Wide Ruins is a chapter of the Navajo Nation and a census-designated place (CDP) in Apache County, Arizona, United States.

[4] Jilłháál, or Jilhaal, whose name is not easily translated but refers to a war club, was an early 18th-century singer, warrior, and runner.

He lived among the Rio Grande Pueblo peoples and migrated with many of them to the refuge of Dinetah at the start of the Spanish invasion and occupation of present-day Arizona and New Mexico.

Jilhaal is believed to have brought many cultural, architectural, and agricultural influences to the greater Ganado-Wide Ruins region.

Research suggests that Jilhaal contributed to the construction of fortifications to the north and south, notably in the hills east of Wide Ruins, 15 miles to the southeast of Ganado.

Oral history research suggests that he inhabited "Wide Ruins, (meaning the Ancestral Pueblo site) and, a few miles north up Wide Ruins Wash," at the citadel of Kin Naazinii (Upstanding House); if not contributed to its construction – with the help of elder Daalgai – "a Navajo fortified 'pueblito' that archaeologists date at 1720–1805 (NLC, site S-MLC-UP-L; Bannister and others 1966:8; Navajo Nation 1967:263, 271, 285; Gilpin 1996)."

These pre-Columbian associations of Jilhaal, together with the idea that Wide Ruins was some kind of 'boundary' place between Hopi and Zuni zones ..., makes one wonder if the north-south travel corridor through Wide Ruins to Canyon de Chelly could have been a late 'everyone's land' as conceptualized by LaBlanc (1999:70, 333) between settlement clusters" much older.

[5] According to oral history, "Kin Naazinii was built as a fortress, with [defensive] slits in the walls for shooting arrows at enemies.