Скачать или смотреть A Heliograph to Kin Kletso - Original fiction set in Chaco Canyon on the Winter Solstice

A few years ago, we visited Chaco Canyon for the Winter Solstice sunrise. One of the buildings there, Kin Kletso, was designed by its builders to align with a natural feature so that when you stand at the eastern corner on the solstice, the sun rises directly aligned with a cleft in the canyon wall.

While beautiful, the experience got me thinking about how much of our experience, and our understandings of it, resembled the original designers' understanding of Kin Kletso and all of Chaco Canyon. I wrote "A Heliograph to Kin Kletso" to explore how we each understand the places, people, and things we encounter in the contexts of our own lives rather than the reality of history.

This story presents what I might call the "Parks Service" version of Chaco Canyon. It's important to recognize that Native Americans recognize a vastly different history of the place and view of it now. While I use words like "ruins," "Anasazi" and "ancestral Puebloans" in this story, those terms/concepts represent an empirical, academic view of Chaco Canyon that many Native American people find disrespectful because those terms disregard their knowledge of a place like Chaco. The story is not intended to teach about Chaco's history, but show how unknowable it is to someone like Carter.

This video from the channel Navajo Traditional Teachings tells the story of the Gambler, which is a much darker and more interesting history of Chaco Canyon than the Park Service's speculation -    • The story of the Great Gambler… And the on...  

It's important for those of us interested in pre-Colombian history to learn how to find information beyond what the US Parks Service provides, information from indigenous people whose ancestors created and lived in the places we visit. Only when we learn to do that will we grow closer to knowing about such places.

"A Heliograph to Kin Kletso" appeared in the literary magazine, Weber: The Contemporary West in Fall 2020. You can read it here - https://issuu.com/weberjournal/docs/f...

https://weber.edu/weberjournal/Issues...

This is my first audio version of a story. Thanks so much to my wife and my friends for their help!
Frankie Rollins - Violet
Matt Tuozzo - Ranger (I mispronounce Matt's name in the video; it's too-zo.)
Erin Aldrich - Woman from New England
Everything else was read by me, Eric Aldrich
.
.
#fiction #literature #literaryfiction #Weber:thecontemporarywest #chaco #chacocanyon #kinkletso #solstice #sunrise #wintersolstice