On a chilly day in March, two dozen weary walkers are
resting at the Ute Indian Museum in Montrose. In the shadow of
western Colorado’s Shining Mountains, surrounded by relics of
the tribe who once inhabited the area, the group is taking a
two-day break on its five-month journey from California’s
Alcatraz Island to the nation’s capital.
After
1,000 miles and a month on the road, the Long Walkers seem to enjoy
relaxing in the comfortable atmosphere of the museum, eating pizza
as they watch a film about Western Shoshone efforts to reclaim
traditional lands. The walkers are young and old, Indian and white.
There’s a core group of approximately 30, along with an
ever-changing group of supporters, whose ranks ebb and flow as the
walk heads east.
Their trek commemorates the Longest Walk
of 1978, which began with 17 participants in San Francisco and
ended five months later with 30,000 in Washington, D.C. The
original Longest Walk halted a congressional effort to abrogate
treaties that protect Native sovereignty. It also helped spur the
passage of the American Indian Religious Freedom Act in August
1978.
The 2008 walk, which began Feb. 11, is “a cry
out to all native people for unity and solidarity,” according
to Jimbo Simmons, a Choctaw. It’s split into two different
routes. Simmons is leading the northern one, which follows the same
trail used by the walkers 30 years ago. And American Indian
Movement co-founder Dennis Banks, now in his 70s, is leading the
southern route, which passes through Indian land. Both Simmons and
Banks are veterans of the original walk.
“Nothing’s changed,” Simmons says.
“There’s still a systematic violation of human and
natural rights.”
Despite the passage of the
Religious Freedom Act, Simmons says threats to Indian sacred sites
have intensified. He mentions 15 sites that are threatened or
already compromised: Mount Shasta in California, for example, where
tribes and environmentalists are fighting geothermal development,
and Bear Butte in South Dakota, where bikers, chainsaws and a
shooting range have desecrated Lakota sacred areas. At Yucca
Mountain in Nevada, sacred to Shoshone and Paiute people, tribes
have played a prominent part in protesting a long-planned nuclear
waste dump.
Simmons emphasizes that “all life is
sacred, all places are sacred. The survival of indigenous people
depends not on just one area, but on the entire life system. Our
cultural survival is at stake.”
There are as
probably as many reasons for walking as there are walkers. For
Willie Lone Wolf, a Navajo/Ute who left his construction job in
Oakland, Calif., to join the walk as bus driver and drum keeper,
the walk is “for our ancestors … our mother, the earth,
all life that is sacred, for future generations.”
The hardest part so far, he says, was through Nevada, “the
loneliest highway in America.” They were encouraged in this
desolate stretch by the local Shoshones and the Paiutes, “who
walked with us, fed and housed us, and took care of us.”
For Washoe Chris Fred, who joined in Carson City, the
walk is a spiritual journey he undertook to cleanse himself from
drinking.
Along the route, Simmons says, the walkers have
received “many many medicines, representative of the support
and need to protect the earth that people feel.” The
medicines include feathers, staffs, medicine bundles and sage. Some
of them are arranged on the dashboard of the “media
bus,” which contains an audio studio for daily streaming and
archiving (www.earthcycles.net), powered by a mix of solar and wind
energy and heated with a wood stove.
“When we get
to D.C., we’ll create one huge altar,” says Simmons,
who predicts that 1 million people will turn out by the end of the
march in July, when the walk’s two routes converge.
Simmons expects to see people from around the world, in support of
the U.N.’s Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples,
adopted by the General Assembly in September 2007. The United
States joined New Zealand, Canada and Australia in voting against
the declaration.
As for the apology to Native peoples
recently issued by the U.S. Senate, Simmons says it’s
“just words. If they were sincere, they’d give back the
land and the livelihoods they destroyed.”
Simmons
says the 1978 walk gave him, as an Indian youth, “a sense of
identity and direction.” The younger people on the current
walk, and those they meet along the way, participate in
“holding the vision and moving forward with intention,”
he says. “We’re investing in and trusting the younger
generation, and depending on them for their advice and
skills.”
After Montrose, the walkers move on to
Gunnison, then to Pueblo, covering between 20 and 80 miles each
day. The act of walking “brings back into focus the
traditional knowledge that’s been locked away for
generations,” says Simmons. “All of our traditions and
ceremonies are based on nature. The walk itself is a prayer.”
The author is the Online Editor for High Country
News.
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