By
Annette McGivney

While most people find it difficult enough to live happily in one culture, Jason Nez (pictured) manages to thrive in three. He’s an employee at Grand Canyon National Park, where he navigates a large federal bureaucracy to protect one of the world’s most magnificent natural wonders. He is Diné, raised on the Navajo Nation, and is deeply committed to practicing his Native traditions and language. And he spends as much time as possible dwelling in the past, communicating with prehistoric peoples through the artifacts they left behind — potsherds, rock art, ruins and even the ancient grinding stone he keeps on the floor of his living room.

“I think of myself as a hopeless idealist,” Nez says as he sits in a chair next to the grinding stone in his apartment in Grand Canyon Village. On this late October afternoon, Nez’s green park uniform is covered in sawdust from working all day with a crew that was cutting down small trees to reduce fire hazards. Nez is a fire archaeologist for the park and is tasked with making sure the park’s firefighting and management activities don’t harm cultural resources. 

“We humans have so many possibilities to do something good and to be something good,” he says. For Nez, doing good involves simultaneously walking in those three cultures to positively affect as many people as possible. Drawing from his Navajo heritage, Nez has introduced traditional ecological knowledge into fire management decisions at the Canyon. He helps Navajos better understand the benefits of the science-based preservation efforts happening on their homeland inside the national park. And he’s an enthusiastic student of the Canyon’s ancient Indigenous technologies, going so far as to replicate prehistoric methods to make his own pottery and grind his own corn. 

“I love my job because I am helping take care of this very special place that has immense meaning to both Indigenous and non-Indigenous people,” he says. “If we take care of the landscapes and all the resources in those landscapes, then we are also taking care of the people connected to the land.”


Although some Indigenous people with cultural ties to the Canyon understandably avoid working for the government agency that dispossessed them of their homeland, Nez doesn’t see it that way. He’s fighting to protect his culture by working within the system. “A lot of harms have been done to Indigenous people,” he says. “But for us, there are only a few ways to get past these issues. One of those ways is to learn how the government and land management works. Then we can use that knowledge to protect the resources we care about.” 

Nez is a highly valued member of the staff, according to park Superintendent Ed Keable. “Jason brings an important perspective to our management of the Grand Canyon, including his great understanding of Indigenous history and traditional ecological knowledge,” says Keable, who adds that he’s personally relied on Nez for perspectives that Keable “could not get without him.”

Nez, 45, grew up in a remote community on Coal Mine Mesa, about 80 miles east of the Canyon. He is of the Zuni Edgewater Clan and born for the Salt Clan, and he describes a childhood
where he was raised by a village of extended family who immersed him in traditional Diné practices. “Every one of my relatives has contributed something to who I am,” he says. “All of my strength comes from them.”

But that traditional upbringing clashed with the dominant white culture Nez encountered when he attended Northern Arizona University in the early 2000s to earn a degree in environmental science. “It was weird to go from the reservation, which was 95 percent Native, to a place that was just the opposite,” he recalls. 

Nez says he was adrift in college, but during his senior year in 2003, a job as a backcountry ranger at Navajo National Monument helped him find his purpose. Even though the monument is on the Navajo Nation, it protects Ancestral Puebloan ruins, which many Navajos keep at a distance. But Nez started to feel a connection with the people who once lived at the Keet Seel cliff dwelling where he was giving tours. Nez’s Zuni Edgewater Clan is related to the Zuni people, who descended from Ancestral Puebloans — and Nez realized he was in the ancient home of his ancestors. 

“We think of these places from the past as being dead, but they are alive,” he says. “And they are speaking to us, not in English or Navajo, but in the language of pottery sherds, projectile points, pueblos and the art that was left behind.” The bond Nez formed with the past at Keet Seel showed him what he wanted for his future. And he also developed a connection with the non-Indigenous visitors who came to learn about his Native history. “I am shy,” he says. “Giving those tours helped me break out of my bubble and learn how to talk to people from outside my culture.” 

After graduating from NAU, Nez worked for the Navajo Nation’s Archaeology Department and then at the Museum of Northern Arizona before joining the staff at Grand Canyon National Park in 2011. On his days off, he returns to Coal Mine Mesa, where he lives in a hogan he built with the help of family members. It’s completely off the grid — and he prefers it that way. But Nez also is at home at the Canyon. “We are not here as visitors; we are residents,” he says. “We are the original land managers.” 

For Nez, the past, present and future are interconnected, just as humans and the landscape are intertwined. And the best way to make wise decisions about the future, he says, is to listen to the teachings of those who successfully lived in the Canyon for thousands of years. 

“This is part of my family; it talks to me,” he says of the grinding stone in his living room. He rubs the stone against the base, kicking up a cloud of corn meal residue. “My aunt says that if you have a grinding stone, you will never go hungry.”