Ann Axtel Morris

the Navajo, which is really difficult.”

Lawrie finds it tragic that such a brilliant woman ended up in her 40s as a broken, pain-racked alcoholic recluse, and she’s glad the movie doesn’t dwell on that. “We do address her decline, but our film is really a celebration of Ann, so we focus on those amazing years she had in the 1920s,” she says. “And she did have an impact. Those books are out of print now, but they were very influential in their time. Ann was inundated with letters from people who wanted to become archaeologists, and she really paved the way for other women in the field.”

The filmmakers managed to recruit the British actor Ewen Bremner to play the archaeologist Sylvanus Morley, and the great Cherokee actor Wes Studi, who delivers a blistering performance as Tsali, the crew boss on the Morris excavations. Perhaps the greatest casting coup, however, was to persuade Jonathan Nez, the 46-year-old president of the Navajo Nation, to portray the time-traveling incarnation of an Anasazi.

With the weather still bitterly cold and windy, Nez arrives at the set in a black SUV with a small entourage, and ducks into a trailer to get into 1920s period costume with a double layer of thermal underclothes. I asked him why he decided to participate in the movie. “To represent our people and our belief system, which is shown through the scene that I’m going to be part of,” he says. “Ann is sick and we believe the ancient spirits made her sick. If you disturb that negative energy, it comes back on you. That’s what she did when she was excavating. You don’t mess around with this stuff. And she messed around with this stuff.”

For the Diné who know her story, there is no mystery at all to Ann Morris’ sickness and early death. In her excavations at Canyon del Muerto, she broke one of their strongest taboos, with entirely predictable consequences. “You don’t do that,” explains Nez, who studiously avoids using the words “dead” and “death.” “That’s why there

are very few Navajo archaeologists.”

Taft Blackhorse is one of them, and after handling dead bodies he goes through a purification ceremony to remove the danger from the spirits. Ron Maldonado, also observing the shoot, was an archaeologist for the Navajo Nation for many years. He is not Navajo, but his wife and children are. To protect them from the chindi (spirits) of the dead bodies he disturbed, he went through a ceremony that required him to spend four days covered in sheep fat and charcoal.

The movie presents the Navajo explanation for Ann Morris’ sickness, and it also presents the Morris family explanation—Ann and her brother were born with weak bones and “the arthritis of the Axtells.”

Ann Morris died in self-imposed solitude at the age of 45, and the official cause of death is unknown. Earl Morris married again, to a schoolteacher, and he never spoke of Ann again. “In my family, we kept her buried under layers of pain and shame and silence,” says Gell. “It was like the Navajo death taboo. Don’t talk about her or something terrible will happen.”

Now, with Ann rescued from obscurity, embodied in her youthful vivaciousness by Abigail Lawrie, and celebrated onscreen by a writer-director who genuinely admires her, Gell hopes that his grandmother will finally get the recognition she deserves. “It’s been an excavation,” he says. “We’ve dug down through the layers of shame and silence. We’ve exposed the prejudice she had to deal with. We’ve brought her out into the light.”