Visions of a Liminal Landscape: Mythmaking on the Rainbow Plateau

The Rainbow Plateau spans the border between Utah and Arizona, covering 775 square miles of some of the most rugged terrain within the continental United States. Bounded by the Colorado and San Juan Rivers to the north, Piute Canyon to the east, and Navajo Canyon to the west, it was first mapped a century ago by Herbert Gregory who described it as “the most inaccessible, least known, and roughest portion of the Navajo Reservation” (figure 1).¹ Over the years, the Rainbow Plateau has become known for its breathtaking natural beauty. But the area’s remoteness has also cast a spell over many Euro-Americans who have either seen it or experienced it as armchair travelers in scientific treatises, novels, ethnographies, and magazine articles. My fascination with the Rainbow Plateau began several years ago when I encountered several photographs of a remarkable-looking school located on the eastern slope of Navajo Mountain. Navajo Mountain, at 10,348 feet, is not only the topographical centerpiece of the Rainbow Plateau, it is also the highest point on the Navajo Reservation. The school, a Navajo-Modernist hybrid concocted by a top New York architectural firm during the 1930s, was, well, amazing (figure 2). But experiencing it in the context of the Rainbow Plateau left me with the unshakeable feeling that the builders intended the school’s startling architecture as a response to its dramatic surroundings. The area is filled with numerous Native American sacred sites—“places where Divinity is closest” as historian Editha Watson once described them.² And the land on and around Navajo Mountain is studded with geographical features that have served as sacred symbols in many cultures through time and across the globe. The Euro-Americans who interacted with the Rainbow Plateau creatively, through writing and through architecture, may have been aware of the Native American sacred sites located there, but they also brought with them a cultural heritage that already included powerful religious images like “the cosmic mountain.”³ Sacred symbols like the cosmic mountain form a key element of religious experience because they are liminal—they unite multiple and even paradoxical meanings into a potent image that represents “neither this nor that” but combines both meanings at the same time.⁴ Because the sacred and the profane are oppositional, they can only coexist in a place that is “betwixt and between,” a space where the rules that structure ordinary places are ambiguous or even absent. The liminal nature of sacred symbols embodies and expresses the amorphous nature of sacred places.

Figure 1.

Map of the Rainbow Plateau region, 1950. The Rainbow Plateau is located between Navajo Creek, the Colorado and San Juan Rivers (their confluence is just north of the map’s edge), and Piute Canyon. The Navajo Mountain Trading Post is marked as “Dunn.” (From the National Park Service tourist brochure for Rainbow Bridge National Monument published in 1951.)

The Euro-Americans who traveled to the Rainbow Plateau found themselves in a landscape filled with sacred symbols. Many of them experienced it as a heterotopic and heterochronistic place where the laws of space and time are suspended. What is more, these visitors—explorers, scientists, archaeologists, anthropologists, novelists, sightseers, traders, and architects alike—found that the liminality of the Rainbow Plateau encouraged mythmaking. As Roland Barthes has suggested, myths are narratives that reify particular ideas and make them seem true.⁵

Figure 2.

The Navajo Mountain Day School, c. 1950. Photographed by John Collier Jr.—John and Mary E. T. Collier Collection. (Courtesy of the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology, University of New Mexico. Catalog No. 2006.117.307)

Defining a Sacred Place

Historians have been analyzing Navajo (or Diné) sacred places as a unique phenomenon at least since the 1930s. Richard Van Valkenburgh, Editha Watson, Robert S. McPherson, Stephen C. Jett, the team of Klara Kelley and Harris Francis, Kevin Blake, and Peter Nabokov have all made contributions to understanding Diné sacred places as a distinct geographical category. As Kelley and Francis...