Zuni Tribe Quotes

To many Native American tribes the Grand Canyon is a sacred place: site of numerous origin myths from the Havasupai to the Zuni; hushed repose of the Hopi dead. If I were forced to choose a religion, that’s the kind of religion I could go for. The Grand Canyon confers stature on a religion, outclassing the petty smallness of the Abrahamics, the three squabbling cults which, through historical accident, still afflict the world.

They passed the Confluence sometime that afternoon, where the Little Colorado River emerged from its own canyon on the left and bent around its delta to join the Colorado. The waves turned choppy and coffee-brown where the two rivers met. Tumbled stones, rounded by water, lay on the delta: azure and mauve, taupe and terracotta, some white and cracked like eggs ready to open, others like blunt black knives. The Confluence is a sacred place to the region’s tribes. Zuni send spiritual offerings down the Little Colorado to the Grand Canyon, the home of their ancestors. Hopis say nearby is the place of emergence, where all humankind climbed into this world, the Fourth World, through the hollow stem of a reed, and spread over the Earth, leaving footprints and broken pottery to mark their journeys. Hopi youth make a sacred pilgrimage to the Confluence to gather the salt that seeps out of the sandstone, pressed from an ancient sea and crystallized into gleaming stalagmites. They bring the salt back to the mesas east of the Grand Canyon, where, they say, their people settled at the center of the earth.