Leaving Chaco via Acoma

Our last morning in Chaco Emily, Laura, and I woke early to hike up on the Mesa to watch the sunrise.  At 5:45am the sky was already mostly light but the sun had yet to peak over the lip of the canyon.  Due to fires that had began the day before in arizona we weren't sure if we were going to be able to see the sunrise when we got to the top--sometimes smoke/pollution make the sunrise brighter, sometimes they obscure it.

At the top we waited and waited, watching the arch of sky become lighter but unable to find the sun through the bank of thick smoke to the east.  A hole of color appeared in front of us, a tiny island that smeared the otherwise dusty gray expanse.  It was through that hole that we watched the sun, which judging from its distance from the horizon had been risen for a while, surface and then slip back beneath the cloudy smoke from arizona fires.

Since the beginning of the trip Jeff had been warning us of the perils of the south road out of Chaco.  After all that warning and hype, however, it was much milder than we had all anticipated.  We arrived at Acoma Sky City mid morning.

Acoma is built on a mesa and sits above the valley in which it is built.  All of the homes on top of the mesa are family homes and are owned communally by Acoma families.  Not all homes are occupied but to me Acoma feels more like a place that people actually live than a tourist destination.  After visiting Taos Pueblo several days earlier Acoma offered us a very different look at life in a native american pueblo/tourist destination.  At Taos Pueblo once we had paid the entrance fee we were allowed to wander at will around the Pueblo.  Acoma, in contrasts, requires that all visitors enter the village with a guide and stay with the group.  Several members of our group commented that this made them feel very uncomfortable and aware of their role as outsiders.  To me, however, this uncomfortableness felt right because it did not all us, as visitors, to forget that we were encroaching on other people's private space.  Although perhaps not always the best feeling I feel that this feeling of awareness is incredibly important and that visitors should not be allowed to forget the role they play when entering someone else's space.  This feeling is one that we struggled with frequently, the balance between embracing community and a feeling of a 'sense of place' but also acknowledging that we were only briefly there to experience that feeling.  Acoma challenged us to consider this idea anew and to think about the ways in which tourism can intrude into people's private lives and the ways in which we, knowing this, can be as respectful of tourists as possible.

-Maya Lemon