Canyon de Chelly is a living cultural landscape within the Navajo Nation, shaped by water cutting through sandstone and by human use extending for thousands of years. Archaic peoples, Basketmaker communities, and Ancestral Pueblo farmers built homes, storage rooms, fields, and ceremonial spaces in the canyons. Later Hopi histories preserve connections to particular places, and Navajo families established homes, orchards, farms, and grazing lands. The name Chelly derives from a Spanish rendering of the Navajo word Tséyi', meaning within the rock, underscoring that the canyon is not merely scenery or an abandoned archaeological park.

Cliff dwellings such as White House, Antelope House, and Mummy Cave preserve masonry, plaster, rock art, timbers, and archaeological deposits from different periods. They are genuine ancestral structures, though erosion, vandalism, excavation, stabilization, and limited reconstruction have changed what is visible. Spanish colonial expeditions brought violence to the region, including the 1805 attack at Massacre Cave in which Spanish troops killed many Navajo people. Mexican and American slave raiding, warfare, livestock conflict, and territorial expansion continued to destabilize communities through the nineteenth century.

In 1863–1864 United States forces under Kit Carson carried out a campaign of crop destruction, livestock seizure, and pressure intended to compel Navajo surrender. Many families sheltered in remote parts of the canyon, but thousands of Navajo people were eventually forced on the Long Walk to Bosque Redondo in eastern New Mexico. The 1868 treaty allowed survivors to return to part of their homeland. Families again farmed canyon plots, tended sheep, rebuilt homes, and maintained ceremonial and kinship ties. Their return and continuing residence distinguish Canyon de Chelly from places interpreted only through ancient ruins.

President Herbert Hoover established Canyon de Chelly National Monument in 1931 on land that remained under Navajo tribal and individual use rather than transferring ownership to the federal government. The National Park Service cooperatively manages archaeological and visitor resources with the Navajo Nation and resident families. Roads, overlooks, trails, signs, and stabilized ruins are preservation and access interventions. Historic orchards, fields, hogans, fences, and occupied areas continue to change through work and seasonal use. The monument is therefore neither a reconstructed village nor a conventional federally owned park enclosing an empty landscape.

Rim overlooks are generally accessible without an entrance fee, while entry onto much of the canyon floor requires an authorized Navajo guide or participation in activities allowed under current rules. Closures, road conditions, floods, weather, and community needs may alter access, so visitors should verify arrangements and respect homes, livestock, sacred places, and photography restrictions. Navajo guides provide perspectives that cannot be replaced by distant viewing alone. The monument's history joins ancestral Pueblo and Hopi connections, Navajo sovereignty and survival, colonial violence, archaeology, farming, and cooperative stewardship, with living community authority placed at the center rather than treated as background.