SOJOURN : Sojourn 36 45

Through a T-Shaped Door text and photo collages

by Raechel Running

A

single line defines space, time, countries. Crudely or delicately drawn, it becomes the contour of a man, a woman, a bird, a snake, a fish, a butterfly, the sun, moon, and stars.

Patterns emerge, disappear, and are redrawn. The dark and light of it illuminates our human passage. It can be seen as

a violent scar or rendered into a beautiful form dividing or uniting our perceptions.

It is the foundation of history, a map that is often indecipherable but that links us to our past and our future. Our lives were connected to the landscape of spiritual, artistic, and cultural exchange long before lines were imposed on a map.

I am a photographer migrating across a line between my birth home in northern Arizona and my adopted home in northern Chihuahua, Mexico. My interest in the cultural connections of the Greater Southwest—the Gran Chichimeca—began when I was a child and has continued in my adult life. I made my first journey south to photograph a story about a village of potters in Mata Ortiz—the legacy of Spencer MacCallum and master potter Juan Quezada, two people worlds apart, each inspired by the beauty of ancient pottery— where a rare expression of art has changed a community. Despite distance and “foreignness,” I discovered that northern Mexico was closely related to my homeland. What began as a fourday editorial assignment has grown into a two-year visual odyssey. It continues to unfold in surprising and unexpected connections between what have become for me two homes.

It is said that the ruins of mythic Aztlan lie at the bottom of Lake Powell. If that is true, I wonder what they can tell us of connections that have been lost. Aztec ball courts are found throughout northern Arizona. Mexican agaves grow at the bottom of the Grand Canyon; scarlet macaws have been found in ancient burial sites and are still used in ceremonies from the Hopi mesas to the Rio Grande. As a child I was taught to respect the San Francisco Peaks as a sacred mountain, as the home of katsinas who brought the rain. As I learned about the cultures of the Colorado Plateau I wondered about the people who once occupied the living dioramas of the Four Corners region at Mesa Verde, Canyon de Chelly, Walnut Canyon, Wupatki, Tuzigoot, and Montezuma Castle and Well. I walked through canyons and dry washes where I saw their cliff dwellings, turkey pens, lookout towers, and kivas. I traveled on the San Juan and Colorado rivers where pahos (prayer feathers) still carry prayers from the holy shrines of the Sipapu, and the sacred salt mine. The breath of the ancient world has swirled throughout my life in warm winds and thunderstorms.

 (

s ojou r ns

summer

09 ) 

I travel long stretches of empty roads these days. As I gaze across the dashboard, the San Francisco Peaks recede behind me; what was familiar and safe grows smaller in the rearview mirror. The call of adventure and the unknown lay ahead. Homeland security feels dangerously ironic as I cross the U.S.–Mexican border into Chihuahua. Beyond the fear and media hype I was to discover surprising links to the sacred mountain and landscape that I knew as home. A door opened. At the threshold I heard the echo of the ancient ones.

I’d known nothing of this southern region’s historical significance. The variegated geography, with its native flora and fauna, is as diverse as the cultures it supports. Indigenous tribes, Mexicans, Mennonites, and Mormons celebrate the seasons of their lives. Family, rites of passage, religious ceremonies, music, dance, and cuisine, are all enmeshed with local traditions of farming, ranching, and horse cultures. All of this reflects the Gran Corazon, the big heart, that is Mexico. I look north with a different perspective.

In the pueblo of Casas Grandes, down the street from where I live, Paquimé rises in a profile of worn adobe, a shadow of its former greatness that still inspires awe and fierce debate amongst scholars. Paquimé was the center of a complex religious society of Puchtecas traderpriests, craftsmen, artisans, and aviculturists connected to extensive trade routes throughout Mesoamerica and the greater Southwest at the height of the Medio period (ad 1200–1450).

Partly excavated by archaeologists Charles Di Peso and Eduardo Contreras between 1958 and 1961, the adobe architecture and aqueduct system are recognized as being among the most complex designs in the Americas. More than nine hundred rooms were organized into a ceremonial, living, and storage structure. Agave roasting pits, ball courts, and effigy mounds in the forms of a plumed serpent, a parrot, and a directional cross still hold their positions in this beautiful maze of shadow and light. The migration paths share common beliefs, patterns, and symbols with the cultures of the Colorado Plateau and, like the clouds, move across the landscapes knowing no boundaries.

 (

s ojou r ns

In stories of the Hopi migrations, Paquimé was known as Palá kwapi, the mysterious Red City to the south. Established by the katsinas, a clan dispute possibly lead to it’s mysterious and tragic end. One day the city came under siege. The Warrior Woman katsina Hé Hewúti, in the midst of tying her hair, picked up bow and arrows to help defend the city, to no avail. The katsinas aided the clans’ escape and helped them to resume their long migrations in order to fulfill their destinies. The katsina spirits told the departing clans that they would relocate to a mountain in the north where they could be called upon when needed.

To the north, the silhouette of the San Francisco Peaks rises from the horizon of the Colorado Plateau. It is the sacred center of both the Puebloan and Navajo worlds; it is here that the katsina spirits are said to have established their new home. For millennia the mountain has been home to White Shell Woman and the Navajo Changing Woman, who share the same attributes as the great Corn Mother, Tonantzin, Aztec goddess of fertility and renewal.

Mexican grandmothers light candles, medicine men paint mandalas of sand and draw lines of corn pollen, reestablishing our connections to the earth, the sky, and back to ourselves, making a path of beauty. These mysterious lines weave back and forth, migrating north to south and back again. People share and pass along their mythologies, stories, and traditions through generations. Some lines are lost, forgotten. Some remain. The concept of the world as home is redrawn over time.

In the Sierra Madre, a petroglyph reminiscent of a fertility goddess is pecked into stone.

She appears to be dancing, with a dragonfly on her head. I look beyond her. She points north to the atalaya, an observation point on the Cerro Montezuma, overlooking Paquimé. These two sites lie on the same meridian as Chaco Canyon, 400 miles to the north. The ancient sites of Valle de las Cuevas, Quarenta Casas, Arroyo de los Monos, and Cañon del Lobo feel surprising familiar. What I see in Chihuahua—the contours of land, caves and cliff dwellings, and the simple, cryptic symbols written in stone—looks much like what I’ve seen on the Colorado

“It is unnatural to be without a special love for the country of one’s birth. . . . But let our allegiance extend to the whole globe on which we travel through the universe. . . .”

—Carl Lumholtz, Unknown Mexico

 (

s ojou r ns

summer

09 ) 

This story has been a collaboration across borders. I am grateful to have worked with my father, photographer John Running of Flagstaff, who planted the first seed. His curiosity and love for the Southwest, its people and land and rivers, has been the doorway to our family’s experience and appreciation of the world of the Colorado Plateau. My dad contributed images of places I’ve yet to photograph. In my collages I’ve woven our images together to express connections—my father’s Kodachrome slides, my digital images, all are threads from the past weaving new designs.

—RR (www.RaechelRunning.com)

Plateau. There are more signs of the past: ancient pots in the form of shamans; smooth, smoky wood beams shading ruins of broken doors and walls; dried ears of corn. Hand-plastered granaries rise above me as I look into them—eyes in a cliff face. Families in old pickup trucks travel across rivers along the old migration trails; they ride standing in the back like a Shonto Begay painting gone south. Candles burn brightly in shrines on the darkened roads, merging into the canopy of the Milky Way. Rich, symbolic fragments still connect enduring cultures to the greater history that links the Americas: pottery and shards, amorphous figurines, copper bells, and turquoise beads. What I have come to see is a much larger picture. It encompasses the history, art, and spiritual patterns of cultures intricately tied to the Colorado Plateau and the Casas Grandes region. These seldomseen connections have altered my world view.

“Migration doesn’t mean abandonment,” says the new sign overlooking Walnut Canyon National Monument’s loop trail. I descend the same paths I ran and played on thirty years ago on school field trips and family visits. I reach out to touch the replaced stones and listen to the wind. I am still looking for signs, following the lines. In my old home as in my new one, adobe walls are sheltered in the shadow of an overhanging cliff, rain still forms seemingly out of nowhere, and sweet corn still grows in the arid soil. A spiral once pecked out in stone echoes a primal knowing, a compass in the blood, time circling back on itself, or forward in an outward migration.

A T-shaped door beckons us to step through. It quietly implores us to go beyond borders, to see the connections and engage in a larger story of most wondrous design.

 (

s ojou r ns

summer

09 ) 