Oak Flat Photo by Tim Nafziger
When one is deeply immersed in a particular struggle for justice, myopia can ensue. My call for justice in one instance takes precedence over any other; nearest to my heart, this cause also looms largest, while others are rendered flat, monochrome.
The futility of such nearsighted vision came home to me during a powerful Coalition Prayer as Action Hour about murdered Indigenous women whose bodies were discarded in a landfill north of Winnipeg, Canada. These were not just the anonymous ones designated collectively as MMIWG2S, but loved and named women, mothers, members of their community.
Their family and friends have established camps near the Green Prairie Landfill to amplify their call for a search to recover their remains. A video featuring Cambria Harris, daughter of Morgan Harris, accompanied the deeply felt witness of a white settler couple involved in the quest to recover the precious remains.
They urged us not to walk away, distracted by other duties, but to remember these women in our ordinary daily lives, as the grieving survivors cannot help but remember. They cannot walk away. And, if we are all connected, neither can we.
Next month, the Prayer as Action Hour focuses on an issue with which I’m much more familiar: supporting the legal battle of the Apache to save their sacred land from destruction by extraction of the copper we use in our ordinary daily lives, in our electronic devices, electric cars, coinage, industry.
Half a continent apart, what do Camp Morgan and Oak Flat share?
Apache spiritual practice lies at the heart of the Apache Stronghold’s current appeal to the Supreme Court to protect Oak Flat. This is no accident. Unlike the “religion” or “spirituality” claimed by many settlers, for the Apache, faith and practice are one and the same. Belief expresses itself in life and the ceremonies honoring life are born of the living land and bless the land in return.
While accompanying Apache Stronghold at Oak Flat in January, I was privileged to be part of a ceremony that takes place within four days of a girl’s first menstruation. This spiritual acknowledgment of a girl’s capacity to bring forth and nurture life is a necessary precursor to her four-day Sunrise Dance that will take place later in the year. Both ceremonies are inextricably bound to sacred land and water–the very places slated for destruction.
What I saw and heard that day was a luminously beautiful young girl on the tender cusp of womanhood, surrounded by 60 or more of her extended family members. From her godmother, her guide to this new adult life, to the medicine man leading the ceremony, to her parents, to the aunts, uncles, and cousins who accompanied her, the message was clear:
“This is who you are! This is where you belong! We are your people! Here on this sacred land the bones of your ancestors were lovingly laid to rest; here the guardian spirits speak to you and to us. Like this land itself, you are fertile now, capable of giving life to your people.
“We are here to uplift you, to show you how to use your new life wisely, to help you claim your identity as a strong Apache woman.
“As rocks and sky and water and Grandmother Oak spreading her arms over you all stand to witness, we promise to support you, and always, always, always, to receive you back to the heart of the community wherever life takes you, no matter what traumas you endure, no matter how the world may seek to rob you of your value.
“We are here to tell you the truth about yourself: you are precious, you are loved, you are essential to our common life. We promise never to lose you. We are here for you.”
This is the spiritual practice that links the land to the people and the people to the land. There on the sacred land of Oak Flat, celebrating the shared life, I couldn’t help but think of the Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women, Girls, and Two-Spirits. They were also beloved members of a community striving to maintain wholeness in the face of the ongoing assault of colonization. To read the profiles of Morgan, Marcedes, and others on the “Search the Landfill” website is to feel the jagged hole left by their loss.
Giving, loving, caring women are seized, brutally abused, and discarded, left broken in a pit full of dead materials, the discarded waste of an extractive society.
Productive, fertile land is seized, brutally abused, and its remnants discarded, to lie dead for eternity, more waste of the same extractive gluttony–to fill our ordinary daily lives with things we feel we cannot live without.
But the spirits of these women and the spirit of the land live on in those who cherish them.
Can we broaden our vision and deepen our hearts to encompass all the world’s hurts? Maybe not. But maybe we can open our eyes to their intersection with our ordinary daily lives. And maybe even let them change the way we live.