Walking to return

A conversation between Alix Camacho Vargas (AC) and Erin Turner (ET)

12/22/24

AC

Sometimes, alpinists tie themselves together when they go up a mountain. In Spanish, the word for it is cordada—in English, a roped party. In both cases, it means climbers attached by the same rope and advancing together.

In a conversation with an alpinist from Colombia, it was highlighted that even if alpinists walk together on the same path, each person's experience is completely different.

So, I remembered “Reports from walked landscapes”,[1] the project where I invited you and other people to record their voices while walking. I returned to that playlist and found your report created at Bears Ears National Monument in Utah. I have never been to Utah and have not even Googled the National Monument to see pictures of it. The ideas that I have about that place all come from your report. While listening to your audio, I could imagine the half-moon at 40° from you, suspended above the two mesas, which look like bears' ears. I can also imagine your footsteps in the snow and the blue sky with the two little streaks from airplanes. 

The image that comes to my mind is completely different from yours. Of course, you have walked to that place, and I haven´t. But even walking on the same path will make our experience completely different. The desert will never be the same for both of us. Physical, emotional, and sensible conditions will determine our experience.

I returned to the word “cordada” and realized it is close to recordar (remember). A word in Spanish that comes from the Latin words re (new) and cordis (heart). The English word remember comes from the Latin rememorari, which is related to retaining memories. I think both words are perfect for thinking about walking. Cordada because even if we walk alone, we are tied to others—not just humans tied into the roped party, but also other beings, cycles, and times. This word also comes from the Latin cordis (heart), so we could say that when we walk, we have our hearts tied to other hearts. Everything beats, and we can feel all these different rhythms while we vibrate alongside them. When we walk, we are tied to all we know and don't know, and this is how we draw our paths between our certainties and doubts—between the paths that are already marked and drive us to a specific place and the new paths that we create by exploring the unknown. In addition, when we walk, we return to our hearts (recordamos) to retain a memory (to remember) of that space and moment that won't repeat. Even if we record our walks and try to repeat the same road, it won't ever be the same because the road and the walker are always changing. We, as walkers, change as the road does because we transform each other every time we meet. At the same time, walking is about recordar (remembering), because the heart and the mind are connected while we walk.  

Where are you? What are you tied to right now?  

2/29/24

ET

(I write retroactively about a walk I took 3 hours ago in Brooklyn, NY. I am presently flying over the country, looking through a bright light that is diffused through thin clouds. That grey winter color prevails.)

Less tied, more braided.

I return to your image of the rope of the alpine climbers. This object ties the footstep to the place like a song. Its cursive script makes a melody. Each footstep from each climber creates another instrument in the song.

I’m walking in Brooklyn, into the park that I walk to almost daily. This morning, there is such a noisy flock of birds in the bare trees over the basketball courts that I stop to listen to the cacophony. I never hear this many birds in Brooklyn. It sounds like a warm damp day in winter. And it is. People are out, sitting in the sun, walking with friends, playing basketball. Tracing my favorite smooth curved paths that take me to the row of park benches under the trees, a DJ plays seductive grooves across the meadow, and I weave out and almost aimlessly in to listen to the music longer—Abusey Junction by Kokoroko. The word junction also reminds me of the act of braiding. There is a node where three parts intersect. Yet, there will be a different strand on the top as they cross themselves over and over. Walking invisible lines, imbedding invisible songs.

The Songlines (1987) is this beautiful book by Bruce Chatwin that speaks about the Dreamtime of the Aborigines in Australia. In this worldview, walking is an act done to sing into existence the memory of the landscape. And in remembering the song, singing, and walking it over and over, the landscape is created over and over again with each walk.

I think about these ideas of return and creation when thinking about Bears Ears and how you define walking as a constant connection between memory and the heart. It is a place that has been the crossroads, the junction, the place of return for many peoples Indigenous to North America since at least 13000 BP. Today, five Native Nations—Navajo, Ute Mountain Ute, Hopi, Pueblo of Zuni, and the Ute Indian Tribe of Utah—represent the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition to protect this place. In fact, each of these nation’s respective languages come from distinct language roots developed over the course of tens of thousands of years. Each discrete language describes Bears Ears as the ears of a bear: Hoon’Naqvut (Hopi), Shash Jáa (Navajo), Kwiyaghat u Nükavachi/Kwiyagatu Nukavachi (Ute), Ansh An Lashokdiwe (Zuni). The implication of this naming means that the story of the land is not only deeply embedded deep into these language histories, but that the story of the land and the distinct people who have traversed it over the course of thousands of years are all deeply embedded within each other. As we can see with the naming of this landscape, not only have these cultures continually returned to Bears Ears over thousands of years, they have also influenced each other in how they see and perceive that landscape themselves. They have embedded that cultural sharing and that memory into their languages. This is deep knowledge, deep relationship, and incredibly deep memory.[2]

(We are out of the thin cloud and watching an ocean of undulating cloud waves far underneath us. A striation of deep blue and ambiguous purple stripe the horizon.)

You say that each walk is different because there are always different conditions that we as humans are experiencing and that the landscape is constantly shifting as well. Does this statement assume that time continues in a straight line and in a forward motion? The geometry of remembering feels more cyclical to me, but also like a braiding movement, meaning that we are constantly returning something to the top, be it an interest, emotion, place, perception, or relationship. So what happens when we walk the places that we return to often? We remember moments of the past, we pass our heart over these places again and again, and like an x-ray—through our heart space—we see the invisible songlines that our body has traced onto this land turning into song. We remember these places and by returning to them fall more in love with them.

I think about these places that I return to as “my ecology”, or all that I participate in and with. I travel often, and sometimes that means new places, but it also means going back over and over to the same places. And in that returning, more and more intimacy is built, because more and more memory exists there. Therefore my heart continues to create the story of these places, singing them into existence over and over again. I'm thinking about this idea implanted into the etymology of RECORDAR… a return through the heart. We usually think about memory living in the mind, but in this word, it reminds us that memory is kept by returning to the heart space.

I’m heading to Oklahoma, another place that I frequent. I was born in Oklahoma. I often return to the prairies and big skies of Oklahoma. The emotions I have about returning are complex, because many memories exist for me in this place. But I continue to sing this place into existence: homeland. The prairie, like the desert, the páramo, or the ocean, means a subtle landscape, with subtle visual shifts. But as more intimacy is imbued into this landscape, the tiny red berry means the approaching winter, or the miniscule flower under the crunchy pale yellow grasses and frost means that the warming weather nears, and where I walked with a loved one, or where we shared sad news and an embrace.

The anatomy of a heart shows that when you stretch it open, it uncoils into a helix. When your heart opens it is in itself a cyclical form, curving around itself. I am in a moment of creation. But the winter kind. The kind where things are underground, waiting for the right moment to emerge from my heart space.

(The clouds have cleared, and the land underneath is quilted and patched together. Agriculture. There is a hazy glow in the distance, mystifying the horizon line.)

I walk with the intention of listening to the deep history of every place. When the world was submerged under great waters. It is a practice that I try to remember, to think about non-human scales, and the deep memory of the land itself.

Can a landscape have memory? Can it have intelligence? Is the mountain that the alpine climber traverses sentient?

1/08/25

AC

Looking at the Colombian central and eastern mountain ranges, divided by the Magdalena River in a city named Honda, I returned to your question about the memory of the landscapes. Inevitably, I think about Waman Puma de Ayala and his illustration of an Indigenous astrologer and poet walking with a Spanish hat on his head and a Kipu[3] in his left hand. I often return to this 17th-century image to remember why I am interested in walking and consider it an important part of my artistic practice.

Based on the Bolivian thinker Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui and her book Un mundo ch´ixi es posible[4] Waman Puma´s image shows an Indigenous astrologer and poet who knows the circle of the sun and the moon and practices his arts to sow food that has nourished his community since ancient times. In the book, the author explains that these images show us the materiality of cosmic knowledge, revealing that this productive activity is a sacred fact and not only earthly—it involves not just exchanges between humans but exchanges with the deities themselves. At the same time,  the figure is knotting—in his Kipu—the threads of memory. The common interpretation is that a Kipu was an Inka accounting system. However, this is a limited definition of how this sacred object functioned for the Inka. Rivera Cusicanqui explains that it was also a system to record desires, promises, and offerings to the Pachamama, among many other sacred activities. So the Kipu, in contrast with the symbolism found within the Spanish hat, represents how the Indigenous people stay connected with the cosmos. In effect, by using the Kipu, the Indigenous scholar symbolically resisted the violent colonial force that was trying to induce oblivion on the native community’s deep and rooted Indigenous knowledge. In other words, the Indigenous creativity challenges the imposition of the Spanish way of perceiving the world order. Therefore, the memories collected by Waman Puma transcend the human experience and linear time—they become cyclical like the seasons, returning to deep knowledge of the earth and cosmos and the interconnection between all creatures. Through walking, he keeps his personal and collective memories alive while connecting with the memory inscribed in the landscape and the cosmos—a memory threatened by the imposition of one god, one language, money, and accumulation as the only destiny.

In connection with Waman Puma’s illustration and your question, I believe landscapes hold memories often underestimated by anthropocentrism. Instead of thinking that we are separated from nature, we can feel part of everything surrounding us. Walking becomes a way to open cracks in Western history—a method to connect with the memory embedded in the landscape and to create new orders wherein there is no division between us and nature, reason and sensitivity, past, present, and future. It is similar to how alpinists walk, tying themselves together. In that sense, Waman Puma invites us to tie ourselves to everything that surrounds us and live connected.

In this context, when I say that each walk is different, it is because we and the landscape are not the same every time; I am not thinking about time as a straight line. On the contrary, walking is an act of creation that intertwines times that even surpass the duration of our existence. Thus, every time we walk, the memories of the landscape expand with our memories. 

You talked about braiding and composing songs with one's feet. Looking at the Indigenous astrologer and poet, I see him dancing barefoot and reciprocating with the cycles of the cosmos and the sacred places around him while looking to the future through the past of his colonial background. In addition, I see him braiding times and knowledge in his Kipu, expanding his memory beyond the present.

I return my gaze to the Magdalena River dividing two mountain ranges. I reflect on how walking around, observing, and listening to this place expands my memory. Now, I am standing on the Navarro Bridge. A sign on a wall says that it was built between 1894 and 1898 out of steel by the San Francisco Bridge Company, based in New York. History tells us that the bridge traveled from New York to Barranquilla through the Atlantic Ocean and sailed down the Magdalena River to Honda. It was built to connect Colombia's north and center for commercial purposes. Being on this bridge connects me with times and historical moments beyond me: the Industrial Revolution in the 18th century, the iron deposits found in Michigan and Minnesota; the German, British, and other immigrants working in the steel mills in the United States in the 19th century, even the Brooklyn Bridge, which I crossed many times while living in New York City, was an inspiration for the construction of this bridge in Honda, and a reflection of the modern values spreading around the world. Walking expands memory because it is like building bridges between times and spaces. I am here, aware that this moment is connected with pieces of mountain, people, dreams, needs, moments in the global industry, as well as the ways that human and non-human exploitation have defined the actions and promise of “progress”. Inevitably, being here and noticing what is surrounding me expands the knots of my Kipu—of my memory. I feel like talking with the visible and the invisible around me. I am sure that the information I am collecting here cannot be fully translated into rational thought nor organized in linear time. Therefore, walking allows me to speak other languages that cannot be articulated or materialized in words.  

Do you feel like your languages expand when you walk? How would you describe those other languages we speak when walking?

1/22/25

ET

I walk by the Hudson River on the west side of Manhattan. It is actively freezing. I take my phone out to collect some images of the frozen yet broken river, each ice piece divided by slushy and undulating boundaries. The pattern is like the skin of a blue giraffe who is slowly breathing. My fingers outside of the confines of my gloves immediately burn in the cold.

I have been thinking recently about inverse geometry. How to perceive the geometries of our landscape that are not visible to the human eye, such as what does the bottom of the river bed look like? This is something that we can imagine, as I am sure most of us have seen a dried river bed at some point in our lives—sandy bottom with patterns of undulation, or maybe a rocky bed littered with dried driftwood, as in the washes of the Southwest. But can we sense the shape of it internally, can we feel our stomach slide across the muddy bottom in our mind’s eye? Can we imagine what the river’s body would say to us if it could stand up and talk to our human faces? Can we intuit what a landscape that may be mined for copper looks like once all the ore is stripped from the center of the earth? Would it cry out? Or laugh terribly at the thundering music that plays for eighty years, tickling its back and disgorging it of its copper stomach? Can we feel the deep earth water bodies flowing underneath our feet, yards and yards below us?

I am reminded of a Yoko Ono instruction found in her book Grapefruit (1964):

WATER PIECE

Listen to the sound of the underground water.

1963 spring

or

EARTH PIECE 

Listen to the sound of the earth turning.

1963 spring

You mention meditation and awareness. I also think of deep awareness, connection, and some form of meditation when I walk alone. I practice Yoga Nidra, and, in a certain way, this practice has trained me to walk with more awareness and intuition. The practice of Yoga Nidra is done laying on your back like a corpse. Slowly you bring your attention to each part of the body, until you go around 61 nerve-rich points, helping to direct your attention inward. With the concentration that the practice brings, it is possible to sense internal organs, energies inside you, and then begin to travel outside of you. I imagine sensing the water flowing in the deep aquifers. I imagine the slow-moving process of minerals gritting their teeth over a million years. Is there a way that scale can be contorted in our feeble human perception? Is there a way to sense processes that are not on our body or time scale? This is the interesting thing about walking to me. It is a very human experience on a very human scale. But I often think about what better habitants we would be if we did not think in human scale. Some Indigenous thought demands a scale of 7 generations before and 7 generations after. This is roughly 150 years backwards and forwards. What if we actively practiced trying to perceive things on the scale of a tree or a rock? Would we expand our notion of connecting to non-human relatives? Would we have a deeper sense of reciprocity with the earthscape?

I was reading something by Willow Defebaugh recently that makes me think of walking with other awarenesses, or awareness for our other kin:

In April of last year, a group of scientists and philosophers came together to collaborate on a statement declaring scientific evidence for consciousness being widespread among other animals. Part of it states: “The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).” Although they make up 40% of living species we rarely give insects a second thought. A trillion are estimated to be farmed every year, with quadrillions wiped out by pesticides. But even animals as small as these may demonstrate sentience, it turns out. Studies in recent years have suggested that some insects feel pain and joy, have rich and complex inner lives, and display intelligence. Why is it so hard to see ourselves reflected in their kaleidoscopic eyes?[5]

Walking by the Hudson River, there was a sign showing the animals who call the river home, posted on the edge of the railing. I imagine all of their little breathing slowly harmonizing with the waves of the tidal river. I try to imagine and intuit the eels in the rocky abodes and the crabs clicking their little heels above them. The algaes dancing, unhindered by the frozen waters overhead. Can we slow down enough to perceive other creatures and even other mineral bodies in their states of existence? Create empathy with the mineral world?

As one who deeply respects Indigenous thought—as well as physics—I like to think about the idea that the hat and Kipu can be a balancing act between different perceptions; both are languages that dream or sing the world into existence.

Can I ask you to take a walk and follow the instructions from WATER PIECE and EARTH PIECE? What is your experience? Is the deep aquifer water inside the earth sentient like the insect or the human? Is the mineral body that it flows over also intelligent?

2/20/2025

AC

Thanks for your invitation to follow Yoko Ono´s instructions. When I received it, I thought it was a serendipity, a special coincidence that connects perfectly with the spirit of these days. 

I am in La Paz in Bolivia, doing an artistic residence focused on critically reflecting on the bicentennial of independence, which will be commemorated here in August. Recognizing that the colony is still embedded in our heteropatriarchal, homogenizing, and anthropocentric nation-states. We, three women artists in residence together,[6] are researching how independence is an illusion. The violence of the colony is still alive, trying to reduce our subjectivities and oppressing and exploiting the earth under the promises of progress and development drawn by a hegemonic model. So, we have been walking and visiting different places to reflect on how national archives, mint houses, museums, printing presses, and maps, among other places, operate as colonial devices for the whitewashing of history, structuring it in linear time and narrating it only from its “owners” the founders of the republics—that did not include human and non-human diversity. In parallel, we are walking and listening to different landscapes and people not included in History, with a capital H—or the history that assumes it is more important than other histories—seeking to create counter-narratives and perspectives that break the fixed, anthropocentric, and androcentric limits of what is perceived as official and true.

A few days ago, I was in Uyuni, the salt flat in the southwest of Bolivia, which you have also visited. At this time of the year, the summer's rain creates a mirror effect. So, I saw the sky, the clouds, the mountains, the people, and everything as if they were inside a kaleidoscope. While losing the notion of the Cartesian plane—with the clouds reflected on the ground and the perception that I was walking among them—I thought about the non-human scale you mentioned. It made me aware of the small dot I am in the middle of everything that surrounds me. Also, it made me think about the word humility related to the Latin word humilis, which can be translated as “being humble” but also as “grounded” or “from the earth” given its connection with the word humus (earth). I wondered if this is what humility feels like. I wonder if the people wanting to extract lithium from this salt flat—for batteries to continue advancing the construction of electric cars, among other technological purposes—have ever felt the immensity of the earth. I wonder if they have ever felt from Earth, or if they only reduce it as a ball full of minerals that they, the “owners”, can dominate, penetrate, violate, empty, and kill.

In the middle of that, I started following Yoko Ono´s WATER PIECE instructions. Walking barefoot, I heard the salt crunching when I stepped into the hexagrams formed on the ground by the salt. I felt how the salt crystals separated and how my foot sank. I was afraid of breaking the surface and falling into the water, so I began to look at the floor and walk carefully. Slowing my walk and putting all my attention into space led me to a lucky encounter. I heard something similar to the croaking of a small frog, and when I approached, I found a small hole through which water leaked from below to the surface. That inverted leak warned me of the brine and lake mud that accumulated below the visible. I noticed other holes in the ground and began to direct my walk towards them.

I stopped at a larger hole for quite a while and concentrated on the stalactic-looking brine formations. I saw them hanging from what I could no longer understand as the ground. Then, by surprise, I saw myself reflecting on the water and heard, “You are the salt flat”. The information did not reach my head but the middle of my chest. I was recordando, returning to the Earth with my heart (cordis). I couldn't do anything but put my hand in the water and caress the surface. Trying to soothe the pain that we were both feeling when visualizing the machines arriving at the salt flat to extract its lithium.

A few days before Uyuni, I was in Potosí. For many Indigenous cultures mountains are sacred. In Quechua, sacred places are called wak´as. P’utuxsi, Potosí, the hill from which the town is named, is a wak´a. After the first vein of silver was found in 1545, it started being exploited—first by the Spanish, then by the Republic, and, after changes in the mining laws during the 20th century, by local mining cooperatives.

In Potosí, it is possible to experience centuries of history, but not from a linear perspective. If space is broken in Uyuni, Cartesian time is broken there. The prehispanic, colonial, liberal, and populist horizons are intertwined. The mountain is still a wak´a but also, simultaneously, represents colonial exploitation and capitalistic accumulation. Miners keep alive the challa[7] practice—a tradition rooted in pre-Incan times when offerings were burned and buried in P’utuxsi to the forces of the manqhapacha––while celebrating the mining carnival.[8] This speaks to times when silver was understood not just as money but also had a symbolic value to be offered to the Pacha. The juxtaposition of multiple pasts consolidates the present.[9]  

In this way, being in Potosí makes it possible to understand that the colonial project has not been completed because there are still traces of memory much older than the one sought to be implanted from the perspective of an “old” and “new” world. Simultaneously, the colony is a project present and interwoven with the Republics, the nations, and the states. In other words, it still exists among the tension between persistence and resistance.

In Potosí, I remembered the instruction to listen to the sound of the earth turning. The Earth speaks in non-linear time. Something related to the Aymara aphorism “qhipnayr uñtasis sarnaqapxañani” on which Silvia Rivera Cusicanquis has based her theory on the Ch´ixi. This aphorism could be translated as “you have to walk through the present looking with the eyes of the future (behind) and the past (forward).” Similar to the Angelus Novus of Paul Klee, described as the Angel of History by Walter Benjamin, who has his face turned toward the past watching a chain of catastrophes as he is driven by the furious wind towards the future—towards progress.[10] Benjamin’s dialectic image follows the same symbolism as the Aymara aphorism in terms of breaking with historicism and the division between past, present, and future. The rupture of linear time stops us from seeing history in historiographical terms and/or narrating the events as past. Instead, by understanding the overlap between the past and future in our present, we can comprehend the political dimension of history, projecting our desire and anticipating dangers. That rupture of time inhabits the political power of transformation—the possibility of opposition being carried by the furious winds of progress, without hesitation.

Taking this into account, and going back to the image of Waman Puma, the contrast between the Spanish hat and the Kipu does not represent a balancing act between different perceptions. It represents the contradictions that inhabit our history and the impossibility of whitewashing it as long as our long memory persists, as long as we continue walking between times and spaces and breaking the linearity immersed in the official narratives, knowing that something different is possible.

How does walking accompany your political and historical consciousness? How is walking accompanying you to break the linearity and homogenization of history that the renewed emergence of fascism worldwide is trying to impose?

2/25/25

ET

We both find ourselves walking in mining country. I am in Arizona, at a place known as the copper triangle by some, Oak Flat by others, and Chi’chil Bildagoteel, “the place of the oaks” by the Apache. There are many mines that have slowly slurped up the mountains and towns and left toxic tailing sites, acid pits, contamination, and cancer in this area. I come here to walk and run with political and historical consciousness. Let me explain.

Chi’chil bildagoteel is another place of return for me. I first learned of the fight to protect Oak Flat in 2015 when researching cultural heritage sites within the US that were at risk for erasure. A bill proposing a land transfer between Resolution Copper (a transnational conglomerate of Rio Tinto and BHP Billiton) and Tonto National Forest was denied 10 consecutive years by Congress, only to be slipped into an unrelated defense bill in the 11th hour in 2013 by then Governor of Arizona, John McCain and signed by President Obama.[11] The Apache Stronghold, a non-profit organization from San Carlos, has led the fight to protect this place, which is considered sacred to the Apache people. Over the years, I have walked to the petroglyphs, the waterfall, the spring, and through Ga’an Canyon. I have heard coyotes howl, javelina stomping, and the Ga’an dancers blessing the people and the ground who have come to protect Oak Flat. I have seen ceremony and experienced the magic of these hills.

{I add a rupture in time here, written on May 4, 2025 in regards to some recent advances with the fight to protect Oak Flat. ...

The federal U.S. government on Thursday, April 17, announced that it plans, as early as June 16, to publish a final environmental impact statement (which the Biden administration had previously paused in 2023 to give the Forest Service more time to consult with tribes) which grants Resolution Copper to move forward with the transfer and destruction of Oak Flat. The Apache Stronghold has filed an emergency motion in federal district court to ensure that the government cannot transfer Oak Flat before the Supreme Court decides whether to take Apache Stronghold v. United States. The court scheduled a hearing on the emergency motion for May 7, 2025, at 9:30am, before the Honorable Judge Steve P. Logan, in the Sandra Day O'Connor United States Courthouse, located at 401 West Washington Street, Phoenix, Arizona. On May 9, 2025 Judge Logan temporarily blocked the land transfer until the Supreme Court resolves the case. For updated information see @protectoakflat}

Understanding how to walk here is understanding the history of this region—Apacheria. Acknowledging this history through walking and running is the way that the Apache Stronghold reclaim this sacred landscape and resist the extraction that knocks at its front door.

The Chiricahua Apache are from an area in Arizona known as the Chiricahua National Monument. Entering into this landscape, columns of limestone adorned with a vibrant neon green lichen stand as an ancient army occupying the undulating canyonlands. When the Apache were first rounded up as prisoners of war, they were taken to Fort Bowie, about 15 miles from the Chiricahua Mountains. From there, the Chiricahua and other western Apache bands, along with the Yavapai, were taken to Old San Carlos in 1872, the first concentration camp, also known as Hell’s Forty Acres. This area is now known as the San Carlos Apache Reservation.  

Twelve miles as the crow flies from the Rez line, or 48 miles along the stretch of highway, connects us to Oak Flat—a flat area amidst the low rolling mountains and canyonlands that sit nearly 3000 feet above the desert valley where Phoenix sprawls. This landscape is sprinkled with Emory Oak Trees, sustenance that is worth more in weight than the copper ore found below the ground, providing minerals, vitamins, protein, and fiber to those who consume it. This landscape is also considered sacred by the Apache, who say that their Ga’an deities preside in the canyon that wraps around Oak Flat.

You speak about walking to crack open the layers of time and space in a way to almost preside outside of time and space. I have felt that kind of rupture here. The Ga’an are powerful mountain spirits, deities of the Apache. When the Ga’an dance in front of you, it is considered the greatest blessing, an embodiment of the mountain spirits themselves, and they offer a connection with the ancestor world. These dancers are also known as crown dancers, for the headdresses they wear are crowns painted with ancient symbols. It is no surprise that as you pass over Ga’an canyon on hwy 60, a sign reads “Devils Canyon”. Of course, this is the layering of time and space and then the rupture you speak of. The white Christians who arrived and threw new names all over an already beloved landscape did not understand the sacredness of the Ga’an, yet considered the dancers to be dancing for the devil. We walk to bring back the name of Ga’an Canyon. I walk to accompany the Apache people back to their sacred lands; to witness their return. 

In an effort to bring visibility to the fight to protect Oak Flat and acknowledge the brutal history found in this landscape, the Apache Stronghold organizes a yearly run/march where a staff of eagle feathers is carried out of Old San Carlos to Oak Flat by a relay of runners. As a descendant of a white miner (my great-grandfather) who found himself living in both Bolivia and Arizona, I run with the Apache Stronghold, accompanying them out of Hell’s Forty Acres to the sacred place known as Oak Flat, to reclaim this place of return. By returning to these places, the Chiricahua mountains, Fort Bowie, Hell’s Forty Acres, Chi’chil bildagoteel—or even P’utuxsi—we sing into existence the memory of these places, praying with our feet. I find this practice to be an important and sacred act of resistance. Resisting destruction and standing up against the new capitalistic distraction, which you have already mentioned previously, the green-washing and promise of progress for electric cars and improved technologies. Exploitation of the land and the Indigenous people is the United States’ constant project since its inception—but also, everywhere. So we must constantly resist this colonial project, as you are actively doing now in Bolivia. Because these places have other names, they have deeper histories, they are places of deep connection, and as you mention, we are these landscapes ourselves. I truly believe this: by walking, we remember the depth of who we are.

I agree with you about the need to conjure up the long memories that the landscape holds. Regardless of location—Colombia, New York, Bolivia, Oklahoma, or Arizona—I believe that by walking places with the intention of remembering and resisting the colonial narrative, we can connect our hearts to these places and remember that there are other ways of participating in the world with reciprocal actions and attitudes. I believe that the land remembers us when we return to these sacred places or hold ceremony there, dancing their memory into existence.

While going through my phone to find a photo of Bears Ears, I find a photo of a piece of paper with the following words:

The single biggest thing I learned was from an Indigenous elder of Cherokee descent, Stan Rushworth, who reminded me of the difference between a Western settler mindset of “I have rights” and an Indigenous mindset of “I have obligations.” Instead of thinking that I am born with rights, I choose to think that I am born with obligations to serve past, present, and future generations, and the planet herself.

3/08/25

AC

Given the political and spiritual power of walking, perhaps we have no choice but to end this journey by inviting whoever reads us to go out for a walk.

3/09/25

ET

Dear reader, how do you dance your sacred places into existence? Can you hear the sound of the aquifer underneath your feet? Move your heart over the landscape and watch as your mineral kin, and others, embrace you.

Notes

[1] Reports from walked landscapes is an ongoing participatory archival. The project began as part of the exhibition Art as Social Action curated by Chloë Bass for the Queens Museum, New York in 2020. To learn more about the project visit: https://espacioparahabitar.org/reports-from-walked-landscapes/

[2] R.E. Burrillo, Behind Bears Ears: Exploring the Cultural and Natural Histories of a Sacred Landscape, Salt Lake City, Torrey House Press, 2020

[3]An ancestral device made of wool or cotton ropes was used to record, through knots, Inka´s accounting and spiritual information.

[4] I consciously refuse to translate the title into English since the author rejects the English edition circulating online. In the edition in Spanish, by the Piedra Rota publishing house, Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui explains how the edition in English not only mistranslates some concepts - for example llama, the animal, is translated as flame-, but also, because that edition was not agreed with the author.

[5] Defebaugh, Willow, 1.17.25, Exploring Consciousness in the Animal Kingdom, Atmos.earth, atmos.earth/overview-animal-consciousness-exploring-consciousness-in-the-animal-kingdom/

[6] I am part of a residency in Materia Gris in La Paz and doing a collaborative research with Gala Pereira, a curator from Bolivia, and Yanina Luponio, an Argentinian philosopher and dancer.

[7] The act of Challar. A word in Quechua for the practice of giving the earth something to drink or eat in gratitude or payment for what it gives us.

[8]   In Andean ethics, the land (Pacha) is divided in three spaces or levels:  Alaxpacha, the world above. Akapacha is the visible world in which we live. And Manqhapacha is the inner world, the bowels of the earth. 

[9] In this idea, I return to the concept of Ch´ixi by Silvia Rivera Cusicanqui which refers to an indeterminate entity that is not white or black but both things simultaneously. She proposes this concept to overcome the idea of ​​the mestizo, a new entity produced by the mixture between Spanish and Indigenous people. “The mestizo believes that there is a way out, a synthesis and a “third republic” supported by forgetting the contradictions that inhabit his multiple pasts” (translation by me).

[10] Benjamin, W. (n.d.). On the concept of history. Frankfurt School: On the Concept of History by Walter Benjamin. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/benjamin/1940/history.htm

[11] Davidson, Osha Gray. "A Sacred Place And A Sacred Quest To Save It: The Oak Flat land in Arizona is holy to the Apaches. A mining company wants to blow a two-mile-wide hole in it." Huffpost, Dec. 27, 2019, huffpost.com/entry/oak-flat-arizona-apache-mining_n_5dfa9a7be4b006dceaa7e48c

See also www.apache-stronghold.com