It’s not obvious at first and you may not see it until someone points it out to you, but the desert is as much a place of water as it is of sun-blasted rocks and sand. The canyons in northern Arizona prove that the desert flows with water, their copper-toned walls pressure-washed over eons into creases cradling the remnants of once-mighty rivers. Hidden in their crevices are stories that spring to life when the right person guides you to a watering hole.

Donovan Hanley is one of those guides. Standing at the bottom of Canyon de Chelly, which seems to sway in the afternoon light, he’s the living embodiment of fluid movement. His hair, kept long to honour his Navajo traditions and beliefs, flows like rain. “My grandmother tells me the rains stopped when we men started wearing our hair short. When you cut your hair, you cut the rain,” he says, referring to recent droughts that exacerbate the semi-arid climate. His waist-long braid, reflecting hope that things might change, falls like the desert varnish that spills from the top of the surrounding cliffs. Black-blue calligraphy painted by plants and rain, the varnish tells the story of time.

In Arizona — one of the driest states in the U.S. — time is water, and water is everything. Water is a force that has shaped monumental geological features and continues to nudge life out of scorched earth. Water has carved the protected canyons where Indigenous people have cultivated corn and beans for millennia. It determines the growth rate of the Ponderosa pine close to the state’s northern Canyonlands and the number of arms sprouting from saguaro cacti in the Sonoran Desert in the south. If you know how to find water in the desert, you might find tales hidden in the red rocks and golden earth that form the foundation of Arizona.

Hanley, wearing turquoise tribal jewellery and beaded moccasins, is a guide and the president of Detours Native America. The tour company is reclaiming ownership of the Native American narrative by bringing visitors closer to Indigenous culture and history. (In Arizona, Hanley says, the official terminology to describe an Indigenous person is American Indian, but Native American is widely used.) “Before, white people sold their version of our story, or tourists got it from museums run and curated by white people. We are sharing our story,” he says.

The story he’s sharing as he’s crouched in the Canyon de Chelly — Tseyi in Navajo — illustrates how the canyon was formed millions of years ago. He scrapes together a mound of sand and douses it with water, creating a channel through the centre. “The Anasazi people used caves and overhangs in this rockscape to build their dwellings,” he explains and walks over to the cordoned-off ruins made famous in photographs and on postcards. The architects’ disappearance is still shrouded in mystery, as is the meaning of many of the petroglyphs and pictographs drawn throughout the canyon by the Anasazi as well as the Hopi and Navajo. What’s no secret but has been kept under the radar by settler historians is that the Navajo also have a history here, at one point hiding from and sometimes being killed by the U.S. military during the Long Walk, a forced migration in 1863 from traditional lands to Oklahoma. “The Navajo were eventually allowed to return,” says Hanley of an 1868 ruling, “but life has never returned to what it was before European contact.”

As Hanley drives the dusty roads through the Navajo Nation, he deepens the cultural context. Chinle, the name of the town closest to Tseyi, means “flowing out,” referring to the water leaving the canyon. The town of Kayenta has a tax on junk food and puts a premium on sports, exemplified by a group of long-distance runners out training as Hanley drives through. The Navajo — or Diné in their own language — used to (and some still do) live in hexagonal or octagonal hogans, dwellings whose door traditionally faced the sunrise. “Humans are not made to be indoors, so the hogans were simple structures that encouraged people to spend most of their time outside,” he says.