Stunning. Massive. Wild. Of all the words associated with America’s national parks and scenic landscapes, there’s one word some travelers forget: homeland.
“When our visitors come from afar, they are walking on the lands that have been and the footprints of our ancestors,” Albert Brent Chase, a Navajo (Diné) cultural educator and language teacher, told USA TODAY during an Adventures by Disney trip through Arizona and Utah.
Disney’s guided group travel arm specializes in connecting travelers to places through people and stories. On this particular trip, many storytellers were Navajo and Hopi , whose tribes are deeply tied to places the tour group visited along the Colorado Plateau .
You won’t see America the same way: Experiencing Native-led travel
“We want our people that come to visit the Southwest to know that this is us. This is the people that you’re visiting. And Navajo is just one,” Chase said. “There are many different tribes with their own unique stories, their own new cultural uniqueness.”