Haleighsloth

YOU GUYS.

Oy!

Chaco Canyon is a 1,000-year-old archaeological complex whose importance I don’t even know how to express with enough intensity to convey what it means to pre-colonial American history. It’s a region of palatial Great Houses that were occupied by elite ruling families a thousand years ago who brought huge swaths of the surrounding area into their religious-political sphere of influence. And then it may have been ultimately rejected in the 1100s by the people living in it who found the whole Chaco power system to be overstepping and coercive. There’s a lot we have to learn from Chaco and its outlying sites about power and political organization, and a lot we still don’t wholly understand. And Trump wants to strip protections from hundreds of thousands of acres of archaeological sites, Native American cultural landscapes, and wildlife habitats to open them to oil and gas drilling.