Amid
a frenzied conversation over shrinking public lands, Native Americans
run hundreds of miles to honorand take backthe land
that's sacred to them
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Dustin
Martin (right) organized the Sacred Strides for Healing event
along with other organizations.
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Everyone ran the final
miles to Bears Ears National Monument together. It was a sunny,
blue-sky day in March, and 45 pairs of feet shuffled down a road
of soft red dirt, kicking up a dust cloud. One woman wore her jingle
dress, a garment used in ceremonial dances, its rows of metal cones
clinking as she moved. Some still wore running shoes, but many had
switched to moccasins. No one spoke. At this point, many of them
had been running relay-style for three days straight, from sunrise
until the light ran out.
The groupcomposed
of members of the Hopi, Navajo, Ute, and Ute Mountain Ute tribes;
a few of the New Mexico pueblos; and a contingent from the Wintun
and Maidu tribes in Californiahad come together to run nearly
800 miles from New Mexico, Arizona, or Colorado to Bears Ears from
March 12 to 17. Four separate routes snaked like veins through patches
of tribal land, atop mesas, through coniferous forests, past oil
pump jacks, and alongside busy highways. The event, with its rented
minivans and overflowing boxes of performance snacks, was logistically
similar to a team relay run like the Ragnar race series, but to
define it as such would be misguided. These weren't racersthey
were prayer runners. And this group represented a largely untapped
generation of voices and activists, many of whom are young, in the
current fight over public lands.
A little more than a
year earlier, in December
2016, President Obama designated 1.35 million acres to protect
this land as a national monumenta move that was almost entirely
due to an unlikely alliance between five of the above tribes, who
had put aside a long history of animosity to form the Bears
Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition. Then, in December 2017, President
Trump shrank
Bears Ears and opened opportunities for extraction there.
To participate in the
public lands conversation, a person could call their local representatives
or exercise their right to show up in protest outside a state capitol.
Or they could run.
The event, Sacred Strides
for Healing, came about in the name of preserving important places,
but also in the spirit of improbable unity. Each tribe is distinct
in their traditions, and some have histories of conflict with each
other. A local Navajo leader likened the relationship between the
Navajos and the Utes to that of the Palestinians and the Israelis.
"We were mostly looking to heal our relationships with each other,
and we realized that those relationships are rooted in the land,"
says Dustin Martin, 28, who is Diné (Navajo) and the executive
director of Wings of America,
a Santa Febased youth running nonprofit. "My whole life I've
heard people talk about why we're so different or why we can't come
together. One of the main purposes of this run was unity."
Martin and Wings helped
organize the run with the Bears Ears Prayer Run Alliance, Utah Diné
Bikéyah, and the Seventh Generation Fund for Indigenous Peoples.
He also led the 245-mile Zuni/Navajo leg, which started less than
a mile from his childhood home near Gallup, New Mexico. There were
three other routes: The Pueblo/Navajo route started in Santa Ana
Pueblo, just outside of Albuquerque, New Mexico. The Navajo/Hopi
route began in Flagstaff, Arizona. The Ute route started from Towaoc,
Colorado. While the group moved toward Bears Ears, schoolchildren
in each region ran laps in solidarity. They hoped to collectively
log 1,000 miles for the cause. They ended up running 1,240.
Native Americans have
a long tradition of running, both for ceremonial purposes and with
messenger runners, who would often cover great distances on foot
before they had access to horses. "Those that could run messages
to other people quickly were revered. And that's in our blood,"
Martin says. Many people in the Sacred Strides group would describe
themselves as runners, though plenty vehemently denied the label.
One young woman hadn't run four miles in a row before this, but
it mattered to her to participate in this particular event.
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(Forest
Woodward Photography Inc.)
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Bears Ears is one of
the most talked-about public lands under threat, though the conversation
often glosses over how sacred it is to many Native Americans. Prayer
runs, which aren't protests or purely awareness-raising events,
are a more personal way to honor and interact with these places.
They've been organized for other reasons in recent years, like supporting
the Standing Rock Sioux's fight against the Dakota Access oil pipeline
in 2016. Indigenous youth from the Hopi and Navajo tribes organized
a 195-mile prayer run, Three Sisters for Bears Ears, in late December
2017 at the time the monument was shrunk. According to Martin, to
run in prayer means to run for something other than yourself. "It's
something unselfish and without ego," he says.
Still, this run wasn't
absent an agenda. "We took a nonpolitical stance, but a major intention
behind this was bringing our people together to work together, to
raise our voices about what's going on in Bears Ears," says Brian
Monongye, one of the run's organizers and the liaison for the Hopi
Tribe. The future of the monument will
play out in court. Various tribal groups filed three separate
lawsuits against the Trump administration in late 2017, all of which
question presidential authority under the Antiquities Act. The Hopi
Tribe, Pueblo of Zuni, and Ute Mountain Ute Tribethree of
the five tribes that comprise the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalitionall
filed together. A coalition of other tribal groups and conservation
organizations filed the two additional suits. All of the suits concerning
the reduction of the monument were consolidated into one and will
be heard together in court at an undetermined date and location.
According to Monongye,
this puts the tribes in the position of having to demonstrate their
claim to the land and prove to Western society that this is their
homeland and that they have a long history and connection to it.
"Nobody is going anywhere, so we've got to learn to live peacefully
among each other," Monongye says. "And it really begins with the
young people to break those barriers down."
On the first day, five
runners huddled together on the side of a Forest Service road in
New Mexico's Jemez Mountains on the Pueblo/Navajo route. They stood
just where the paved road, which hugs the wall of a box canyon on
the Rio Guadalupe, cedes to a dirt road that winds through a forest
of ponderosas. When the first runner took off, a support vehiclethe
de facto mile markerzipped ahead to indicate the handoff point.
There, the runner would pass a small black velvet pouch to the next
person, who would then take off down the road. The pouch, belonging
to 28-year-old Graham Biyáál, was filled with stones,
shells, and other tokens of personal significance. Biyáál
was sick and injured, knocking back cold medication and running
with a limp, but this was still where he wanted to spend his spring
break from college. "For me, my way of making my voice known is
through my actionscovering these tracks and these miles and
physically carrying those prayers from our homelands," Biyáál
says.
The runners repeated
that same process for 93 miles that day. And they did the same thing
again for the next two days, only stopping to sleep on the floor
of whichever Navajo Nation chapter house or community center opened
their doors.
Beck Touchin handed out
small bags of homemade snacksdried fruits, venison, doughnutsto
incoming runners from the back of her red Dakota Sport, which she
calls Red Rez Betty. "As indigenous people, when you see someone
who doesn't have respect for what is important to you, on national
TV and in the media, there's a lot of frustration and anxiety because
you feel like there's nothing you can do," she says. "I mean, who's
going to listen to me?" Touchin had participated in prayer runs
before, but this was going to be her first time to Bears Ears. "The
prayer run put my heart at ease. The healing part is to be able
to touch it, to feel it, to experience it. And being here? It feels
like home." Before returning to New Mexico's Laguna Pueblo, where
she lives, Touchin would put more than 900 miles on her old truck.
On the second day, the
Pueblo/Navajo route ran from Counselor to Shiprock, New Mexico.
Many of the routes involved long stretches on the side of busy highways,
and semi trucks regularly blazed by as Jasmine Felipe, 24, of Acoma
Pueblo, popped headphones into her ears and started off down the
shoulder of Highway 550. The only structures on the horizon belonged
to oil refineries, fields of pump jacks slowly dipping their craned
necks into the ground. "What I want is the respect of land, the
respect of each other, the respect of culture and beliefs, and the
respect of sacred sites," Felipe says. "Because they're not going
to be here forever. And once you lose that identity, once you lose
your culture and your sense of spirituality, I don't see the point
of living."
At the end of the second
day, as the route finished in Shiprock, the 7,200-foot peak of the
same name came into view. The rock is sacred for the Navajo and
rises abruptly and dramatically from the flat surrounding landscape.
"We did once run all these lands. We did not used to travel by highway,"
says 33-year-old Alicia Littlebear, who organized this leg of the
route. "As I'm doing this run, I'm not feeling any pain and I'm
not feeling scared. These sacred sites are very special to us, and
I would like people to know that and to not take these things away
from us, not take it for granted, not develop that land."
On the third day, Martin
led runners on the Zuni/Navajo route making their way north from
Chinle Junction to Rock Point, Arizona. A group of fast high school
runnerslike, five-minute-mile fasthad joined for the
day's miles. Many of them Martin knew through their involvement
with Wings of America, and some were former Wings of America national
team members. The routes all converged at dusk on the third day
at a campsite in White Rock, Utah, near the San Juan River. From
there, all of the tribes would run the final miles together. The
wind blew almost constantly at camp, so people set up their personal
tents inside a big twin-peaked circus tent set up on the edge of
the dusty field. Still, everyone managed to wake up covered in a
fine layer of dust that got between their teeth and into their morning
oatmeal.
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(Forest
Woodward Photography Inc.)
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Regina
Lopez-Whiteskunk,
48, former co-chair of the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition and
former tribal leader of the Ute Mountain Ute Tribe, addressed a
group around the campfire on the morning of the final leg of the
run. She wore a black hooded sweatshirt that read "Regina, the Perfect
Mix Between Princess and Warrior." "Holding a sign that said something
derogatory wasn't ever us, but running this land and using it is
us," she said.
The last 20 miles of
the route to the final gathering site in Bears Ears wound through
a wash on that dusty red-dirt road. Martin ran the entire 20 miles
without stopping. Felipe had never run in her traditional dress
and moccasins, but she did now. Many women had their hair tied back
with yarn. Those in the front of the pack held staffs adorned with
feathersphysical manifestations of the prayers they carried.
Most wore tired smiles. Together, they arrived at a small clearing
surrounded by trees and assembled into a large circle, where they'd
stay for the next few hours as people spoke.
"Some people talked about
this being an endpoint, but I like to think it's more of a beginning
for us. If we forgot what this land meant to us, this reminded us
of it. And if we never knew, then we learned something this week,"
Martin says. "I want to remind us all to pray for those people that
don't understand why we're here. We need them on our side, and in
our family, if we're truly going to be able to be stewards for this
land."
A man and his two sonsall
of whom were whiteapproached the circle from the road. The
tension was palpable; some of the run's leaders mentioned they'd
encountered some friction with the locals in San Juan County. The
older of the boys announced that the group's vehicles were blocking
their camper down the road, before turning to walk away. His father
didn't follow, instead taking a few steps in toward the circle.
"Is it OK if I join you?"
he asked.
Martin smiled.
The
Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition
In July of 2015, leaders from five Tribes founded the Bears Ears
Inter-Tribal Coalition, representing a historic consortium of sovereign
tribal nations united in the effort to conserve the Bears Ears cultural
landscape. The five nations are committed to working together.
https://bearsearscoalition.org
Wings
of America
Inspired by the cultural, spiritual and competitive legacy of Native
runners, Wings empowers Native youth and their families.
http://www.wingsofamerica.org
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