I've made it to Flagstaff. The drive was at times harrowing and mind-numbing due to its ungodly length, but once I made it out of Amarillo, Texas the skies grew enormous, stretching far across open plains to distant horizons in every direction. The vast landscapes helped carry my mind far away from the road and provided some time for meditation on my project objectives. I took I-40 the entire way from Chapel Hill to Flagstaff. I feel like I crawled across the whole gut of the U.S. on one long flat black line.
Anyway, upon my arrival I have been in touch with a few Hopi Natives who run a local ethno-botanical store called Winter Sun. Starting Tuesday I will begin work illustrating live plant/herbal specimens for a book that a Hopi woman is working on. I get the sense that this work will be a project in and of itself, and I am grateful that the folks I have encountered thus far have been so receptive of my presence.
I also checked in at Ta'al Hooghan, a local info shop and media center run by a Navajo native. It seems that there will be ample opportunity to get involved with skill-share nights there, and I plan to help print the posters I made for the Human Rights Convention(featured below in an earlier post) with a modified quote and donating them to the store.
Hearing about some of the specific issues, such as a fight for religious freedom and its ensuing supreme court battle to prevent a ski-resort from using re-cycled water to make artificial snow, has forced me to come face to face with the real word significance and gravity of the plight of North America's rightful Natives and their respective cultures (*water is considered a Kachina spirit that the Hopi, Navajo, Apache, and other local tribes hold sacred, traditionally and to this day. using recycled water from the city to make artificial snow equates to sacrilege, e.g. someone pissing on a bible in a church*).
One of many difficult nuances that I have perceived in this case is that the U.S. courts have a hard time even understanding that to at least 11 nations indigenous to this area, the entire mountain range, not just marked and quantified parts of it, is considered extremely sacred as a provider of life and font of spiritual relation to the world. It's as if an entire code of understanding cannot be translated between Natives and U.S. officials and so trying to straighten out the situation entirely according to U.S. court customs is frustrating and ironically, quite unjust.
Looking ahead, I will be assisting others at various community gardens on the Navajo Res. and will also take part in a collaborative mural project beginning in Mid-June. I'm excited to be back out in the desert, though the weather has been surprisingly mild and overcast since my arrival. More updates to surface on the eventual horizon.
peace,
CZ
