Our first stop that morning was breakfast, and we decided that the Painted Desert would make a pleasant backdrop for our morning granola:
looking north towards the Navajo Nation
the moonlit morning
This national park seems like one of the most unlikely to me because, other than sitting around and staring at the sand, there didn't appear to be much interaction between the park and the visitor. I mean, even if it's fetching, who wants to hike through a desert?
Maybe the southern end of the park, which includes petrified forests, has trails and the like, but time constraints demanded that my yin and I confine ourselves to the few miles of road adjacent to I-40. In fact, the only piece of petrified wood we saw was in the visitor center:
Maybe the southern end of the park, which includes petrified forests, has trails and the like, but time constraints demanded that my yin and I confine ourselves to the few miles of road adjacent to I-40. In fact, the only piece of petrified wood we saw was in the visitor center:
Nonetheless, we did have good timing. It was the morning of the summer solstice, and our nifty national parks book informed us that there were petroglyphs nearby:
this one of the man-eating bird was my favorite
And that one of them functioned as a sundial, marking the arrival of the summer solstice. Basically it was a boulder with a deep notch in it, and a nearby boulder had a petroglyph of a small spiral. The shadow casts by the first boulder onto the second functions as a cosmic timepiece:
As the exact moment of the solstice grew closer (approximately 9:30am MST), the shaft of light reached down further and further until it eventually ended up in the center of the spiral petroglyph:
almost there
By 9:20, however, the rock outcropping that served as observation deck was becoming crowded, and my yin and I decided to leave. It turns out that watching a shadow creep forward is not unlike watching grass grow.
But this is beside the point.
The point is that we made a new friend as we walked to the car:
This photogenic lizard kept following me around, hamming it up for the camera and striking poses that would make even circa-1989 Madonna blush:
Perhaps this reptilian encounter inspired us because by the time we reached Santa Fe we couldn't help following its example:
my yin as St. Francis dancing on the water
author as St. Francis, lover of dogs
This downtown cathedral was one of the highlights, even though we were there only a short time:
St. Francis Cathedral Basilica
And I especially liked the words over the gate to the cemetery:
"God gives and God takes away"
The dancing St. Francis statue was also engraved with all sorts of slogans, which made it just as impressive close-up as it was from a distance:
One statue was simultaneously beautiful and disturbing, though:
my yin honoring Kateri Tekakwitha
Something about this sculpture didn't sit quite right: while it was undeniably meant to honor Native American, it also seemed to function as honorarium, a token of goodwill that obfuscates the history of genocide and apartheid that have defined the interaction between Europeans and Native peoples.
When I got home I checked out this hunch, and a visit to About.com confirmed my suspicions:
"Tekakwitha's father was a Mohawk chief and her mother was a Catholic Algonquin... She was orphaned at age 4 when both parents and a brother died in a small pox epidemic. The disease affected her eyesight and her health. Her name, Tekakwitha, means 'putting things in order.'"
Small pox, of course, ravaged Native American populations because they had no natural immunity to it, and to my knowledge, the European settlers' donation of pox-infected blankets to Native Americans is one of the earliest examples of biological warfare. Obviously I do not know if this is how Tekakwitha and her family contracted the disease, but I do know that the statue managed to encapsulate these tensions.
(This is not beside the point.)
These same tensions were also present at the main plaza, mere blocks from the St. Francis Cathedral Basilica, where Native Americans sold their turquoise and serpentine jewelry. White vendors, sitting under umbrella-ed carts with fine custom pieces for sale, were on one side of the street; and on the other were the Native Americans, who had been bussed in from surrounding reservations. They sat on blankets spread out over the walkway, with licenses affixed to the corners that certified the wares (and by extension the artisans who created them) were "authentic".
The spatial configuration between these two groups of merchants, as well as the exhibition and "authentication" of the Native body, neatly demonstrated the implicit economic, social and historical inequalities between them. I felt too uncomfortable to take a picture:
That night my yin and I ate at a groovy restaurant selling largely vegetarian New Mexican cuisine:
But our delicious nachos and fresh jalapeños couldn't quite wash away the taste of the afternoon. It was hard not to connect the ruined pueblos, which we had seen since entering Arizona three days earlier, to the toothless grandmother from whom we had bought a pair of earrings an hour before.
These same tensions were also present at the main plaza, mere blocks from the St. Francis Cathedral Basilica, where Native Americans sold their turquoise and serpentine jewelry. White vendors, sitting under umbrella-ed carts with fine custom pieces for sale, were on one side of the street; and on the other were the Native Americans, who had been bussed in from surrounding reservations. They sat on blankets spread out over the walkway, with licenses affixed to the corners that certified the wares (and by extension the artisans who created them) were "authentic".
The spatial configuration between these two groups of merchants, as well as the exhibition and "authentication" of the Native body, neatly demonstrated the implicit economic, social and historical inequalities between them. I felt too uncomfortable to take a picture:
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That night my yin and I ate at a groovy restaurant selling largely vegetarian New Mexican cuisine:
the Tune-Up Cafe
But our delicious nachos and fresh jalapeños couldn't quite wash away the taste of the afternoon. It was hard not to connect the ruined pueblos, which we had seen since entering Arizona three days earlier, to the toothless grandmother from whom we had bought a pair of earrings an hour before.
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