In a matter of days, we will be passing this mesa again. Whether it will look like this remains an open question; nearly all of our snow has melted, but the weather is already changing again. Rain is forecast for the next three days, with possible snow, and snow again for most of next week.
Here at Red Willow, such is our world at winter’s end.
The mesa shown in this series, a group of photos Wings captured on film some twelve or fourteen years ago, are from lands some hours south, inhabited by peoples who are cousins, to greater or lesser degree, of Wings’s own people. Those nearest this formation speak a language classified beneath a wholly different umbrella category from his, although there are several in the broader area that speak one of the three languages into which his own falls. A little further south, and there are two pueblos that speak their own variants of his language, with superficial differences in some meanings and pronunciation, but sufficiently similar to be clearly understood.
One might expect that the linguistic groupings would fall either in a rough gradient or in scattered but mutually exclusive, clearly demarcated plots, but such is not the case. It’s testament to, among other things, the degree to which the Indigenous peoples of this land traveled and likewise traded — not merely in goods but in concepts and words, in practices and traditions. There are similarities among all of the peoples of this broader region . . . and strikingly great differences, too, even among those who speak the same tongue.
It is rather like the earth of this region, the soil and climate and weather and landscape: fundamental commonalities; elemental differences.
Here at Red Willow, the land manages to be both loamy and talc-like, rich and ashy at once. In an ordinary, it simply depends on how deep you dig: The surface is often windswept into dust, but dig a little below the surface, and it’s a rich reddish-brown, a perfect consistency to nurture seeds. In other places, it’s truly red, coppery colors ashimmer with mica; this is the clay that is used for the Pueblo’s iconic pottery.
Mica is less common to the south, although there are rich red clays there, too, as well putty-colored grays and even small pockets in pale shades underlit with hints of white and blue. The earth as a whole, though, is another matter: Much like the mesa’s faces above, the hoodoos in the dark blood reds of sandstone and slate, the red earth ranges from a near-pumpkin color in the area of this formation to rusty brick in the lands to the northwest to bright red-rock sandstone beneath the Dinetah sun to the west.
And here, it runs the gamut from coppery mica to a rich loamy combination of umber and russet to the blood-red siltstone that veins the local slate.
And now, the hues are once again beginning to show.
That may change again tomorrow — or Thursday, or Friday, or next week. It’s likely that we will have several snowstorms yet between now and the practical arrival of summer; spring here is less about genuine warmth than it is about just enough of a rise in the mercury to sustain a slow, steady thaw.
For now, though, we are making our way through inches of mud, rejoicing in the high flat places where it has at last begun to dry, cursing the quagmires that still suck at our boots. In some spots, the winter-yellowed grass has already begun to show signs of green. Spring no longer seems so far off, and indeed, it is not — just over two weeks distant, with the synthetic, pitiable human manipulation mislabeled Daylight Savings Time now less than a week off.
In our world, time is not reckoned by colonial machinations, nor the seasons either. For now, as we make ready to travel up and down this ancient path once more, we are planning for the planting season, our concerns those of the water, and of the land. But it is the time of renewal, and as we move through these days, we will meet the face of a new red earth, in all its shades and shapes.
It is, after all, this earth, both new and impossibly, incomprehensibly old, to which our peoples are bound, this earth that gives us life.
~ Aji
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