Aaron Wright’s edited volume Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology
is now available from the University of Utah Press
(September 30, 2024)—I remember the drive like it was yesterday.
I was on a loop of the Four Corners in my white 1991 Pontiac Grand Prix, before smartphones and Google Maps. I’d planned the route with a trusty New Mexico gazetteer and a couple of fold-out road maps you used to find at travel centers and rest stops along the interstates. It was very much an adventure—new country, unknown sights, and unexpected encounters. I was one year into my first position as an archaeological field technician, based out of Raton, New Mexico, and I would go on long drives on my days off to get the lay of this unfamiliar land.
On this trip, I was heading west from Shiprock, having turned left onto U.S. Route 64 from former U.S. Route 666, an infamous highway I’d first learned of in an Oliver Stone movie a few years prior. The place names were still interesting—a mix of Diné that was unintelligible to me with Old West favorites like Mexican Water. I eventually turned north in Kayenta, Arizona, onto the U.S. Route 163, with the intention of circling back through Bluff, Utah, to hit the Four Corners Monument on the return to Raton. After crossing the San Juan River at Mexican Hat, I turned left on Utah Route 261 not knowing what lay ahead.
And there it rose, this massive reddish sandstone bluff whose top was covered in a dark green rind, much like a slice of watermelon in profile—Cedar Mesa.
On approach, the gravel road began to kick back and forth, with each turn providing a different angle of view over an increasingly vast landscape. I later learned that this road had been dubbed the Moki Dugway in homage to the Hopi. Climbing past the last switchback, I parked on the side of the road, mouth agape, staring down over the most spectacular landscape I’d ever seen, a broad vista encompassing the aptly named Valley of the Gods and Monument Valley.
That was over 20 years ago, but it proved to be a pivotal experience that stays with me today. It was my first brush with what I regard as the sacredness of Southwestern landscapes. And it was that experience, combined with similar ones since, years working with petroglyphs and other vestiges of ritual practice, and the insights descendant communities have shared that led me to address this subject directly.
Although transformative, my experience on the Moki Dugway was, I suspected, not unique. So, for the 2019 meeting of the Society for American Archaeology, I invited more than a dozen Southwestern archaeologists and allies to participate in a session dedicated to sacred Southwestern landscapes. I wanted to know how others were engaging with this phenomenon, in different places and at different times, both personally and professionally. I asked participants (later contributors) to explain what makes Southwestern landscapes sacred.
And now, five years later, we’ve realized the fruit of our collaborative endeavor. Sacred Southwestern Landscapes: Archaeologies of Religious Ecology was just published through the University of Utah Press. I’m proud of it, and grateful for the contributors’ dedication and patience. Although it is being marketed as an archaeological volume, I consider it an archaeological contribution to the Environmental Humanities. And for that reason, it reads a bit differently than the average archaeological monograph—perhaps less science-y and with a bit more humanity.
As I explain in the volume’s Preface, we humans and our plant and animal kin face a slate of dire environmental challenges that seem increasing insurmountable—drought, extreme heat, wildfires, and torrential storms on scales we’ve never experienced in modern times. We know about this calamity through science—we measure, monitor, prescribe—but so far, science has only been able to draw attention to the alarm, not reverse our trajectory. That takes will, heart, and humility. And the unfathomably rapid and unrelenting destruction of pristine landscapes wrought by urban sprawl and industrialized mineral and fossil fuel extraction at unprecedented scales shows that what we can ultimately save will be irreversibly transformed.
So, in recalling my drive up the Moki Dugway, and the awe and reverence of that experience atop Cedar Mesa decades ago, I suggest in the Preface to Sacred Southwestern Landscapes that we need to learn to love the land in ways we haven’t thus far. We need to respect and revere the land rather than assault it to suit short-term interests. There is strength and succor in the land, and there is profound wisdom and guidance in how to treat it among the region’s Indigenous residents, who have stewarded these lands since time immemorial.
And therein lies a fundamental disconnect we see at the center of near all controversial land battles world-wide—Indigenous worldviews, management practices, and values versus extractive and consumptive economies steered by the interests of international corporations. This touches home in the Southwest in myriad ways, including Tribally-led monument campaigns to protect sacred landscapes such as Bears Ears and Avi Kwa Ame from energy development programs, the 20-year moratorium on oil and gas drilling around Chaco Canyon spearheaded by the All Pueblo Council of Governors, and at present (and quite pressingly) the upcoming final stage of Apache Stronghold’s battle to save Chi’chil Biłdagoteel (also known as Oak Flat), a setting below the Pinal and Superstition Mountains in eastern Arizona that is sacred to local Tribes.
For more than two decades, Apache Stronghold and their supporters have been fighting to save Oak Flat from becoming a nearly 2-mile wide, 1,000-foot-deep crater with attendant pipelines, utility corridors, roads, and a mountain-sized toxic waste dump. They stand on the grounds that allowing such a mine project to move forward would be an infringement upon the free exercise of their religion—an established tenet of the First Amendment. So far, the courts, and most recently the 9th Circuit Court of Appeals, have disagreed. Earlier this month, Apache Stronghold and their supporters completed a pilgrimage to Washington DC to petition the Supreme Court—the end of the legal line—to take up the case. And now we wait.
I’ve been waiting since 2019 to see Sacred Southwestern Landscapes become a reality. And now, with its release, I find myself awaiting the fate of Oak Flat. Unfortunately, the case of Oak Flat is not featured in the volume, but it dovetails in such a way that feels like more than a coincidence. The Southwest’s landscapes are sacred to those who live here. That may be hard to understand for justices positioned in Washington DC and Rio Tinto and BHP mining executives based in London and Melbourne, but it is evident to nearly anyone who steps foot on this land and takes the time to listen to it and its people.
As we bide time to see whether the Supreme Court will heed the plea of Apache Stronghold, take a read of the new book and let me know how you feel about the sacredness in Southwestern landscapes. Comment below or email me, and I’ll share your thoughts in a follow-up post.
One thought on “For the Love of Land and the Sacredness of Landscapes”
Comments are closed.
Aaron! This looks fabulous. What a wonderful achievement and a monument to your own connection to these lands. I loved your story from years ago when you first encountered Cedar Mesa. That’s now on my bucket list. Thank you.