Canyon de Chelly cuts through the heart of the Rez—spectacular to behold and heavy with history. The Navajo made their last stand against the U.S. Army there, in 1864, before they were driven out on a three-hundred-mile forced march known as the Long Walk. Many died along the way and on the return trek, after Navajo leaders signed the treaty that established the reservation. Even so, “This is not our land,” Vincent Salabye, another cyclist on the Rez, said. The treaty only gave the Navajo the right to live on the surface, while Washington kept the soil and the riches that lay beneath. And, for more than a century, reservation children, including Salabye, were taken from their families and sent to boarding schools to be Anglicized, Christianized, and otherwise deracinated—perhaps above all by being forbidden to speak their language. This was the original trauma of the modern Navajo experience, and a century and a half later it haunts collective memory on the Rez, where existence is defined as much by the stark and stony magnificence of the landscape as by the struggle to overcome the contradictions of being both a sovereign and a subjugated people.