And for at least a moment last summer, I wondered if all the forgiveness in the world could cover our sin.

Joyce Hollyday was associate editor of Sojourners when this article appeared.