protection of sacred San Francisco Peaks takes another blow
For past and current information regarding this case, refer to savethepeaks.org
The case over the San Francisco Peaks has caused deep divides in Northern Arizona. The judicial pendulum, which temporarily favored indigenous rights and environmental justice, has radically swung back toward the advantage of those profiting off the destruction of environment and religious and spiritual identity. When I write of religious and spiritual identity, I’m referring to at least 14 different people’s cosmologies, all of which the San Francisco Peaks play a central role.
This is inadequate still. The Peaks do not “play a role” because if one plays a role, that person must stray from their true self for the service of others. The Peaks are perfect as they are. The Peaks are sacred. But even “sacred” is a European word, as is the etymology behind it. Yet it is the best word local indigenous people have found as a means to translate the emotional, spiritual, and religious connections they have with the mountain. The words available to me in my language will always fall short because they do not represent the same idea of sacredness that indigenous peoples intend. I believe this back and forth in the courts is largely a result of the dominant culture’s incapability or unwillingness to understand that which is “sacred.” But if we follow the word’s etymology all the way back before Christianity to Old Latin, we find that the definition could have encompassed the physical world. This connection needs to be rediscovered.
The word “Sacred” arrived in the 12th century from the Old French, sacrer, which came from the Latin, Sacrare, meaning “to make sacred, consecrate,” from sacer, the “sacred, dedicated, holy, accursed,” and finally prior to the influence of theocracy, it’s Old Latin origin, saq, “bind, restrict, enclose, protect.”
If one is in a non-binding commitment, it is one that cannot be broken. There are restrictions, like guidelines, and those restrictions must be protected. The metaphors indigenous peoples use in an attempt to bridge the gap are lousy, but it’s not their fault. Not since Old Latin, which became extinct in first century B.C., could our understanding of the word encompass something physical. It seems as though sometime during the 12th century, the word “sacred” became integrated into the Christian cosmology. Words like “holy” and “consecrate,” I believe, come straight from Christianity.
For example, Indigenous people will say, “putting waste water on our mountain is like pissing in a Catholic church.” Well, no it isn’t. What our civilization deems sacred is not something physical. This phrase might strike a chord because the church symbolizes the Christian faith. It is a place of community and worship. But lets face it; they are not sacred. Churches are bulldozed all the time. Churches are built all the time.
The Peaks are sacred; they do not represent or symbolize that which is sacred and intangible at the same time. The Peaks, in their physical and experiential presence, are sacred. They are “sacredness” incarnate. It has been a very long time since people from our civilization were able to experience the sacred in such a tangible way. In the dominant culture, what do we have that is sacred in its truest definition? What do we experience in our life that binds us to restrictions and orders our protection? Sure we have ideals such as liberty and freedom, but there is no collective understanding of these words. Liberty and Freedom have definitions that become more hollow with each administration. These are ideals that those in power have used as tools, the manipulations of these ideas have been used to spread great injustice through out the world. Remember, a logger is not deforesting and destroying eco-systems, rather he is “developing natural resources.” Similarly our country is not occupying another to secure a scarce resource, they’re spreading democracy, spreading freedom. Further, liberty and freedom might mean something different to me than it does to you. These ideals might pull at our heartstrings, but they are no longer sacred.
What about our economic system? On the surface, it might seem ridiculous to call our economic system, sacred. But consider the way we talk about it. The market is in “recession,” it “needs our help,” it is in decline, it is in recovery. The language we use to describe the ups and downs of our economic system is not far from the codlings of a mother to a child. But our economic system is not real either, so even if we do view it as sacred, it does not help local indigenous people translate a tangible sacredness.
Maybe our children are sacred. Children are our future right? They are tangible, they are our future and represent our past. As long as there are children, our people will live forever. But still we press on, further down this destructive, exploitive path; one that is leading our people off the edge of a cliff. If our children were sacred to us, we wouldn’t be destroying their home, their future, their communities.
In some cultures, nonhuman animals are sacred. Not just native cultures, but in Hindi traditions, for example, we’ve all heard of the “sacred cow.” Anyone who has seen the inside of a factory farm knows that in our culture, nonhuman animals are not sacred. They, like the San Francisco Peaks, are understood as objects, a resource to be exploited at our will. We are not terrible to all animals. Many families grow up with dogs and cats that are loved and considerd family. We recognize they have a spirit; they have preferences and personalities.
Perhaps that’s it. In our culture, in order for something to be sacred, for something to have value on it’s own, it must be recognized as having a spirit. I believe that if something or someone is to be sacred, this implies a great love. Unconditional love, not of an idea or ideology, but love first for the absolute singularity for who or what it is. What is it that we love? If we recognize that our pet dogs have preferences and a spirit that is unique to them, if their lives mean just as much to them as our lives mean to us, why can we not extend this respect to all animals? And is it really so much of a leap to see and understand that even trees and rivers and mountains have spirits? Even if this seems goofy at first, it’s a worldview that has sustained humanity for hundreds of thousands of years. This destructive civilization has only been around for the last 10k years or so, which is a blink in the eye of 300,000 years or more.
The truth is, everything in the physical world is sacred. It is here; it is present. We owe our lives to the world around us. We are both a part of the natural world and manifested as the natural world. That means that we are also sacred. In this civilization, we are provided with limited ways in which to express the sacredness of the world around us. The Peaks are sacred to native people because they have entered into a bind with the land, to protect it, not as an ideology, but as a necessity. If one protects the land that allows them to live, they holding up their end of the bargain, of the bind. Their blood has mixed with the soil and the mountain’s soil is in their blood. How can they possibly be able to express this sacred bond to foreign people, in a foreign language? And how are these foreign people, with no direct physical or emotional ties to the land, supposed to truly understand?
I’d like to think our children are sacred to us, but again, if something is sacred, it must be loved unconditionally for the singularity of who it is. Many of our parents love us unconditionally for who we are, but as a culture, we could care less. In our culture, of course we love our kids, but we don’t treat them as sacred. Good parents give most of their resources, their time, and their energy into their kids, but as a culture, our resources service corporations and the military (and if those things are sacred, we’re already fucked). Still, even if education were funded more, our understanding of education is in service of this culture, which is no longer run by well-meaning hearts like ours.
“Education,” coming from the root, educere, means to “lead forth, to draw out.” In other words, if we were true to the definition of education, children should be led in ways that allow them to become their true selves and enact their own lives. I would argue that the reality of industrial education stems from a different but similar word seduction, which essentially means to “lead astray.” (for more on this, read Jensen’s “Walking on Water: Reading, Writing, and Revolution”). We teach our children, not how to be a human on this planet, but as a citizen in this country, a consumer, one of many well-greased and easily replaceable cogs in a machine that doesn’t serve them.
Yet, this is the only world we know. There are good, kind, loving people that run this exploitive and destructive system. Ask someone with 4 kids, a 50 hour a week job, credit card bills, and a mortgage to “start identifying with the needs of the physical world,” they will laugh at you. In this culture, you don’t feed and house your kids with meaningful connections to the land, or empathy for those communities your culture systematically destroys.
Local indigenous groups will never translate “sacredness” to these people in the courts. Even if the most destructive, insane members of this culture started giving a rat’s ass about the land, about local communities, they don’t live here. Most of the people that ski on the Peaks are from Phoenix. Snowbowl itself is owned by rich people that live on the east coast. Why would they give a damn about what sacred means? All they know is they could make a grip of cash by putting fake sewage snow on the mountain and deforest some of the last pristine old growth that exists in our country.
But as long as we’re arguing about what “sacred” means or how safe or unsafe reclaimed water is, we’re forgetting the bigger picture on this issue. In the southwest, we’re in the middle of an extended drought. If the water is safe, pumping 1.5 million gallons of water up a 15-mile-pipeline to be turned into snow is a really shitty waste of water. Further, the world is warming. Whether humans are causing it or not is irrelevant. It’s happening. So here we have a proposal that will not only desecrate a sacred site and disrespect communities that have been living here since the beginning of time and potentially permanently alter a fragile eco-system, but it will temporarily make a few east coast assholes a bit richer for a bit longer.
The comments here are amazing. Racism is alive and well in Flagstaff.
This isn’t over. Save the fucking Peaks.
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