CULTURES OF THE SOUTHWEST: A Navajo girl in New Mexico.
MARK NOHL/COURTESY NEW MEXICO TOURISM DEPARTMENT
CULTURES OF THE SOUTHWEST: A Navajo girl in New Mexico.
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BY STEPHEN TRIMBLE
Special to The Miami Herald * Visiting the Southwest's Indian country

Sunset brought the wall of traditional kachina dolls to life, row after row of carved spirit-messengers warmly lighted through the west window in Janice and Joseph Day's gallery, perched on the rim of Second Mesa at Arizona's Hopi Indian Reservation. When the golden glow faded, I took my leave and drove across the top of the mesa toward my room at the Hopi Cultural Center.

To the west, that sunglow I'd admired on the kachina dolls now precisely haloed the San Francisco Peaks, home to the holy beings of the Hopi portrayed by the carved dolls. Entranced, I pulled over on a dirt track to watch the drama of the sunset play itself out behind the sacred mountain, saffron and mauve clouds built from contrails scrawling indecipherable messages across the darkening sky.

I lingered for the last shift of color, for I was done driving for the day, barely a minute from my room and dinner.

Travelers can zip through Southwest Indian country from Gallup, N.M., to Flagstaff, Ariz., in half a day, but they miss a lot.

Larger towns offer comfort and cuisine. But overnighting in the heart of ''the rez,'' at a Pueblo inn or Navajo bed-and-breakfast hogan, creates the opportunity to linger over sunsets, meet people and accept serendipitous invitations, find your way beyond the pavement, or have a second chance if you miss a scheduled tour or a potter gone to town.

You will be there when the sun, moon and stars arc horizon to horizon over the golden sandstone and painted badlands -- truly ''the floor of the sky,'' as writer Willa Cather put it.

At the Hopi Reservation, an hour north of Interstate 40 at Winslow, the only lodging is the venerable Hopi Cultural Center, housing a restaurant, motel and museum. Staying here allows you to breakfast on sweet, nutty, blue corn pancakes or cornflakes, and to dine at night on spicy lamb and hominy stew or a buffalo burger wrapped in blue corn fry bread.

You can turn on cable TV, but Hopi radio -- KUYI (Hopi for ''water'') -- brings a soundtrack of chanting plaza dancers right into your bedroom (between NPR news, Hopi reggae and world music).

Staying here overnight also allows you to cope with the unpredictability of Indian time.

When I turned up for the walking tour of Walpi village, the ancient pueblo at the tip of First Mesa, the last tour had just left. If I had not had my room reserved at the cultural center, I would not have been able to return the next morning.

I would have missed guide Loretta Huma's stories from her grandparents. I would have missed the chance to walk past willow wands strung with prayer feathers and to pass across the narrow neck of sandstone to the tiny masonry village of Walpi, the oldest continuously inhabited settlement in the United States, where just five Hopi families remain today in homes with no modern amenities.

Take some time, and you will find out about HildaBurger, the hamburger emporium in Shungopavi where you will meet every kid in the village, or the Asian take-out run by the Korean woman who married a Hopi man.

Discover one of the most remarkable petroglyph sites in the Southwest -- a visit permitted only with a Hopi guide. One of those guides, Gary Tso, emphasizes the contrast between life at Hopi and the outside: ''Here things don't go so fast.'' Tso believes that ``it's an exciting time to be Hopi. Basic sustenance is no longer a problem, so we can explore new things.''

With the recent closure of the Mojave Power Plant on the Colorado River, which used Hopi and Navajo coal and brought millions of dollars in royalties into tribal coffers, ''tourism has to become a larger part of the economy,'' he says.

Stay long enough at Hopi, and you will penetrate beyond the first row of kachina carvers and potters selling their work at village community centers. Check out McGee's Trading Post in Keams Canyon, choose a favorite potter, and ask how to contact the artist. Most potters love to talk about their work, and searching for them gives you an excuse to knock on doors and meet Hopi people.

Don't be surprised, however, by directions that begin, ``Turn left where the store that burned down used to be.''

ZUNI RESERVATION

At the Zuni Reservation, 30 miles south of Gallup, N.M., many people still live close to the core of the pueblo, and the Inn at Halona lies right in the thick of daily village life. The Vander Wagen family came here a century ago as missionaries and eventually opened a trading post. The current operators (Elaine Thomas, granddaughter of the founders, and her husband, Roger, a warm and talkative Frenchman) have lived here for 30 years.

The trading post evolved into a modern market, and in 1998, Roger and Elaine transformed the adjoining family homes into bed-and-breakfast lodgings, with help from 25 Zuni people who staff the store, deli and inn.

''There is a natural inclination for Zunis to remain friendly and welcoming,'' Roger Thomas says. ''New people in town are the main entertainment,'' so when you walk next door to the market deli to order dinner to be delivered to the inn or walk through the village, Zunis will unfailingly start conversations.

''Zuni is not really a big destination,'' he says. ''There isn't a lot of predictability. This is very different from tightly controlled cultural tourism.'' His advice? ``Go to Zuni, sit there, walk around. Just go there! That's it!''

Visitors come back to the inn at the end of the day and tell Thomas, ''Guess what happened?'' He can guess: They met a Zuni silversmith who invited them home to see his work. A fetish carver generously gave them a serpentine bear with a tiny turquoise arrowhead bound to its back. They made friends with a gaggle of Zuni kids and ended up having lunch at their home.

The truly lucky visitors encounter masked dancers emerging from a kiva to circle chanting through the village plaza. Most Zuni ceremonies are unscheduled and remain open to outsiders (though photography of religious activities is never allowed).

The Inn at Halona looks out over the village and sacred Corn Mountain, Dowa Yallane. Its parking area adjoins Halona Plaza Market, ensuring a connection to the daily life of the pueblo.

THE NAVAJOS

In contrast to these self-contained Pueblo villages, the vast Navajo Reservation stretches across three states and remains the homeland for more than 300,000 American Indian people. Towns like Chinle, Window Rock and Shiprock offer motels and franchise food; they feel more suburban by the year.

The reservation also harbors remote corners well beyond the grid. An overnight stay at a bed-and-breakfast hogan opens one window into rural Navajo life.

Hogans are traditional Navajo dwellings, an octagonal space with a dirt floor, a doorway to the east, and a smoke hole open to the sky through the cribbed log roof. Harold Simpson, of Trailhandler Tours in Monument Valley, has recently built a family hogan between the sandstone buttes of Horse Canyon at the western edge of Monument Valley.

His father, a medicine man, uses the hogan for ceremonies. In between, visitors use the structure for overnight stays. Monument Valley lies on the Arizona-Utah border, and the state line actually passes through the family's hogan.

Simpson embodies the sophistication and traditionalism of the modern Navajo. He spent hours sitting with me under a single bare light bulb in the hogan, serving lamb stew and fry bread and speaking of the metaphoric significance of the hogan while he stoked the oil-drum wood stove with fragrant juniper.

He spoke of how the opening in the roof connects the dirt floor of the structure -- Mother Earth -- with Father Sky. And my night would be transformative: ''You're born into the world again when you leave this door,'' he said. ``It's a time for gratitude; it's a special moment, your moment.''

Other Navajo families rent out hogans for bed-and-breakfast stays. Some you won't encounter until you ask around on the reservation. A few can be contacted ahead, including Simpson's Trailhandler Tours and Clarissa Williams' Two White Rocks Hospitality.

Hogans have dirt floors -- swept clean every morning -- and guests use outhouses, but Navajo innkeepers attend to their clients' needs. Simpson warned me that his coffee is exceedingly strong to cater to the tastes of his European guests.

Williams' operation is considerably more remote than Simpson's, but she provides clean linens and towels for the beds in her hogan, while still offering sheepskins to those who want to try them.

There is no electricity or running water, but she can set up a sun shower. Her family's attention to amenities and the soothing remoteness of the hogan boosted it onto Travel & Leisure's list of America's 10 favorite B&Bs in 2000.

Williams' extended family welcomes visitors to Two White Rocks Canyon (Tse Li Gah Sinil in Navajo), which lies seven miles off the highway down a dirt road between St. Michaels and Ganado in the pinyon and juniper forest of Arizona's Defiance Plateau.

''We want to give a taste of our life,'' she says. ``The hogan is a family hogan, with a lot of traditional prayers in it because we use it for ceremonial purposes.''

Her mother and aunts may prepare your Navajo taco (chili on fry bread), an uncle might run a sweat lodge ceremony, a younger brother or sister might watch your small children while Williams guides a hike to an Anasazi ruin.

Her great-grandmother might come by and tell stories in Navajo, translated by Williams, who is another of the multifaceted 21st-century American Indian people, studying chemical engineering in Salt Lake City during the school year.

These overnight visits at reservation B&Bs preserve the adventure and serendipity of travel in a bygone era and bring you as close to these Southwest Indian cultures as you can penetrate on a brief visit.

Roger Thomas, innkeeper at Zuni, understands that the experience Halona offers appeals both to newcomers and to ''incredibly seasoned travelers'' who have already been to ``Taos, Acoma, Nepal and the South Pole.''

Here, ''we can walk around without a guide. We have the chance to look into the life of a community in a relatively truthful manner,'' Thomas says. ``Was it planned? No. Was it good? Yes.''