Wearing painted wooden masks, 75 men emerge by ladder from an underground kiva, or ceremonial room. Chanting, shaking rattles, and moving rhythmically from one foot to the other, the kachina dancers encircle the town plaza on the Hopi reservation. As I watch with Rotarian Brenda Thomas, who is part Hopi and part Navajo, medicine men and women dust the dancers with corn pollen. The dancers then distribute colored popcorn balls, apples, and other symbolic food to the crowds gathered on the rooftops and benches around the plaza.

The Hopi people prohibit photography, sketching, and video and sound recordings on their lands; although this sacred dance is open to the public, many others are not. Thomas, 2006-07 president of the Rotary Club of White Mountain, Ariz., USA, grew up on the Navajo Reservation. She is taking me to three reservations in sparsely populated northeastern Arizona. We cover more than 400 miles in three days, zigzagging across the deserts, mesas, and canyons of the Four Corners area, where Arizona meets Colorado, New Mexico, and Utah.

We start our journey at her home in Pinetop, where her daughter, Chanda, and one-year-old granddaughter, Amarii, greet us with a dinner of “Navajo tacos” – fry bread heaped with ground beef, beans, and cheese. The next morning, Thomas and I head 30 miles south to the White Mountain Apache Reservation, where she once was a school business manager.

The brick buildings of Fort Apache sit solidly around the parade ground. In a nearby field are several wikiups, the tepee-shaped, branch-built homes in which Apaches lived. We stop by the small museum  for a look at Apache artwork and other exhibits, then head north to Hopiland.

As we drive through the evening toward the Three Mesas, where the 10,000 members of the Hopi tribe lives, Thomas tells me that she has many relatives here. As a child, she frequently visited her grandfather in Hotevilla on Third Mesa. Only recently have the village’s inhabitants, the most traditional in a very traditional tribe, agreed to bring in water and electricity. We spend the night at the Hopi Cultural Center Restaurant and Inn, which is run by the community on Second Mesa.

The next morning we stroll to the plaza, surrounded on four sides by flat-topped adobe or concrete dwellings, to watch the kachina dances, held each year to ensure rain in a land where water is scarce. The kachinas are spiritual beings who teach the Hopis what they need to know to live in harmony with the earth. The dances begin in February with the sprouting of beans and end in October with the harvest.

On our last day together, we visit the Navajo Nation. Dine Bikeyah, as it is known in Navajo, is a semiautonomous Native American homeland covering 27,000 square miles. It occupies all of northeastern Arizona and parts of Utah and New Mexico and is the largest reservation., At Tuba City’s new Explore Navajo Interactive Museum, based on an exhibit that premiered at the 2002 Winter Olympic Games in Salt Lake City, Utah. For the first time, the Navajo Nation told its story to the world in its own words. Here, I learn about the sacred number four: four clans living in the fourth world, the four seasons governing all personal and group activities, four sacred mountains, and four values – life, work, social/human relations, and respect and reverence.

The museum also tells the story of how the Navajos were enslaved by the Spanish, burned out of their farms in Canyon de Chelly by Kit Carson’s U.S. troops, then forced to march 300 miles into New Mexico.

Modern life has posed its own challenges for the Navajos. Thomas tells me that her father, like many Navajos, was diagnosed with lung cancer from exposure to uranium while he worked as a miner. Their house was built with tailings from a nearby mine. He eventually left the mines and returned to the traditional Navajo way of life as a sheepherder, while her mother wove the wool into rugs. Her grandmother and aunt also were weavers, among the first to create rugs based on sacred sand paintings. The rugs preserved the intricate designs, which traditionally were destroyed after the ceremonies.

Neither of her parents made it past second grade, she says. “They knew how hard life is, so they urged all of us to go to school and get an education.” Thomas and many of her six siblings went on to earn advanced degrees. She’s a school district business manager. They worry now about welfare dependency on the reservation, Thomas says.

Finding work isn’t easy today, Thomas recognizes. Unemployment among the 300,000 Navajo people is 42 percent, and 43 percent live below the poverty level. Leaving the reservation to attend school or work, as she did, poses its own challenges. For many years, Native American children were removed from their homes and sent to boarding schools, where they were forbidden to speak their language or follow cultural traditions. Opinions differ on whether schools inside or outside the reservation best serve children today.

Thomas recalls how her parents gave back to their community. Rotary, she says, helps her continue that tradition. As president, she helped her club provide dictionaries to all third graders in Arizona’s Navajo and Apache counties. Working with two other Rotary clubs, she raised enough money to buy 3,000 dictionaries. She and her husband traveled 1,500 miles over three days to deliver the books to 72 schools. “My main desire was to give them to the kids on the reservations,” she says. “I remember how much it meant to me when I was a kid and somebody gave me something.”