Sacred Shrines

Heavy with backpacks, we emerge from the dripping rain forest into the welcome mid-day brightness of the driftwood-clogged strand on the Olympic Peninsula. Placid doe and their still-spotted fawns wander serenely, incurious. Sea lettuce and jungles of stringy kelp the color of tarnished copper litter the narrowing strip to the petroglyph site called “Wedding Rock.”

Indigenous peoples use an expression appropriate not only for the petroglyphs and pictographs but also for all the “bones of the earth.” “The rocks speak,” they say. All things are connected. Not by oversight are the forty-some petroglyphs of this rock art gallery vulnerable to the sea. But the vulnerability of these Ozette writings to technology could not have been foretold.

Gratefully, we drop our packs on the cool sand and set up four of the five cameras that have been our constant, unfailing companions. Before long, there will be work to do. But now, we savor the moment—children in a new playground—leaping from boulder to boulder, excited by each petroglyph discovery.

Dusk laps the shore with the incoming tide. The mercurial liquid seeps past the remnants of fragile crustaceans, curling over polished, fist-sized stones. Inching up the tripod legs, it fills the recesses around still jagged boulders, reuniting with stylized whales etched deeply on their surface. These are killer whales . . . mysteriously smiling.

Water pearls around the pocked, shin-high granite slab. On its leeward side, a three-foot carving of an orca mother rejoins the lifetide that she and the cetacean baby within her symbolize. The message of the ochre-reddened rock drawing is clear. This is a sacred place. At this place, and at secret sites not unlike this, Makah whalers—keeping the ritual of their ancestors—fasted and prayed. They understood. The hunter and the hunted are one in the continuum of life.

The cycle of life is everywhere rhythmical. The ebb’s silent leave-taking unveils hidden caverns. In the morning light, the pellucid tide pools teem with miraculous creatures. An olive drab crescent, armed with a clipboard, hunches over a distant pool. Dipping and dunking, she extracts samples from the microcosm.

“I’m testing the water,” she replies automatically to my query. “We’re recording the health of the tide pool ecosystem before the oil slick hits.”

Before the oil slick hits?

The ranger slips the catches in her day pack. It is just a handful of words. But her grim news snares us like a lasso on a calf’s leg. Why is this so incomprehensible? We are, after all, on assignment for Sierra Club Books and Random House to photograph sacred places that are threatened and endangered by just such recklessness.

We have been on the beach less than twenty-four hours. Although working on a deadline, we had spent the preceding days back-roading through slain rain forests. Over the years, we had taken our place among those who opposed clear-cutting. Yet we had only known clear-cuts as two-dimensional abstractions—full-page spreads, at most—in environmental advocacy magazines. But here, now, the grim statistics came to life—remaining was less than 10 percent of the virgin forests early Indians knew. . . . The devastation was tangible. Like fallen enemy soldiers, profanely dismembered, trees whizzed past us—acres and acres of them—heaped high onto logging trucks bound for pulp mills and Japanese plywood plants. Despair gripped us. We had no need of more. We left the radio off and our psyches to heal. What could be more devastating than the raped, denuded mountains we were seeing?

The beach south of Cape Alava had seemed a Zion. So appealing had been the shimmering reflections of the night before on that pacific body that only when the sky no longer recorded cobalt on our Polaroid proofs did we reluctantly pack away the cameras and leave the tripods to stand guard over our tent as we slept.

Now, rocking on the gray main, ever closer to the centuries-old symbol of life we had photographed such a short time before, threatens an insoluble, thickening, bituminous mass. Beyond sight, the ritual tug of the halcyon waters flirts innocently with the indiscriminate drift.

Cape Alava was just one of many stops on our journey over the past fifteen years as husband-and-wife team using our documentary and his unusual light-painted night photography to record and interpret such fragile landscapes—secret and sacred places endangered by a host of unnatural disasters. Perhaps it was providence that fortuned our presence on the beach that night that seems like yesterday.

One year and a dozen incidents just as disquieting later, a glossy 1993 Sierra Club Special Edition Calendar, “Sacred Places: Native American Sites,” lay in our hands. We flipped past the cover image, Pueblo Alto, with Chaco Canyon’s opalescent moon rising over an Anasazi mesa; past January’s varicolored clay cliffs at Martha’s Vineyard; past a mysterious ceremonial kiva in a region aptly named by the Spaniards “Mesa Verde”; past an ancient Mississippian temple mound, for centuries gouged and disfigured by farmers’ plows; past all these memories to retrace with broadened understanding the impression of the orca mother.

The many months of photographing for that first calendar brought us into relationship with the sacred places that appear between its covers. Each of the scores of sites that couldn’t be included also taught us a lesson. Each raised and continue to raise sobering questions. Will greed and apathy destroy these places of power? Will the children of tomorrow know them only as stories on the wind? We’re reminded of the many stories told to us and kept on tape and in our hearts.

At that time, cultural preservation was a fairly new undertaking for the Sierra Club. Club leadership and members enlightened to the link between preservation of land and the preservation of indigenous peoples supported a major educational project that was to become the Sacred Places calendar. Editors selected images to represent a variety of geographic regions, which produced both a genre of sites and a range of threats to their survival.

From Atlantic to Pacific, we bumped over back roads, slogged through clay-mush, and baked in the desert. From the four winds, the collective voice of traditional peoples shouted to be heard: “We are still here.” And with anguish, came the same invectives: “The destruction of our sacred places must stop.”

But it hasn’t.

While at work on the calendar, we learned from a report by tribal leaders, members of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act Coalition, presented in a hearing before the House of Representatives, that at least 44 sacred sites in 10 states were being desecrated or threatened by destruction. Such hearings are punctuated with disenfranchising stories. Each underscores the basic conflicts between Indians and whites: differing concepts of land and the essential qualities of human beings who derive nourishment from that land.

A part of the land—not apart from it—Indigenous lifeways are intricately and intimately entwined with place. There is a relationship that acknowledges and celebrates the equality of all things. People and place are linked through the rituals of birth, life and death. A distant mountain behind which the Sun is born, and a grassy meadow where the ancestors lay become hallowed ground.

Too few people think of land that way. It is the artificial separation from the Earth Mother, contend native peoples, that promotes and allows her exploitation. They say it is because we distance ourselves from her that we guiltlessly relegate her to a commodity to be traded on Wall Street—an unlimited resource that can be rapaciously consumed. The attitude is a dangerous one, they warn. And we may see the effects of such apathy acutely if exploration is allowed in the Artic National Wildlife Refuge.

Before the turn of the twenty-first century, the Indigenous Americans we met predicted a rapacious energy-hungry society in which unchecked exploitation ensures an environmental nightmare. They fear that without global recognition that all acts have consequences, in which all things are related, more peoples will lose their ancestral land, language, rituals, ceremonies and, finally, their beliefs.

“And then,” said the late Cha-das-ka-dum Which-ta-lum, when he served as Lummi tribal specialist from Washington state, “you will have killed our culture. This nation has been trying to do that for hundreds of years. Take away our remaining sacred places,” he said ominously, “and you will have succeeded.” He died still working to preserve the rapidly disappearing places of is childhood . . . places where his grandmother took him to look for medicine plants and to pray in the stillness.

Before pale visitors brought ashore disease and their colonial concept of land, before vast tankers and smaller ill-fated vessels spilled glistening black death onto pristine beaches, before uranium slag heaps leached deadly poisons into tumbling streams and crystal rivers, before smelters belched sooty filth into Father Sky, before giant lumber mills chewed up grandfather trees and the forest wept its soil away, the indigenous peoples knew Mother Earth and called these places sacred.

Razed, wrecked, plundered and ravaged, polluted and flooded, sacred sites yearly are lost by the hundreds in the United States alone. A site that Nature has preserved for hundreds, even a thousands of years, can be destroyed in one reckless moment. Preserving a site takes many times more effort than destroying it and usually involves litigation and protective legislation. Such costly and labor-intense activity requires mutual support and the strength of numbers. Out of shared concerns arise advocacy groups and organized coalitions that make their powerful voices heard. Nonetheless, as any one site finally wins protection, time runs out for scores of others. Time and humankind irrevocably alter place. And though a site may be snatched from the gaping jaws of leviathan earth movers—regaining it as a place for continued or uninterrupted ceremony and worship is seldom assured.

Before the inception of reservations, a tribe’s sacred places, where people could go to fast and pray, were not outside its tribal boundaries. Today, that’s far from the case as indigenous peoples are increasingly hemmed off from ancestral lands. Often separated from their sacred sites by great distances, many tribes have lost control over their care. Many such places are now under private, state, or federal management. High fences with padlocked gates—even the necessity to acquire permits to perform ceremonies or gather sacred plants at them—further alienate native peoples from the places invested with their beliefs.

Sacred places, such as Medicine Wheel in Wyoming and Chimney Rock in northern California, are neither simply “piles of rocks” as some local governments denigratingly refer to them, nor are they “alienable tracts of land,” as viewed by the Supreme Court. Rather, “Indian lands are native cathedrals,” proclaimed the Association on American Indian Affairs at its 1990 National Sacred Sites Caucus. “They are places that hold their souls and allow them to retain their identity and contact with Mother Earth.”

Hopes that the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978 would protect sacred sites and the rights of native peoples to perform traditional ceremonies and dances at them (violations that had been punishable) have largely been dashed.

Chris Peters, a member of the Yoruk tribe of northern California and former Executive Director of the Seventh Generation Fund, once stated that the issue is one of “ethnocidal proportions.” Peters was also the respondent in Lyng v. Northwest Indian Cemetery Protective Association, which pitted native people’s First Amendment rights against logging interests, denying three tribes access to a sacred mountain for medicine-making and other religious practices. While the Court concurred that permitting construction of a logging road “would seriously damage the salient visual, aural and environmental qualities of the high country,” it held firm. The decision, which Justice Brennan had called “cruelly surreal,” has since been mitigated and the mountain declared a wilderness area. But the ruling sent shock waves throughout the Indigenous American community that are still felt.

Environmentally, sacred places are the miner’s canary. They are barometers that measure the ecological health of old-growth forests, mountains, springs, streams, and wetlands. Politically, they are the yardstick of national commitment to the preservation of place. As a sacred place issues its last breath, the spiritual and cultural breath of a people is lost on the wind and is known only as a story the grandfathers tell.

A rough, sometimes precipitous road winds to the alpine tundra atop ten thousand-foot Medicine Mountain in the Big Horn Mountains of Wyoming. Where the sky opens to all directions, twenty-eight stone spokes radiate outward to form an eighty-foot wheel. “The sun made it to show us how to build a teepee,” the Crow tell their children. Historically the most sacred spiritual center of the Plains tribes, Medicine Wheel is the hub of worship for Crow, Arapaho, Cheyenne, Sioux, Blackfeet and Shoshone.

Yet barbed-wire and controversy surround the ancient symbol. A sign on its single gate reads “ENTRANCE BY PERMIT ONLY.” The injunction restricts everyone from the sought-after sanctum. “Wannabes” mimic Native American tradition and leave offerings on the fence. Grass, rubber bands, bandannas, yarn, hair, key chains—even bikini panties—anchor pouches, bones, feathers, tobacco—and hundreds of confetti-colored objects virtuous and vulgar—to a longed-for, dissociated past.

Droves of visitors, most well-meaning, some malicious, flock to Medicine Wheel and other spiritual places. Responsibly controlling trampling, litter, vandalism and other abuses is charged to state and federal parks, the Forest Service, Bureau of Land Management as well as historic preservation offices. Too often, tribal leaders say, this land management has been restrictive, even dehumanizing to the very peoples for whom the lands under protection are sacred.

The federal government, proven capable of making and breaking treaties, has instituted, when propitious, policies that “legitimized” taking of tribal land, ritual objects and ancestral remains. Universities, museums, libraries, all have been the recipients of appropriated cultural material, known by the euphemisms acquisitions and collections. Here, too, coalitions flex their legal muscles against corporate and government Goliaths, demanding these objects—traditionally held to possess endemic power that ensures tribal well-being—are returned. As the repatriation movement gains momentum, antiquities are going home.

Ironically, repatriation doesn’t wholly rectify the onerous cultural breach that separated tribes from their sacred objects. Council members and spiritual leaders must determine who among them is qualified to care for the returned objects—who will be the “Keeper of the Pipe.” Some ritual objects are meant only to be seen and used by those who know and can keep the secret ceremonies of cleansing and purification, activities spiritual leaders usually perform in a sacred, holy place.

If sacred places are to be saved for future generations, tribal leaders say, it will take educating the public to their significance as well as to the rights of American Indians under the Constitution and the Indian Religious Freedom Act to practice their spirituality in the holy places designated by their ancestors.

One California Indigenous American summarizes the paradox of education: “Once the potent tool to recreate the Indian in the white man’s image, contributing to his near demise, education may now be his salvation, helping him preserve, or even restore, his culture and traditional lifeways.” But the road to religious freedom is not without its chuck holes. Native peoples must now shoulder the added burden of determining how much is too much to tell.

While some sacred sites under the auspices of the Forest Service and Bureau of Land Management are subject to extractive entrepreneurial activities, each of the sites featured in that first and subsequent sacred places calendars falls under the stewardship of a state or national park. But their necessary and often hard-won “protection” has come about because their secrecy has been compromised.

“Sometimes you don’t want to tell of these places,” admitted the late Bill Tallbull, a highly revered Northern Cheyenne spiritual leader. “Then people will begin to converge on the area.” Tallbull gave these people the uncomplimentary moniker “gawkers.” “They’re not really understanding what’s there. What could we reveal? What can we keep to ourselves? God makes ground sacred. Not the Forest Service.

“I once talked with a forester in Germany,” Tallbull had said. “That forester knew every tree like a person. He went through a ritual before he would cut down that tree. Our [US] Forest Service would learn from that German forester.”

Before Tallbull’s death, on the dark horizon for the Northern Cheyenne was a plan that would put thirteen massive coal mines and a railroad along the eastern boundary of the reservation. Aside from contributing to pollution and irreparably scarring the land, the mines would sacrifice a vital cultural and spiritual tradition. Tallbull spoke out against the loss of place meaningful to tribal peoples. “That sacred site calls the Cheyenne to prayer as the sun breaks over the horizon. We look to the sun that gives us light and gives us wisdom. If we don’t see the horizon anymore, it becomes very demoralizing. That’s what we’re faced with.”

Just as there exist various genres of sacred places, there are as many threats to their survival. And while it may be appropriate to lambaste industry—we thrive on scapegoating—we do it an injustice if we are blind to the role we, ourselves, play.

A sacred spring bubbles into the light of an alpine meadow on Mt. Shasta. For eight thousand years, native peoples have come here for healing and prayer. What Al Logan Slagle, a Keetoowah Cherokee and attorney representing northern California tribes, saw there on one of his visits, however, sickened him: “The rock walls around the spring were torn down,” he had said. “The spring was dammed in three places. During the harmonic convergence New Age people were dancing naked in the spring. We must educate people to have simple respect for others’ beliefs. This place is our church.”

Recognizing the Spirit of Place was our prime consideration when photographing sacred sites over the years to create awareness of their potential loss. The uniquely interpretive approach, called light-painting, helps eliminate the obscene—the glaring aluminum beverage can, the asphalt road, the seven-foot chain-link fence, the crinkled cellophane wrapper. Presence remains the pithy, epigrammatic center of the image.

How best to save place divides even traditional Indigenous Americans from progressives and from activists.

“You need to show more of the desecration of our sacred places,” challenged one Indian activist, who held that while a calendar and multi-media presentations help create awareness that there is no division between cultural identity and the land, they don’t go far enough.

“These sites look too beautiful! Include the after-effects of mindless destruction . . . unchecked activities associated with development, clear-cutting, mining, grazing, damming, looting, energy exploration, toxic waste disposal. Then people will understand what’s happening to our sacred places.”

On the contrary, cultural specialist Cha-das-ka-dum had replied. “The public is too desensitized, and you can’t shock them anymore,” he contends. “You have to come at the problem from a different perspective. People have to identify with a place, smell it, feel its power, as we do. Show more fragile, beautiful places that are in danger. Show their spiritual side. I take people up sacred Mt. Baker and let the mountain’s power take their breath away. Then it comes to them. And something inside them identifies with it. They recognize that it is worthy of saving . . . for all children and grandchildren. Then they can understand why we call these places our churches.”

In his introduction to our 1993 Sierra Club Special Edition calendar, N. Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-prize winning Kiowa author, also entreats us to recognize their intrinsic value:

To encounter the sacred is to be alive to the deepest center of human existence. Sacred places are the truest definitions of the Earth. They stand for the Earth immediately and forever; they are its flags and shields. If you would know the Earth for what it really is, learn it through its sacred places. But where there is the sacred there is sacrilege, the theft of the sacred. To steal the sacred is to rob us of our very selves, our reason for being, our being itself. And sacrilege is a sin of which we are capable. Look around.

At Red Knobs, Utah, shaded by a stately cedar, Lorran Meares demonstrates documentary photography techniques to a dozen summer field volunteers and an archaeological team. Around them the evidence of Pueblo ancestors lies bleaching in the sun. Elaborately painted black-on-white pottery shards and knapped lithics litter the ground. A human femur juts forth from a foxhole-size crater. Hundreds of shallow pits pock the landscape, marking pothunters’ explorations for artifacts.

Beneath the middens’ violated surface and scattered throughout the fragile ruins that lace the canyons, pick, shovel, even backhoe, disinter extraordinary ceramics. Bowls, pots and effigies, fetishes, jewelry, amazingly preserved lacelike remnants, ritual funerary objects: looters’ booty all, fetching obscene prices at fashionable auction houses, fueling the black-market frenzy. When the bidding was over, one Anasazi olla had sold for an incentive-raising $80,000. A lucrative living—catering to the desire for antiquity.

And pothunters have little to fear from a feeble Archaeological Resources Protection Act created to do as its name implies. Odds in the legal lottery of felony conviction are slim. In many areas, only a single ranger patrols a million acres. Such assurances embolden diggers of the lost past to the risk of fines and imprisonment.

Repatriation acts in and of themselves have thrown cold water on collectors of Indian antiquities. But as long as sellers can find buyers, pothunting isn’t likely to end any time soon. And while overzealous visitors and treasure hunters most assuredly impact sacred sites, their greatest threat to survival is a rapacious national appetite for non-renewable resources.

“Shrines and other sacred places are being bulldozed,” former Hopi Cultural Director Leigh Jenkins told us in his cramped office in Kykotsmovi, Arizona. “Bulldozers are chewing up our mountain into bite-sized pieces and spitting them onto roadways to pave the way for more destruction,” he had said. Along with the mountain went shrines and places to gather medicinal plants.

“The mountain has lost her skirt,” mourned an old Navajo sheep herder. She was referring to clear-cutting of the sacred Chuskas that divides her people as surely as the mountains themselves divide Arizona and New Mexico.

History promulgates the stereotype of the eloquent Indian speaker whose words are wise and prophetical. Ironically, government and institutions have honored individual Indians, all the while culturally, politically, and economically extirpating their race. As the reasons to stand up and be heard increase, so, too, do the Indigenous Americans committed to halting destruction of their culture and the Earth all peoples share.

The late Hopi spiritual leader Thomas Banyacya was one of those warriors. His pilgrimages to the nation’s capital—armed with Hopi prophesy and apocalyptic warnings—are now re-enacted by his son. Part activist, part guru, totally opinionated, unflagging and controversial, even within his own tribe, Banyacya groomed his namesake to take up the political and legal war that he saw as the Indians’ only hope.

Only weeks before his death, the canyons of Banyacya’s face still punctuated his words like sharp exclamation points. His liquid eyes pooled the early sunlight streaming in his kitchen window. “If sacred areas are not protected,” he said, “this is what will happen: Living things in sacred areas will act out—birds falling down from the air . . . whales dying . . . lightning . . . tornadoes . . . earthquakes—because sacred areas are disturbed. These things are what Hopi are saying.”

Banyacya predicted that many more sacred places would be chewed up by the machinery of government and big business and spit out into unrecognizable parcels labeled “fair use.” In his waning years, he projected little room for optimism. “The federal government keeps creating boundary lines around people which keep getting closer and closer,” he stated. His gaze pierced the checkered table cloth as he sighed. “Before you know it, they’re going to put a boundary around your two feet—and you won’t even be able to stretch your legs.”

To Indigenous Americans, responsible land management by government is an oxymoron. What it means, no one is sure. But its price, no Indian will ever forget. Attempts to annihilate American Indians and their culture have consumed five bitter centuries, and the list of destroyed or threatened sacred places continues to grow. As the clock ticks, coal shovels chew away at a sacred Hopi mountain; shopping malls and housing projects drain the eco-sensitive Everglades and threaten Seminole lifeways; waves of oily sludge rock toward Makah petroglyphs on the Olympic Peninsula.

Attitude shifts and protective legislation continue to be what is needed. When they do come, they may be too little, too late. This administration’s environmental policies have the potential to be the tsunami that breaks ashore a flood of irresponsible and irreparable behaviors. The seventh generation may not know the places we’ve seen and the places known to the ancestors of the people who aided our own awareness.

Apocalyptic events adumbrate the beginning of this new century. The alarming loss of sacred places forces Indian peoples to practice their traditions less frequently at the few remaining sites further and further from home. To Lummi cultural specialist Jewel Praying Wolf James of Washington, that his people must travel as much as 65 miles to reach sites on sacred Mt. Baker represents not only a hardship for the elders, but also stultifies cultural awareness for the next generation.

Mother Earth and her Sacred Places cannot speak for themselves, Indian peoples remind us. They need many voices to speak for them.

The pungent smell of iodine plants settles in our nostrils. Along the path to the ancient pictographs, the glistening, vicious, jagged fingers of a broken beer bottle reach upward, sinisterly awaiting the unsuspecting. We lay the pieces aside to carry out on our return to the car.

Hector Franco surveys the sun-soaked slope before him. “Why were we not consulted before you came out here and experimented at our cost?” he asks the air. His question, rhetorical now, spears the invisible county board of supervisors who approved sandblasting to erase confetti-colored graffiti painted irreverently, flamboyantly over the legends of Franco’s ancestors. Eyes moist, the rugged Wukchumne Indian stares at the ghostly remains, all that is left of the messages from the past. “This is our inheritance,” he says angrily to no one. The chalky traces on the rocks are silent.

July has painted the rolling Central California hills a sumptuous raw sienna. As if only now remembering our presence, Franco lifts his chin, motioning upward to the chunks of missing hillside. The once flat granite platform long ago was quarried and crushed for driveways, interstates and high-rises, he explains. We climb until the dynamite-tossed boulders—many bearing severed prehistoric rock art—lie all around us like sawdust from a freshly fallen tree. Their corduroy surfaces—ribbed for explosives—resemble borer beetle tracks on bark.

“This place here was level at one time,” Franco says, waving his hand over a pile of rubble as if an abracadabra would make it all right again. “There, that was a place where the people came to dance. But you couldn’t tell that now.

“When we enter a strange place, we offer a prayer that the spirits of that place accept us and help us to be in balance with it. We are a praying people. We look to the sky and rising sun and give thanks for the new day. When we’re here, we’re not just praying for our relations by blood or marriage. We’re praying for the well-being of all people in our valley and throughout the world—we pray for all life. In Wukchumne, we say Comoy-nim Yokuch, ‘all my relations.’ That means everything. Even the rocks are our relations. We’re connected to everything.

“We believe that these places are alive. There are a lot of spirits that guard this place . . . powers that live here, and we respect them very much. Every place that’s sacred all over the world should always be approached with reverence and respect. This is a very sacred place to us, even as much as it’s been vandalized . . . we still feel it has a power,” Franco continues emotionally.

“This is a place where our people come to get help and guidance. We feel that the Creator put this place here for us so we could be connected with all living things . . . our brothers and sisters and all living things. Each time we come here, we tell the spirits of this country that we come here in peace, we’re here only to do good. We tell the spirits that we want them to take care of us and our friends . . . and watch over them. When we’re here, we don’t turn over rocks or break sticks and make a lot of loud noises. It’s good to be happy and laugh, but whenever we visit these places, we try to conduct ourselves with respect.” Franco looks around him and gestures.

“I brought my son here at the spring equinox. He was seven months old when I gave him this place. The place itself shined that day . . . it literally glowed. In olden days, these sacred places were kept clean. I’ve asked this sacred mountain to cleanse and purify itself . . . to make it good for us and to take care of our people. We call the rock paintings Copch’-ke. Do you remember the faint pictograph of a coyote and a man with his bow? It signifies change. In the old days our people would shoot arrows to mark another cycle, another season. Our Indian doctors would gather here and look at the change in the way the constellations were lined up. That’s how they knew that winter would soon be upon them. Now, we come here and do the best that we can with the information that has been passed down to us. We try to acknowledge the seasons.”

Franco turns and brings us further into his world.

“Look. These are doctoring symbols,” he says. “Here is the sky . . . and, there, the stars. A figure painted in black and white like the one here represents balance. This healing site is thousands of years old. The paintings were probably touched up as recently as several hundred years ago. To show reverence, we offer water and sprinkle it around. This figure with a headdress is a doctor. He’s praying. Our people came to pray and listen . . . to contemplate many things. Eagle dancers and spiritual leaders would come here to cleanse and purify themselves and ask for wisdom. This is a dreaming place. A place to fast for many days, to prepare for ceremonies and dances. Then the fasters would go down into the village and dance for the people. Many times we have left offerings here only to come back and find them gone. Women’s and men’s societies all had their spiritual leaders, their seers, their dreamers, and they would come paint these symbols. To us, these paintings have a message of past, present, and future. Some of these paintings are like prophecies.

“You’ll see a man there. Rays flow from his head. He’s an enlightened creature. In time, these paintings are going to disappear. Little by little they’re going to fade. We don’t want to see that process accelerated by vandalism. The paintings are important. But the place is more important. If the place is destroyed or desecrated, the paintings mean nothing.” Franco takes in a heavy breath and releases it slowly before speaking to everyone and no one and to the wind. “You must protect a place that has power.”

“When I was a child, my dad, my uncles and I would go to many different spots. I remember once we were crawling down into a little cave and we came across some paintings. We had never seen them before. It was very exciting. There is a story among our people that when they first walked through this valley, the paintings were already there. They were said to be inscriptions left there by our Creator. Much the same way you would say God gave Moses the Commandments. There used to be pounding rocks here with the pounding pole still in them. They were right here. Now they’re gone. Evidently someone must have dug them up. Probably were paid a lot of money for them. Look. The graffiti is creeping up. You’ll see over there. It’s more evident. There’s more modern art. That’s rock art!”

Franco stares at the sacred ground beneath him and seems to peer into its depths. “You can’t deface a known archaeological site.” He extracts the sentence slowly, allowing its full irony to fall upon us, its potent words inflected with anger. Behind him, scrawled on a trailer-size boulder: “TONY LOVES MARGO.”

On the other side of the mountain, Franco guides us through a maze, under boulders, and inside a low-ceilinged natural cavern. Cross-legged, we sit in surrender to the powerful “doctor” symbol. The iron-oxide red and white lines of this anthropomorph radiate energy. Its bifurcated head suggests duality and balance. This is a vision cave, the tribal coordinator tells us. Franco offers tobacco, prayer, and song to the spirits of the cave. A two-inch scorpion scuttles across the rock on which Lorran leans and disappears into the flaxen grass blown into a crevice. Franco begins his storytelling.

“Historians call us Yokuts. We call ourselves Inyana, one people. In the time before the settlers, gold and the locomotive, the Inyana enjoyed abundant life in this sun-washed valley and thanked the Great Spirit with wonderful dances and songs. We walked softly through the stands of oak and sycamore. We took salmon and other fish from the singing rivers, streams, and the lake that is no more.”

The wind whistles through the narrow slits between the boulder walls and blows fine sand across the tape-recorder’s microphone. Franco listens to the wind, then loses himself again. “A microwave tower pierces the center of our world. There, under this grotesque steel, is an ancient rock with a carving of our valley. Another tower had been proposed for Condor Rock, where we still hold our Condor dances. When our people started losing connection with these places, problems started. Anyone who loses connections with [their] sacred places loses something they can’t replace. Every culture, every group, has a connection with a place that makes them who they are.

“It’s really important to our people to be able to come here. There was a time when we were told not to come back. But we came anyway. For years we’ve been coming here in secret. We were doing what we were put here on this Earth to do—to take care of these places . . . to watch over them. My son needs this place. My daughter needs this place. Pretty soon the only things we can show our children of our heritage will be found in books . . . and that’s not enough.”

Copyright © 2005 Charlotte Meares

indigenous Americans'
sacred places in danger 

from stories on the wind

Copyright © 1990 Lorran Meares