In Bedonie’s class, Jakins said, they learned about the “importance of the four levels of creation, or the four worlds” which are represented by sacred colors: Blue, yellow, white and black.

Finally, the Diné, the term the Navajo use to describe themselves and their language, settled in the canyon — between the four sacred mountains of their creation story.

But Eskeets said that for the Navajo, it goes in both directions. The four sacred mountains — Blanca Peak and Mount Hesperus in Colorado, Mount Taylor in New Mexico, and the San Francisco Peaks ...

A fertile cradle. Canyon de Chelly (pronounced de SHAY), a national monument since 1931, sprawls fingerlike across roughly 84,000 acres of northeastern Arizona, near the town of Chinle (CHIN-lee ...