Spider Rock  Canyon du Chelly                      click to enlarge

If you were raised Navajo like I wasn’t, you will have heard this story like a million times. It is the story of Spider Rock and Spider Woman. Spider rock has been around for a very long time, since way before the internet, way before color TV even. I know, I know it’s hard to even think of how long that must be. Let’s just say it is a very long time and leave it at that.

Spider rock is also the lair of Spider Woman. She’s not like the Spiderman guy you see at the movies, the one who dresses cool and swings around the city kicking the beejeezus out of bad guys, no, she’s like the spider that bit him giving him super powers, only big. Big like Shelob, big. Eight legs, hairy body, lots of eyes, nasty disposition, able to crawl right up that great big rock and just sit up there, figuring stuff out.

What she figures out is things like which of the little children have been good or bad. This is the justice system for little children, not the big ones like teenagers and 20 something’s. She leaves those to the Navajo tribal police to deal with. She doesn’t use that old naughty or nice thing, she goes right for good or bad. No grey here. You were either good or you were bad. And she knew. Don’t think you could fool her. This is her job and she takes it pretty seriously.

So through out the year parents and or legal guardians would keep track of just how miserable a little snot-nosed kid you were and how you behaved, whether you would hit your little sister with that war club your Uncle Skid made for your birthday, or if you’d teased the local flora and fauna until they had just had it and revolted and caused a drought, stuff like that.

If you were a particularly awful little grub with absolutely no redeeming social value they would bring you for a visit with the Spider Woman. Holy Moly kid, you did not want to visit the Spider Woman. Even adults were scared spitless of Spider Woman so usually they would just drop the kid off saying they were going to go over and have a smoke and some mescal or something and let her do her thing.

Her thing was to approach the youngster and ask them “Well, Was you good or bad?” This was actually just a courtesy because she already knew right, she’s Spider Woman, and while the kid was hemming and hawing and trying to weasel its way out of this, she would grab the bad ones, wrap them up in spider web stuff and carry them up to the top of Spider Rock. There, at her leisure, she would unwrap them as she got hungry and eat them. Harsh, harsh, harsh, I know, but that’s the kind of stuff that happens in the real world. No sense sugar-coating it. If you were a total little bastard, your parents and or legal guardian would bring you here and soon your little bones would be added to that pile up on top of Spider rock for everyone to see. That’s why that top of the tower is white. It’s the bones of all those bad little kids that wouldn’t behave and now they’re stuck in a pile up there as a lesson to all the other kids who might be thinking of being bad.

So the moral here kiddies is “Be always good and do not be bad, lest your bones get added to the pile”. If you don’t believe me just try and find a bad little Navajo kid. Can’t do it can you. Happy Holidays.