Trending
Recent travels took my partner and I to Sedona, Arizona. I'd suggested it be part of our itinerary based on my memory of my parents loving it in the ’80s when it was a community of native artisans. A friend visited recently to experience the energy vortexes that are present in the area, and that seemed fun. The combination of arts and nature made it seem like an enjoyable place to relax. I confess that I did not research the area before going there. That was a mistake.
A drive through the beautiful Oak Creek Canyon led us into the northern part of town, which was filled with low buildings that had eerily new and uniform southwest architecture. We came to find out that those buildings were strip malls in disguise, housing shops selling souvenir t-shirts as if it were Myrtle Beach. Close to where we were staying, condos were going up that blocked the views of the towering red rocks from older residential neighborhoods.
A walk through town revealed a sequence of placards placed by the local heritage museum along a heavily traveled sidewalk that looked across a canyon to a giant set of red rock peaks.
First, we encountered a placard that listed the names of the peaks, which began to be formed 280 million years ago. One of the peaks was called Snoopy. As in the cartoon character. It certainly looked like Snoopy lying on his back, but indicating that a peak was named after a comic strip means that the heritage museum was dating nomenclature of the rocks back a few decades at the most. This was a clue that we were onto something odd.
We read the unapologetic history of the forcible removal of the Yavapai and Apache people, which shared a placard honoring the first man who homesteaded in the area and who claimed squatters' rights over the gardens that had been planted by the evacuated indigenous people.
One of the homesteaders in the area was a couple by the last name of Schnebly. The sign indicated that Mrs. Schnebly's independent spirit was honored by her husband "wisely" deciding to name the post office after his wife – Sedona. I had assumed – again without research – that Sedona was the name of an indigenous person or people.
Furthermore, I learned that she was an active member of the Women's Christian Temperance Union. My heart sank. I knew that historically, Methodist women drove the WCTU effort. I quickly googled her, and sure enough, her family of origin was Methodist.
I was gutted. As a United Methodist clergy person, my ancestors did this. They displaced the people native to the area, took their farms and crops because they could and, 150 years later, were being celebrated for it. And for what – the ability to buy an America 250 t-shirt for $25.99 at The Old Trading Outpost (established 2005)?
My first instinct was to offer prayers of confession and repentance. After a period of mourning the dominionism of my spiritual ancestors, we decided a vacation pivot was needed.
So we found an indigenous-owned food stand, operated by a guy named Mitchell. We bought his fry bread (yum) and his mother's handmade sand art (beautiful). He said he got a lot of customers as they headed to the nearby national monument, which was our plan as well. "They call it a castle, but really it was ruins discovered by a guy named Joe." We agreed that Joe's Ruins sounded admittedly less catchy than Montezuma Castle.
"The only castle that's important to me is that one up there," laughing as he pointed across the street where atop a hill at the edge of the reservation sat Cliff Castle Casino Hotel.
We thanked him for the food and conversation and headed to the national monument, where we learned about the cliff-dwelling people who lived there a thousand years ago, none of whom went by the name Montezuma. A placard told us that the Yavapai and other peoples built the adobe structures to disintegrate over time, but the US Park Service had conducted preservation efforts so that the structures would remain standing. Sigh.
Indigenous People's Day happened earlier this month, and it seems like a good time to make you aware of the Native Land app. For any location to which you travel, you can see what indigenous people historically made their homes in and on that land. I wish I had consulted it before traveling there. I wouldn't have found the name Sedona on it.
Rev. Jenny Williams is the Co-Chair of the West Virginia Faith Collective and is writing as part of the Morgantown Faith Leaders Network.