In Navajo culture, the hogan is not just a traditional home, but a metaphor for the ordered universe.
Corner posts represent the four sacred mountains that encompass the Navajo world and hold up the sky. A doorway on the east side welcomes morning sunlight.
The hogan, translated as “place home,” is connected to everything else, a vital part of identity.
But most Navajo people no longer live in hogans.
Across the reservation, tens of thousands of families live in poverty that dictates their circumstances, in homes handed down through generations, or in crumbling housing projects.
Some 70,000 homes need to be built or repaired.
Since 1998, Washington has given the Navajo Nation more than $1.6 billion to provide new housing.
But in the past eight years, records show, the tribe and its housing authority have built only 543 homes.
Why, with tens of thousands of families in need, do so many people still live in homes that are neither modern nor well-built?
More than a billion dollars taken.
So where are the homes?