Ch'ínílį́

Ch'ínílį́ is the Navajo name for the place where water flows out of Canyon de Chelly into the open country of northeastern Arizona. The name means 'flowing out'. The canyon's streams rise in the Chuska Mountains to the east and cut into the plateau, leaving broad floors and high rims. Hopi farmers are thought to have used the canyon sporadically from about 1300 to the early 1700s, and ruins left by earlier peoples, ancestral Puebloans among them, mark its walls and floor.

Navajo families moved into the canyon from northern New Mexico in the early 1700s and made it their home. During the Spanish colonial period, the Chinle area was a base for both trade and war. In 1805 forces led by Lieutenant Antonio Narbona invaded the canyon, killing 115 Navajos and taking 33 captive.