I'itoi

Guardians of Chuk Shon: I'itoi, Our Lady of Guadalupe, Padre Kino, Yoeme spirit power

Nuestra Señora de Guadalupe

She who goes by many names, Nuestra Señora, Our Lady Of Guadalupe, Tonantzin.

Yoeme deer dancer. He stands in front of an original Padre Kino map of his Yaqui homelands in Mexico.

Yoeme / Pascua Yaqui

Yaqui life in Mexico:  ​What the River Knows: ​Yaqui River, Sonora, Mexico

A Yaqui family washes clothes in the pesticide-clogged Río since there is no running water in their village of Tórim.

Padre Eusebio Kino

Padre Kino rides again... Aztec dances and offerings are an integral part of Tucson's heritage and culture.

One of Padre Kino's maps of the Pimeria Alta

Insurrection.

Resurrection...

The Hill We Climb:

When day comes, we ask ourselves,
“Where can we find light in this never-ending shade,
the loss we carry, a sea we must wade?”

We’ve braved the belly of the beast.
We’ve learned that quiet isn’t always peace,
and the norms and notions of what “just is”
isn’t always justice.

And yet, the dawn is ours before we knew it.
Somehow we do it.
Somehow we’ve weathered and witnessed
a nation that isn’t broken, but simply unfinished.

We, the successors of a country and a time
where a skinny Black girl,
descended from slaves
and raised by a single mother,
can dream of becoming president,
only to find herself reciting for one.

And yes, we are far from polished, far from pristine,
but that doesn’t mean we are striving to form a union that is perfect.
We are striving to forge our union with purpose,
to compose a country committed to all cultures,
colors, characters and conditions of man.

And so we lift our gazes not to what stands between us,
but what stands before us.
We close the divide,
because we know, to put our future first,
we must first put our differences aside.
We lay down our arms
so we can reach out our arms to one another.
We seek harm to none and harmony for all.

Let the globe, if nothing else, say this is true:
that even as we grieved, we grew;
that even as we hurt, we hoped;
that even as we tired, we tried;
that we’ll forever be tied together victorious,
not because we will never again know defeat,
but because we will never again sow division.

Scripture tells us to envision
that “Everyone shall sit under their own vine and fig tree.
And no one shall make them afraid.”
If we’re to live up to our own time,
then victory won’t lie in the blade,
but in all the bridges we’ve made.

That is the promise to glade,
the hill we climb, if only we dare it,
because being American
is more than a pride we inherit.
It’s the past we step into
and how we repair it.

We’ve seen a force that would shatter our nation
rather than share it,
would destroy our country
if it meant delaying democracy.
And this effort very nearly succeeded.
But while democracy can be periodically delayed,
it can never be permanently defeated.
In this truth, in this faith, we trust,
for while we have our eyes on the future,
history has its eyes on us.

This is the era of just redemption
we feared at its inception.
We did not feel prepared
to be the heirs of such a terrifying hour,
but within it we found the power
to author a new chapter,
to offer hope and laughter
to ourselves.
So while once we asked, 
“How could we possibly prevail over catastrophe?”
now we assert,
“How could catastrophe possibly prevail over us?”

We will not march back to what was,
but move to what shall be:
a country that is bruised but whole,
benevolent but bold,
fierce and free.

We will not be turned around
or interrupted by intimidation,
because we know our inaction and inertia
will be the inheritance of the next generation.
Our blunders become their burdens.
But one thing is certain:
If we merge mercy with might,
and might with right,
then love becomes our legacy
and change, our children’s birthright.

So let us leave behind a country
better than the one we were left.
With every breath from my bronze-pounded chest,
we will raise this wounded world into a wondrous one.
We will rise from the gold-limbed hills of the West.
We will rise from the wind-swept Northeast,
where our forefathers first realized revolution.
We will rise from the lake-rimmed cities of the Midwestern states.
We will rise from the sun-baked South.
We will rebuild, reconcile and recover.

In every known nook of our nation,
in every corner called our country,
our people, diverse and beautiful,
will emerge battered and beautiful.
When day comes, we step out of the shade,
aflame and unafraid.
The new dawn blooms as we free it,
for there is always light,
if only we’re brave enough to see it,
if only we’re brave enough to be it.

"The Hill We Climb"
Amanda Gorman,
America's 1st Youth Poet Laureate. 
​

    Now, here’s the thing that you have to remember about a place like this. You’re the curator for everything that lives, breathes on that range. Anything that moves, yells, swims, hunts. You’re the curator. That means birds, bees, skunks. There are beehives on my range, but when there are no blooms and there’s no flowers blooming, they get hungry.
So we have to bring sugar water to feed them. You’re the caretaker for everything on that range no matter what it is. If it’s a skunk, if it’s a snake, whatever it is, that’s your job."
- Quote from 2016 article in MensHealth

With his horse, Jazz

Jazz

    A person has to go back to the land,” he said. “It creates thought.”

Dusk falls on the pond at Quitobaquito Springs, in Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The pond is at its lowest level in more than a decade, exposing mud flats throughout. Photo: Ash Ponders

Sacred Arizona spring drying up as border wall construction continues

​Midway down a cactus-covered hill in one of the driest parts of Arizona is a miracle: a spring. Water continually streams out of the ground, down a small channel, and into a pond.

Quitobaquito Springs, as the area is known, is one of the only reliable above-ground water sources in the Sonoran Desert. This oasis long provided water to the Hia-Ced O’odham, a tribe indigenous to the area, and records of human use and habitation go back more than 10,000 years. It’s also home to two endangered species found nowhere else in the United States: The Sonoyta pupfish and Sonoran mud turtle.

“The spring is regarded as sacred, a living element provided to all from our Elder teacher,” says tribal elder Ophelia Rivas, referring to the O’odham Creator God.

​But this once-quiet spot within Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument is in trouble. The flow of water, in slow decline since the 1980s, has dropped about 30 percent since March. The pond is at its lowest level in more than a decade, exposing mud flats throughout—a potentially urgent situation for its endangered animal inhabitants.

The pond is 200 feet from the U.S.-Mexico border, and contractors have already dug a six-foot trench for an electrical grid within a stone’s throw of it. Walls are going up several miles to the east of the spring in Organ Pipe and to the west in Cabeza Prieta National Wildlife Refuge. As construction advances closer to the spring, many people fear that the large quantities of groundwater that contractors withdraw to make concrete for the wall could exacerbate falling water tables and dry up the spring. Quitobaquito is probably fed in part by a regional aquifer that’s already been drawn down by agriculture.

“It’s unbelievable; it’s just horrible; it’s going down and down,” says Christina Andrews, a Hia-Ced O’odham leader, of the spring flow and pond level. She’s visited the spring since childhood, and has never seen it so depleted. “It feels like a violation of innocence.”

​The wall construction uses a lot of water to suppress dust and to mix concrete for the base. For a stretch of wall built a few miles east near Lukeville in 2008, Customs and Border Patrol estimated construction used up to 710,000 gallons per mile of fence. More may be necessary now, since the new wall is twice as high. To put this number in context, it would take about 70 days for Quitobaquito to produce enough water for one mile of fence.

Border Patrol spokesperson Dyman says that at the moment, the agency “does not calculate the amount of water usage per mile of construction.”

"On Each side the people hold it together, to share M Himadag, O'odham"
- The late Leonard Chana, O'odham artist

​The O’odham intensely oppose construction on this sacred land, which also contains a sizable tribal graveyard that is centuries old. While nobody lives at the springs anymore, it’s still used regularly for ceremonies and to pay homage to ancestors. Once difficult to access, the spring now has a road running past it. Large trucks and heavy machinery rumble by continually—and soon, contractors plan to build the 30-foot wall, illuminated by lights powered by electric lines in the already completed trench.

The area around the springs was sold without Hia-Ced tribal consensus to the government in the 1950s and became part of Organ Pipe Cactus National Monument. The O’odham are not only upset about what they see as the desecration of Quitobaquito, but the dozens of miles of fence already put up elsewhere throughout their historic homelands, separating tribal members from their relatives in Mexico. They were particularly outraged when Border Patrol contractors blew up ground in Monument Hill, to the east of the spring in Organ Pipe. The hill contains ancestral graves and a shrine to children.

There's a fabulous little treasure of a book to learn about the O'odham Children's Shrine, their sacred mountain--home to I'itoi,  Their legends and creation stories, the Yaquis (Yoeme), Native Christianities, La Corua, and other rich stuff: Beliefs and Holy Places - A Spiritual Geography of the Pimeria Alta, by James S. ("Big Jim" ) Griffith

A fresh look at La Llorona - the Weeping Woman

​Nobel prize-winner, Octavio Paz. In his 1950 essay, The Labyrinth of Solitude, Paz describes La Llorona as ‘one of the Mexican representations of Maternity’ and, as such, she is presented as a symbol of Mexican identity. This identity, according to Paz, revolves around Mexicans’ view of themselves as hijos de la Chingada. Paz explains that: ‘The verb [chingar] denotes violence, an emergence from oneself to penetrate another by force … The Chingada is the Mother forcibly opened, violated or deceived. The hijo de la Chingada is the offspring of violation, abduction or deceit.’ This violation is the Conquest, the quintessential symbol of which is La Malinche, or Doña Marina, who despite having been sold into slavery and given to the conquistadors – and therefore having limited agency of her own – has been painted as a traitor to ‘her people’. This anachronistic and highly misogynistic view that lays the blame for the defeat of a civilization at the feet of one (disenfranchised) woman has remained popular to this day. Indeed, Paz himself states that ‘the Mexican people have not forgiven La Malinche for her betrayal’.