Vegas Lights, Canyon Shadows, and the Silence of Navajo Land

In India, 'reservations' refer to the caste-based reservations in jobs or rather government jobs but in the U.S., 'reservations' refer to areas of land that are managed by a Native American tribe under the supervision of the federal government. When Amandeep Midha drovBe through Navajo County, deep into Arizona, a southwestern U.S. state, he reflected upon the situation and in his words,"deeper still in Navajo land, that I felt the earth speak, its flat hilltops and deserts holding memories of genocide, exile, and injustice, revealing the unvarnished truth of how settler colonial states are built: on erased stories and stolen lands, glowing still with the quiet fire of resilience."  

Vegas Lights, Canyon Shadows, and the Silence of Navajo Land

Amandeep Midha

In May of 2016, I joined a fintech company in Denmark as CTO, and within weeks we were selected for the Techstars Accelerator in New York. Life shifted gears fast. After a scorching June in New York, the months that followed were a blur of work and hustling, the kind of grind that tests your limits. By the first week of September, I felt like I’d been carrying too much weight for too long. I needed space to breathe. So I took off a few days from work, flew west, first to Denver, where I spent two days hiking parts of the Colorado Trail. The crisp mountain air was a relief, experiencing plucking pears from trees and eating while the sky was an endless blue with sight of flat iron mountains next to the student town of Boulder. But the calm only sharpened my hunger to see more. I booked a cheap ticket to Las Vegas, curious about the casino city that had become a global symbol of wealth, excess, and escape pulling me to experience once.

Vegas was intoxicating indeed. Bright lights, slot machines, the endless hum of money moving from one pocket to another. I had no hotel booked, just a backpack slung over my shoulder. I walked through the Strip all night, testing my luck at casino machines. When I walked out of the net with twenty dollars more than I had entered with from the city, I felt a small surge of victory. Yet what struck me more than the glamour was its contrast. The homeless slept in alleyways near the Strip. People with hollow faces drifted through the city, unseen by the tourists. The urban homeless people do not really exist in the United States, even in India they get heard once in five years during the elections - but not in the United States, this was a cruel encounter with reality. The casinos never slept, but humanity there felt exhausted. By sunrise, I had seen enough. I took the first flight out to Arizona, carrying my backpacks and some added weight of what I had witnessed.

The Grand Canyon was next. Nothing prepares you for its size or its silence. The first view of the South Rim made me stop breathing for a moment and as if it was another planet of giants who carved it. Layers of rock carved over millions of years stood like an open book. It was beautiful, humbling, and a reminder of time’s indifference. I hiked along the rim, taking photographs, sitting at ledges, and feeling my own insignificance against that ancient backdrop. But as I stood there, I began to think about whose stories had been erased to make this land a park, a tourist attraction, and a photo stop for millions.

The following morning, I hopped to a van deeper into Arizona. I wanted to see Navajo land for myself. Reservations were just words to me before that day. I had read of them in passing but never stood in one. I had never seen a land that carried both survival and dispossession so clearly.

The road stretched for miles. The desert was stark and stunning, painted in reds and browns, broken only by mesas and rock formations that looked like ancient fortresses. Roadside stalls appeared along the way. A native woman sat under a tarp, selling silver jewelry inlaid with turquoise. She smilingly explained the patterns to me: spirals for water, feathers for protection, stones for healing. I bought two patterned beaded bracelets which caught my eyes. She smiled when I told her I was from India, now living in Denmark. Her stories came slowly. She spoke of grandchildren studying far away in Phoenix, of winters that were harsh, and of how life on the reservation was a struggle.

That conversation changed something in me. This was not a quaint cultural space preserved for tourists. This was a land scarred by a genocide that Western narratives have softened with words like “expansion” and “settlement.” The Navajo, like so many Indigenous nations, were not simply displaced; they were systematically hunted and starved. In 1864, thousands of Navajo were forced from their homes by the US Army in what is now called the Long Walk. Families were made to march hundreds of miles to Bosque Redondo, an internment camp in eastern New Mexico chosen for its desolation. Hundreds died of hunger, disease, and exposure along the way. The survivors were imprisoned on barren land where crops failed and water was scarce.

Visiting Navajo land today is like stepping back in time. Modern tourists come expecting to take photographs of desert beauty, but if they listen closely, they will hear echoes of those marches. They will see the shadow of Bosque Redondo in the isolation of the reservation, in the poverty that lingers generations later, in the pride of a people who survived it all. The tourist experience is often curated, but here the history cannot be packaged neatly. It is raw and alive.

Driving through Navajo County felt like entering a parallel state. A country within a country, invisible to most of the world. Even time itself marks the difference here. Arizona is one of the few states in the United States that does not observe Daylight Saving Time, yet the Navajo reservation does. This is not a trivial detail. It is a statement of sovereignty, a quiet assertion of autonomy, proof that this community has carved out its own rhythm even when encircled by a state that once tried to erase it entirely.

Homes stood far apart, many without running water or electricity, in one of the most powerful wealthiest nations on earth. Their land is rich in coal, uranium, and oil, yet the people whose ancestors cared for it live without power, stripped of both sovereignty and access to the wealth beneath their feet. This was not a forgotten corner of America. This was a silenced one.

As an Indian, I felt a deep resonance. We carry our own scars of colonization. We have seen our tribal and rural communities pushed aside in the name of progress. We have inherited Partition, displacement, and the rewriting of history. Living in Denmark later, I noticed how Europe has polished its colonial legacy, putting the darkest chapters of its history into museum exhibits. Navajo land was no museum. It was alive, unpolished, and raw. It did not let you look away.

At a dinner in the town of Kayenta, which is holy enough to not serve any form of alcohol to anyone, I tasted frybread topped with beans and lettuce. The server who served me told me about tourists who stopped for photographs but never stayed to see. His words were calm, but they cut deep. This was not bitterness. This was the truth, spoken by someone who had seen hundreds of such travelers pass through her land without really seeing it.

The reservation was a mirror. It revealed that the United States is not simply a land of opportunity. It is also a land built on occupation. The rest of the world rarely hears these stories because they disrupt the myth of freedom. In textbooks, the Long Walk* is reduced to a footnote. Bosque Redondo is framed as a temporary hardship (whereas it was a humanitarian disaster when crops failed and water was scarce).and modern place of Barbecues and Open grills. Westward expansion romanticized all that as bravery. The genocide of Indigenous people is softened into euphemisms. Yet here I stood, in a sovereign nation hidden inside the borders of a superpower, confronted with what that progress had cost.

It looks like that there was a systematic destruction of cultures across Africa, Australia, and the Americas once building colonies over indigenous cultures expunged. The names change, but the logic is the same: seize the land, erase the people, rewrite the story.

As the sun set over the desert, the mesas glowed purple and red, casting long shadows across the land. The silence was not empty. It was heavy with memory. Navajo land is more than a reservation. It is a living reminder that history is not over. It is a reminder of resilience that endures even when the world refuses to see it.

I left with a sharper understanding of America. Its landscapes are breathtaking, but its history bleeds quietly through them. To truly see this country, you must look past the monuments and the neon lights. You must walk through its reservations, places carved out by violence, and you must see the people who remain. And yet this break from work was not usual one.

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(The Long Walk* refers to the forced removal of the Navajo people in 1864, when the U.S. Army made thousands march about 300 miles from their homeland in Arizona to the Bosque Redondo reservation in eastern New Mexico. Many died from hunger, disease, and exhaustion along the way. - Ed.)

Amandeep Midha is a technologist, writer, and global speaker with over two decades of experience in digital platforms building, data streaming, and digital transformation. He has contributed thought leadership to Forbes, World Economic Forum, Horasis, and CSR Times, and actively engages in technology policy-making discussions. Based in Copenhagen, Amandeep blends deep technical expertise with a passion for social impact and storytelling.