Land Acknowledgment
JIMMY SANTIAGO BACA: I'm done with the elitist stories, politically correct, tech-driven testing to make thoughtless and sad consumers, highly educated human-manuals, herded together to croon and moo over toxin-laced facts. Testing for me is like being kidnapped, gagged, handcuffed, and thrown into a small cell where I can’t move and I can’t show you who I am, or what I know. I can’t get close to you. I can’t, in other words, communicate with you. So when I write, my soul unfolds, my heart opens.
SARA ORTIZ: That was Jimmy Santiago Baca.
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ORTIZ: Welcome to the inaugural episode of Black Mountain Radio, broadcast from the Mojave Desert. I’m Sara Ortiz
JOSHUA WOLF SHENK: And I’m Joshua Wolf Shenk.
SHENK: The Black Mountain Institute is an artist-driven, community-supported literary center and what we do is—we make space. We make space for conversation. We make space for heartfelt works of art. We make space for people to come together around that art, like around a campfire or a ritual meal.
ORTIZ: If you thought that was cheesy, I did too, not going to lie. [laughs] But what you’re saying is so true. This is a hard time for gatherings. I’ve hardly left my house in east Las Vegas in months. I want to be with friends and I want to be with our community, but instead I’m sitting on my kitchen stool at our countertop, which is a Brady Bunch orange color, and that has turned into my office. I genuinely miss people.
ORTIZ: I miss the togetherness that comes from our annual Believer Festival and year-round programs. And it’s especially strange because at BMI we bring people together to hear from literary luminaries. Bringing people together, that’s what we do. So, our answer to this moment—a moment where we badly need a common room—is to create one through sound.
SHENK: Sara, I really feel the same way. I’ve been stuck in my house so long. I feel like there’s this strange pandemic geography where we’re kind of anywhere. We can be anywhere in the world. We can be in Berlin or Tokyo or Kansas City for a program, but we are also nowhere because it's been so disconnected for so long, or we can be in multiple places at the same time.
SHENK: This wish to be grounded, that core intention, is why the theme of this episode is land acknowledgment. What is this place we call Las Vegas, or Southern Nevada? It’s known for the chirps of casino machines, but what about native rhythms, and desert winds? We want to really listen to this place in its resonant multiplicities. For their support of this project, we are super grateful to our partners at Zappos, the Rogers Foundation, and the College of Liberal Arts at UNLV, all friends of our work to make radio by, for, and about this strange and wondrous place.
ORTIZ: The more we reflected on this, the more we found that acknowledging this place means looking at its two polar qualities: Southern Nevada is a place where you can get so deeply connected to the natural surroundings. Whether that’s Mt. Charleston or Valley of Fire, there is this idea of the continuous, the always-there, and the always-will-be.
SHENK: It’s so ancient and primal here and yet it’s also a place defined by change, new-ness, abrupt shifts, explode-the-old-bring-in-the-new.
ORTIZ: Yes, it's definitely defined by both. Both continuity and transience.
SHENK: That’s the paradox that guides this episode. Let’s start by talking about how we acknowledge the indigeneous history and presence on this land, which stretches back thousands of years. And let’s be honest—the first thing to acknowledge is how fraught this practice can be.
ORTIZ: Here’s Soni Brown.
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LAND ACKNOWLEDGMENT
SONI BROWN: Each night right after dinner, my husband and I pack the two young ones in our pull-along wagon for a walk. The traffic is light on Hualapai Way. Sometimes we wheel the wagon from the sidewalk into the double lanes of the road. We used to be able to walk across big plots of land, but new tract houses have sprung up on them. In the near distance, there’s another new feature of our neighborhood—the Las Vegas Ikea.
[Sounds of Suburbia]
Where we live, people keep to themselves. I catch glimpses of my neighbors as they drive into their garages. I catch glimpses through open blinds, as they watch TV with a drink in hand. I catch glimpses on Thursday nights when they take their trash cans to the curb. I wonder who on my street can call this home? Who can say this piece of ground is the same place their ancestors walked and lived on? Who carries knowledge of this place in their bones from before Ikea blocked the view of Red Rock Canyon? Before the strip mall with the Dollar Loan center and Tide Cleaners.
How do we connect to, and give respect to, what came before us? If you’ve been to a cultural or academic event in recent years, you’ve probably heard what’s called a Land Acknowledgment—a formal statement to acknowledge the Indigenous Peoples on whose land the event is taking place. Here’s Cody Gambino, introducing a program called Neon Lit at the Writers’ Block in downtown Las Vegas.
[audience applause]
CODY GAMBINO: Hi everyone, welcome to tonight’s reading. Before we get started, I would like to take a moment and acknowledge that we are on the stolen and unseated land of the Southern Paiute nation. Just a reminder…
BROWN: Land acknowledgements are meant to connect us to a place and the people who came before. I don’t feel settled here because I am not from here. I want to know more about this recognition, and to see what promise it might hold to stimulate deeper connections. But I wasn’t surprised to learn it’s not that easy.
TONI JENSEN: I'm Toni Jensen, author of Carry: Survival on Stolen Land.
BROWN: Toni Jensen is an author and educator. Her book, Carry came out the week before our interview.
JENSEN: Well, I think they started from a really good place and for a really good purpose, which is of course, just to simply acknowledge whose land we're sitting on at any given moment. About 15 years ago, you started to hear more and more of them, especially in Canada and New Zealand and Australia, they become really common there. In the States, it's still a little hit or miss. It seems like in intellectual or academic circles you hear more land acknowledgements than you do in rural spaces. I doubt that at the Walmart shareholders’ meeting they're doing land acknowledgements, for example, although maybe they would surprise me.
BROWN: Toni makes a good point. I’ve only heard land acknowledgements in academic circles. At first, it felt a lot like performative wokeness; like a chore.
BROWN: Sponsorship message. Check. Social media shout out. Check. Land acknowledgement. Check, check!
JENSEN: I think most land acknowledgements though, fall slightly short of that and perform kind of lip service in a performa sort of way by just saying ‘some Cherokee people used to live here’ or ‘hey, the Paiute used to be here,’ and the ‘used to’ implies a past tenseness that is problematic because, of course, the Native people often from those tribes still live in all of those areas.
[sound of land acknowledgment being recited in Chicago]
I think that gets lost a little bit and it applies a past tenseness. It also sometimes can seem so performa in academic circles as to be almost a mockery of what it was originally intended to do.
[sound of speaker struggling to pronounce Odawa, Ojibwe and Potawatomi Nations]
Someone stumbles and kind of just, mispronounces sometimes the name of the tribe and then moves on hastily and seems to be embarrassed. I'm not sure what purpose that serves if it's done in kind of that quick, ‘I know we're supposed to do this, but I don't really understand why it's meaningful,’ sort of way, I don't really know what that's accomplishing.
BROWN: How should people craft land acknowledgements?
JENSEN: Yeah, I've heard a couple non-indigenous friends who've given really good land acknowledgements. I think part of what made them so good was that they mentioned people who are from the land specifically—living people. So this notion then that it's not a pastness. If you're talking about a friend's work or a contemporary writer's work, then you're citing someone who's living. Maybe if everyone acknowledges the land we live on formally like that long enough in every single space, people will just start every day to think more about the native people whose land this was before they moved into it. It's possible.
BROWN: The only member of my family who can call Las Vegas her birthplace is my daughter Lucy. We kept her umbilical cord to plant in Red Rock Canyon because that is what we traditionally do in my home country of Jamaica. Old timers there tell you it’s the only way to stay connected to the land and its people. And after talking to Toni, I wanted to connect, not just talk to, but walk the land with someone who has that experience.
[walking sounds]
FAWN DOUGLAS: This is a part of my story, a part of my history. I say it as mine as in I’m not the voice of my entire tribe. Our tribal council, our elected officials, are.
BROWN: Fawn Douglas is a Las Vegas-based artist and member of the local Paiute Tribe. She has used art to represent visual land acknowledgements.
DOUGLAS: There's a certain method people use to take a whole rock part out of the side of a mountain, or the side of the hill, or wherever these etchings are. I wanted to preserve that within my art.
BROWN: Fawn and I walk the land at the Old Mormon Fort near Downtown Las Vegas. Except she calls it the Old Fort, dropping the Mormon part.
DOUGLAS: We're at the Old Fort, formerly known as the Old Mormon Fort here in Las Vegas, Nevada. It's basically on the corner of Washington and Las Vegas Boulevard. This was an ancestral—well all of Vegas is—but this was a traditional ancestral homelands of our Southern Paiute people.
BROWN: Fawn wears her hair bone-straight and loose under a broad brim-hat. We walk to the shade by the gurgling stream and I ask her how it feels to be under the same sky as her ancestors or walking along the spring that encouraged settlers to the Las Vegas valley. She looks up. I watch her gaze at the replica of the settler’s fort, then the cottonwood trees by the stream. There is not much here outside of the visitor center that represents the Paiute’s way of life. Some of the trees, Fawn says, have been here long before the settlers.
[Running water]
DOUGLAS: It's kind of like one of those bittersweet things, because it feels good to be here knowing this is a place of my ancestors, but it's called the old Mormon Fort and you could see a recreation of the old Adobe bricks. They have a workshop where they actually make the bricks here and they keep restructuring it.
BROWN: We walk to the visitor center. A statue of settler and rancher, Helen Stewart stands guard. She is a tiny woman. Fawn points out Helen’s beaded vest, something Fawn thinks Helen got from the Paiutes. The plaque by the statue says Helen deeded 10 acres of land in 1911 to establish the Las Vegas Paiute Colony. A gift from the Mother of Las Vegas.
DOUGLAS: Well, she was actually paid for that. Yes, I read that she is definitely a friend of the Paiutes and she employed some, she was a collector of our basketry and such but you know, she was paid for that. It wasn't like ‘kindness of your heart, give this land.’ It's just like, ‘actually how much should I get for that kind of thing?’ And she was paid $500.
[Sound of weed whacker]
DOUGLAS: This is a part of the original springs areas in Las Vegas. We have many differences— [laughs]. This guy. Colonizers always taking space, even when they're not trying to. It's like, ‘oh, you're doing an interview over there? Let me turn on my weed whacker. You know, there's several thousand acres here, but let me actually just weed whack that one spot where you are sitting.’
[Laughs]
BROWN: That is an exaggeration. There aren’t several thousand acres but the man did interrupt our interview twice with small talk while turning on his weed wacker to cut a barely-there patch of grass. I ask Fawn what land acknowledgments are supposed to inspire.
DOUGLAS: I guess how to care for it. How to be a better human. You know what, these are things that I'm also learning, too. We're learning about protecting the water, protecting the lands, and people are rising up all over the world really for this message of protection. We need to protect our mother earth and we're all her children.
BROWN: My conversation with Fawn was in English, as you’ve heard, yet I couldn’t help but think as we talked how limited English often feels to me. In Jamaica, I grew up speaking patois, which is influenced by English, Spanish and West African dialects. I miss so many of its nuances, but I also know they only make sense in Jamaica. I wanted to think not just about the meaning of land acknowledgment, but also about the very words and rhythms we use.
endawnis is an inter-Tribal woman who often navigates land acknowledgements using the limitations of the English language.
ENDAWNIS SPEARS: My name is endawnis Spears. endawnis is a Ojibwe word. I am the director of programming and outreach and one of the cofounders of the Akomawt Educational Initiative, which is a majority Indigenously owned consultancy that works with places of knowledge to incorporate indigenous perspectives into their work.
BROWN: endawnis thinks the language we use is a big part of connecting to a place.
SPEARS: The land gave us our languages. Our languages were not developed in England and our languages were not developed in any European country. Our languages best reflect the landscape we live on, and so acknowledging that English is an imported good—that English is an imported language that was not born here. English does a great job of reflecting England. It does a great job of reflecting the landscape of England and the values of that culture, but it does not reflect our values here and it will never accurately reflect this landscape that we live on because it wasn't born here.
BROWN: endawnis isn’t saying English is hard to use, just inadequate.
SPEARS: The word for dirt has a negative connotation.
BROWN: endawnis credits this idea of dirt to Chris Newell, the executive director of the Abbe Museum in Maine.
SPEARS: And I’m going to go ahead and borrow it from him. In English, if you call someone dirty, then that's a negative thing. That's an insult. This dirty thing from the earth. But in Passamaquoddy, in his language, the literal translation for soil are “the molecules of our ancestors.” So when you have an understanding of this landscape as being part of your kin, as your ancestors are buried in this place, and for us as Dine people, as Navajo people, our umbilical cords after we are born are buried in these places. Then we are tied to this container that in English we referred to as land, but in our tribal languages, we refer to as these containers of ceremony.
BROWN: The ritual of planting the umbilical cord naturally came up in conversation. Fawn told me she climbed high into Red Rock Canyon to bury her daughter’s umbilical cord deep into the dirt. This way, animals can’t dig it up. If they dug it up, then her daughter would wander far from home. I began my conversation with David, the author of The Heartbeat at Wounded Knee, which was a finalist for the National Book Award, by telling him about this tradition in Jamaica, too.
DAVID TREUER: It's really cool that you guys do that with your umbilical cords; we do the same exact thing. Just this summer, when I was back home on the rez with my kids, we were out in the woods doing some family stuff and I pointed to this tree and I'm like, ‘hey guys, guess what? All of your umbilical cords are buried under that tree.’ Right under that stump, because I put that stump on top so animals wouldn't dig it up—and that's powerful.
My name is David Treuer. I’m Ojibwe from Leech Lake Reservation, and in terms of occupation, I mean, take your pick: writer, professor, father, warrior, you know, all of the above.
BROWN: For many Indigenous people, land relates to all aspects of existence—culture, spirituality, language, law, family, and identity. I don’t live in my home country any more and probably never will. I want what land acknowledgments implores us to do, which is to be the person entrusted to care for the land. To remember those who came before and still live, love and learn on these lands. To continue providing a deep sense of identity, purpose, and belonging. I ask David if land acknowledgment could bind nonindigenous people to the land.
TREUER: I've never heard a land acknowledgement that actually acknowledges the land for its own sake which might create an awareness that we all have to live on it now. With climate change and other things, that's getting increasingly difficult—that would be pretty cool.
I don't know. Maybe the best thing to do is like a reverse land acknowledgement. It's like, ‘hi, I'm David Treuer. I'm really happy to be speaking to you here today. I'd like to acknowledge all of the non-Indians, who've decided to fuck with us and make your homes here without our permission. I'd like to acknowledge your bullshit. And I'd like to acknowledge your sort of greed and rapacity and your desire to make a better life at our expense. So thank you for that and enjoy the show.’
BROWN: This is not an uplifting way to end the piece. But this is not an uplifting piece to begin with. I came to feel, talking with Toni, Fawn, endawnis, and David, just how much distance there is, how much there is to grieve and how land acknowledgement barely touches upon it. Perhaps recognizing the grief is the way we cleave to the land.
When Fawn and I walked side by side, I thought of our ancestors. Fawn and I are the descendants of two continents ravaged by others for profit and power. Then those people asked us to forget, as a nation was created. What keeps me connected is remembering whose land this really belongs to. My daughter’s umbilical cord is in a box within boxes in the garage. It doesn’t feel right to plant it yet. I think my ancestors would understand.
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ORTIZ: Soni’s essay really frames the core question of this show: How do you acknowledge a place as deep, vast, and paradoxical as Las Vegas, Nevada?
SHENK: I love the way Soni does this by getting really specific; what is her relationship to this question, what’s the street that she lives on, where does she come from? Art is specificity, and that really informs our next segment where we bring to air the often-unheard voices who know Las Vegas, and who are Las Vegas. To do this, we’ve partnered with the Oral History Research Center at UNLV Libraries Special Collections & Archives.
ORTIZ: History usually emphasizes dates and documents—the official stuff. But through oral history what we are learning, first-hand, is how people felt, what they saw, and what they care about. It’s the experience of people with personal knowledge. It centers on memories, opinion, and distinct points of view not often found in history books.
SHENK: We’ve talked about how what we are doing here is really trying to listen to this place. Claytee White and her staff at the Oral History Center at UNLV Libraries have been doing that for so long and have been super generous in opening that archive to us. So much more to come in future episodes.
ORTIZ: Yes, cannot wait.
SHENK: Today, as we explore land acknowledgement, Black Mountain Radio’s Layla Muhammad presents an oral history from Kenny Anderson.
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AURAL HISTORY
[ archival newsreel]
1955 ARCHIVAL NEWSREEL: The Nevada desert in America is the scene of the latest atomic test. International observers come by invitation to join scientists, military and civil defense authorities making a study of the test.
A whole town of specially chosen types of buildings with dummies inside them has been erected to study survival chances in an atomic explosion. Called Doom Town, the buildings and their contents will test the effects of the bomb at distances ranging from one to two miles. The extent to which food will be contaminated by radioactivity will also be studied, along with the effect of blasts on communications. Fully protected cameras concealed inside and outside the buildings will take pictures of the blast scene. The bomb itself is contained in a device at the top of a tower 500 feet high. Tanks move into the blast area...
LAYLA MUHAMMAD: This aural history comes from the Native American Forum on Nuclear Issues—an event that spanned two days at UNLV, and is now included in the Nevada Test Site Oral History Project. The project’s lead researcher, Mary Palevsky, notes that of the 1,000 nuclear weapons tests conducted during the Cold War, 928 took place at the Nevada Test Site. Researchers conducted over 300 hours of interviews with individuals affiliated with and impacted by the site. The project records the experiences of downwinders and radiation testers who reveal that wildlife, water, and weather do not obey the boundaries humans create.
For this episode on land acknowledgment, we turn to the voice of Kenny Anderson, a tribal council member for the Southern Paiute people, who describes his experience with a mainstay of Las Vegas history: nuclear testing.
KENNY ANDERSON: My name is Kenny Anderson. I’m with the Las Vegas Paiute Tribe. I’m a council member, tribal member, I’m the environmental program manager for the tribe, and cultural representative for the tribe.
MUHAMMAD: Kenny Anderson was born in 1958; both parents are Southern Paiute people—[a tribe] who have lived along the Colorado River for at least 900 years, moving north and west into what is today called Nevada, Utah, and California.
ANDERSON: We’re a small tribe, like maybe 53 members, plus another probably 20 more kids who, once they reach a certain age, become a member. But we’ve actually been talking with, or having meetings with, the NRC and DOE concerning our issues on the nuclear test site, and having it being a center through the Native land like [U.S.] 95 and we have the train tracks…
MUHAMMAD: Anderson grew up in Utah and Las Vegas. Now 62, Anderson works mornings for a construction company and his afternoons at the Nuwu marketplace, a Pauite cannabis shop on Main Street.
In 1863, the Treaty of Ruby Valley recognized a large swath of land as Western Shoshone homeland. It stretches across what is known as Southern California, Nevada, and into Idaho.
The Nevada Test Site was an outdoor laboratory used to conduct experiments for the U.S. during the Cold War. The test site exists on Western Shoshone homeland according to the Ruby Valley Treaty. In fact, ‘The 928 American nuclear explosions in Newe Sogobia have been classified by the Western Shoshone National Council as bombs rather than “tests.’
[sound: archival footage of nuclear bomb tests, explosions]
1955 ARCHIVAL NEWSREEL: Many cameras in many locations film the single blast.
MUHAMMAD: The testing on the site affected those far beyond its boundaries and into surrounding communities. While the test site provided jobs to thousands of people, the danger of radiation continues to affect populations on farms, ranches, and communities, including Indian Reservations.
ANDERSON: … and hopefully all the other states will try to stop this nuclear waste from coming into Nevada. But we’re a small tribe and some of the problems that we were trying to talk to the DOE about is the problem with transportation and what happens if it crashes, and all that radiation is released into the area. We’re a small tribe and our economic development will be totally devastated.
We were telling the NRC and [DOE], the same questions: what do we do? What do we get out of it? Are we supposed to just move away like the non-Natives do? Because we’re from here, we’re from this valley, we’ve been here for over a thousand years, and our families are here, and we’re not moving. But we would like to have guarantees of what happens to us, and where we go from there. We’re talking about Moapa and Vegas, and it goes up to the Southern Utah area; those five bands up there, all those people were affected.
The lands around there, all that radiation came over and they had seen it. They were telling everybody, they’d had to just either, one day, stay in the house, and one day they’d have to go out and do their gardens and pick—back then they did a lot of farm work, like picking vegetables and stuff like that for farmers. They were out there exposed to this radiation, all through that area.
MUHAMMAD: Kenny Anderson’s mother died of leukemia at age 65. He has continued his work bringing awareness to Indigenous history and to the health needs of the Indigenous community.
ANDERSON: A lot of these people aren’t here no more to tell this story because they are gone. You know, they were exposed and now they have leukemia, which is sort of like strange for Native Americans to get. They die, and where’s their story? Do they tell me?
They’ve seen the big bloom of light as it came this way and they thought it was really nice, ‘Wow, look at that, we get to see something,’ but no, that’s not—they didn’t realize what it really was. The government really didn’t actually tell a lot of people either.
Natives and non-Natives were really exposed in the Southern Utah and the Southern Nevada area, and they’re gone too. Where’s their stories? They’re not here, because they’re gone.
But what we would want to do is like, tell the people who are involved, like the DOE and the NRC, to protect the people that are here now. If something happens, Vegas is going to be—they’ll all go, they're all going to go to another—they’ll make a new Vegas somewhere else, but we’re going to be here.
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SHENK: You know Sara, I spend a lot of time on Google Maps and when I thought about this episode, I mostly thought that we’re hitting that minus sign in the lower right hand corner. Press it 3 or 4 times and see the urban landscape of Vegas as it sits near Phoenix and Albuquerque. What’s the shared experience of these cities? What do these urban Southwest places have in common?
ORTIZ: Yeah, I really like that visual of zooming in and zooming out. So, in this new essay for The Believer, the Black Mountain Institute’s flagship magazine, the writer Kyle Paoletta has this interesting declaration. He declares that there is a singular ethos of what he calls the City Southwest. And in this essay, adapted for audio by producer Claire Mullen, Kyle explores the distinct literature of these urban spaces. What you’ll hear next is Kyle’s narration—plus a conversation with one of the artists featured in his essay, and in my opinion, is the heart of this essay. That is the poet Jimmy Santiago Baca.
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CITY SOUTHWEST
KYLE PAOLETTA: In Ansel Adams’s famous 1941 photograph of the tiny town of Hernandez, New Mexico, a silver moon hangs in the sky above a few adobe houses behind a humble graveyard, its slapdash crosses shining white despite the twilight hour. In the distance, the snow-capped Sangre de Cristo Mountains cut a jagged horizon line. Between their peaks and the village runs mile after mile of bleakest desert, hosting little more than sagebrush and stone.
Eighty years later, the image remains a fair proxy for what most Americans imagine when they think about the Southwest. As far as many outsiders are concerned, the desert Southwest will forever seem an antidote to the quotidian troubles of coastal society; more a landscape than a region. Nevermind that the Southwest has spent more than a century and a half relentlessly urbanizing. Today, Phoenix is larger than Philadelphia and close to three quarters of Nevada’s population lives in metropolitan Las Vegas. It is within the sphere of cities like Albuquerque, Tucson, and El Paso that the contemporary culture of the Southwest resides.
Growing up in Albuquerque, it wasn’t until high school that I began to understand how the history of the Southwest has influenced the city’s present. I had never thought about that divide as particularly literary—that is, until I was 17, when I read the poet Jimmy Santiago Baca’s book, Martín and Meditations on the South Valley. It was the first time I understood my hometown not as the type of dangerous backwater where COPS was filmed, but instead as the backdrop to a work of bona fide literature.
It’s been years since I first read Martín, but in the summer of 2019 I finally got to talk with Baca when I was back in New Mexico. We reached him again recently, at his house in Albuquerque.
JIMMY BACA: I'm Jimmy Santiago Baca, and I'm a poet. I've been a poet all my life.
PAOLETTA: Baca lived on his own in Albuquerque as a teenager in the 60’s, then was sent to prison in Arizona for 6 years in 1973. It was there that he learned to read and write. Since then, he’s published over a dozen books of poetry, in addition to memoirs, essays, stories, and a screenplay.
When I first spoke with Baca, I wanted to know why he has stayed in Albuquerque, even after all the city put him through as a young man. He said he likes the Southwest because, ‘The voice of nature is so huge, I can feel its heart beating in every poem that I write.’ Of course, there are also less lyrical reasons.
BACA: I just happened to like Albuquerque because it's such a cool place. It hasn't yet been discovered by anybody. Except Willie Nelson and a few other people, but it's just a really cool place, man.
PAOLETTA: When we talked, Baca described the thriving Chicano scene he was welcomed into in Albuquerque’s South Valley after he got out of prison. Back in the ‘80s, the South Valley’s 300 year old adobe farmhouses were home to Native American activists, muralists, and other Chicano artists.
BACA: It became the Chicano outlook, where you see your history and you say, okay, I'm not Spanish, but I'm not fully Native American, but I'm a mixture of the two.
I know my history. I know what they did to us. I know how we've always lived on this land. My grandma was Native American [and] my grandfather was a Mexican Indian. They call themselves Mexicans, but because of the political turmoil in which I grew up in, I call myself Chicano because of the things that were happening to us and how [Rodolfo] “Corky” Gonzales, Reies Tijerina, Cesar Chavez—all of those people came and they said, Chicanos are this—Rubén Salazar on the East LA walkouts and stuff. They defined what Chicano was for me. And I realized, I'm Chicano. And ever since then, my skin fits much better.
PAOLETTA: Albuquerque was also one of the urban epicenters of the Native American Red Power movement. Today, Native American and Chicano artists and activists have continued that legacy.
BACA: We don't have conversations about Indigenous cultures and land. We don't have conversations. We don't sit around and talk and then publish poems about it at Yale or something like that—we don't do that. What we talk about is, we all know that we're poets or writers, and we all know that it's all that we can do is just to keep our confidence intact— that we don't let the outer cultures come in and make us doubt our word, because our word is not based upon being right or wrong. It's based upon the faith behind what we say.
So we have faith that mother earth will take care of us. And then we work our voices in our hearts to keep intact the confidence and the conviction and the love within that to write poems that are strong. And when people read them, they don't tell us this is right, or this is wrong—they tell us, holy shit, that's a good poem! I just felt something in my body, you know? And that's what we're from. So we believe that that only comes from—not from conversations, not from intellectual dialectics and stuff like that—that comes from a deep belief in something that's much greater than us, and that's community.
The United States is a well oiled slavery machine. And that slavery machine is to make sure that all rich white people can have free labor if they need it, can be at ease by putting the best of our youth in prisons.
PAOLETTA: Besides Albuquerque, Baca’s other base is north of Santa Fe, where he built a cabin for his family. He’s also established a retreat for writers there, and founded a nonprofit that hosts workshops and outreach programs for young people, prisoners, and ex-prisoners.
BACA: We have retreat houses for ex-convicts to come finish their books. We have mentoring programs. We have internship programs. We have literacy programs on and on and on. So the work that I do is, I try to get them to understand how great they are and get these beautiful human beings that are in their mid thirties, early, late twenties—get them to meet language.
My job is to tap that good intention faith. And get them to write great poems, amazing books. I think I've had at least 20 of them write books and get published. I've had some other alumni start bookstores, open up writing workshops, start acting workshops. You know, you just gotta go there and you just have to let them know that you're the walking, talking model for what's possible.
So we try to keep everything real modeled on real basic humble foundations. You know, you get up, you make the coffee, do your meditation, write, and then go out and work. The end of the more they get into the sanity of living, the stronger they become and the better they write.
All we're really doing is preparing to go into the city and destroy its mores. With our cedar morality, with our granite morality, with our field morality—all we're doing as writers is preparing ourselves to go in and destroy the literature of the cities and talk the truth to them. But we're not doing it glibly. We're not doing it artificially. We're doing it with a strong, strong, grounded base of where we come from. And that makes us going back into the urban cities that much more powerful. That much more empowered to speak.
PAOLETTA: What’s remarkable is that, unlike artists like Georgia O’Keeffe, Donald Judd, James Turrell, or even Ana Castillo, Baca’s artistic practice has not prompted a retreat into the landscape, but instead an ever-deeper engagement with the city it enveloped. And distinct from transplants like Barbara Kingsolver or Dave Hickey, Baca’s having come of age in Albuquerque gives his work about the city a special intimacy.
BACA: That's where the great writers come from: community. Not this bootstrap, do it your own, individualism—stuff like that. But we also believe that you can write poems from an apartment in Manhattan, or you can write poems from an apartment in East LA or Seattle or Detroit or Chicago—you can write poems from there, but writing a poem from there and enjoying the notoriety that that gives you with all the writers in that city is quite different than going off by yourself and working really hard to buy 10 acres of land and then build a house and then build a guest house for someone younger than you to come and finish their work.
That's an entirely different type of poetics than what is urban poetics. It's a whole other world when you live in the mountains and you've worked really, really hard to establish a community that you know is going to nurture the writers to come for a hundred years.
And it's a beautiful feeling to know that you did that. Rather than pursue a national book award. When the water comes down from the mountain springs and you know that it's going into these two cabins and if the people are bathing in it right now, and they're making coffee right now, that's your national book award.
That to me is like, dude, what other award do you want? That's the award!
[gentle sounds of outdoors, birds chirping, cicada cries]
PAOLETTA: Rather than being considered as a poet of the city Southwest, Baca is mostly discussed in terms of his impact on Chicano literature. Similarly, the poetry of Joy Harjo, Ofelia Zepeda, Luci Tapahonso, and Layli Long Soldier is unjustly filed away with a diverse array of other Native writers; while the excellent Anglo storytellers of Nevada, like Claire Vaye Watkins and Charles Bock, are labeled Western, as if they wrote books about cattle-wrangling rather than the coercive violence and stunted ambition that lurks beneath the surface of contemporary life.
Although all of these authors have written about the city Southwest, the literary vision of the region is still dominated by the landscape-beholden work of Willa Cather, Edward Abbey, and Cormac McCarthy.
BACA: The thing that Southwest literature has done is two things; they've taken a bunch of white writers and written about the cowboy lore and made assassins their heroes. There's nothing good about David Crockett, except he massacred a bunch of Indians. There's nothing good about Billy the Kid, except he went out and he killed everybody. But you put that in the hands of a white writer and all of a sudden, Billy the Kid becomes a hero.
For some reason, Americans are still in love with that myth of the cowboy being this individual who can tame the savages and get the land, to do what he wants to do with the land. But in reality, they were slave owners, they were slave traders and they were straight up serial killers. They could kill whoever they wanted when they wanted.
And we still haven't turned that corner in our Southwest literature. If somebody was to criticize a book, like say All the Pretty Horses or all these other Western historians, they would come out by saying that you're being racist in your analysis and stuff. When in true fact, if we had a historian from the Chicano perspective, we would say like the Texas Rangers, they were just a gang of serial killers.
We're hurting for real critical analysis of Southwestern literature. The thing that I find most disturbing about the Chicano literature is that we're so busy trying to please the colonial publishers in New York, we’re so busy trying to please the editors—almost 90% who are white.
So a lot, a lot, a lot, a lot of writers, we’re trying to please them. I'm not here to please anyone, I'm not here to win anyone's approval. And that's really important because we have to teach our kids—you have to win the approval of your heart. When you go to bed at night, you know, you know, how you've lived that day.
You don't need your mom and dad or a teacher or some editor in New York to say you've lived the day good. You know, in your heart. Now we have to transfer that into a literary form that's contributable to society so that other people can read it.
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SHENK: Find a link to Kyle Paoletta’s full essay, and hear Jimmy Santiago Baca’s poem “Poet’s Prayer” in its entirety at blackmountainradio.org
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ORTIZ: [laughs]
SHENK: I mean, have you been asked what hotel you live in?
ORTIZ: If I’m being honest, no one has ever asked me that question. Not one person. But I know that a lot of people do get asked this ridiculous question.
SHENK: This is news to absolutely no one in Southern Nevada, but, remarkably, still news to much of the world: Las Vegas is a place where people live. Change tires, do taxes, go to the dentist, and read books, perform all the many functions of the everyday. But every day here also means facing the particularities of this place.
ORTIZ: And to get to know the real Las Vegas, we have to get to know the people that live here.
SHENK: In our next segment, Black Mountain Radio’s Vera Blossom invites Las Vegas residents to help us understand their experience of one of the most misunderstood places on earth. Vera did this by asking the same five questions of each person—and while she was at it, she also turned the mic on herself.
VARIOUS VOICES: Where is home? What do you think the future of this place looks like? What is the most difficult part of living here? How long do you plan to stay? How has living here encouraged you to grow?
SHENK: We hear from a transplant…
[Marta Meana introduces herself]
ORTIZ: … a nomad…
[Sreshtha Sen introduces themself]
SHENK: … an indigenous person… [Jonnette Pady introduces herself]
ORTIZ: …a first-generation Las Vegan…[Vera Blossom introduces herself]
SHENK: and a fourth-generation Las Vegan.
[Mikayla Whitmore introduces themself]
ORTIZ: Here’s 5 by 5.
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5 X 5
MARTA MEANA: You know, that's a really complicated question for me, because I'm an immigrant twice over–I was born in Madrid, Spain, and my parents immigrated to Canada, to Montreal. And then I immigrated from Montreal to Las Vegas. So the truth is that there is no one place that is completely home for me. It's a little bit Las Vegas, it's a little bit Montreal, and it's a little bit Madrid.
On the other hand, no one of those places is a hundred percent home the way I imagine it might be for someone who grew up and stayed in one place.
When I came 23 years ago, the reason I decided to stay and to choose this over other opportunities is precisely because I thought there were so many opportunities for growth. And of course, when you connect to opportunities for growth in a place you have to grow along with it. So, I still think this is an incredible place in terms of the openness to doing things differently that you don't find in more established towns that are steeped in that intellectual tradition.
Each place has kind of grown a part of me. What Las Vegas has grown is really an openness to reconfigurations of how things are done and how things are created.
There is so much talk about diversifying the economy. There's so much talk about trying to re-envision urban planning. You know, there's a part of me that's lost a little bit of faith in any of those things happening because I've been hearing that for 23 years. I can't say that I see this becoming a walkable city, à la New York or San Francisco anytime soon.
On the other hand, what we have that those cities don't have, is that within 10 minutes you're in this gorgeous desert with this big sky and you're completely alone, surrounded by gorgeous vegetation. So, I'm not sure how this is going to look in the future. My guess is: not very different.
When I first came, I thought, okay, we'll do this for two or three years, and I'll get this whole sun-desert thing out of my system. Well it looks like I’m here for good because I’ve been here for 23 years. [laughs] But it really has become an integral part of me. I love this landscape.
SRESHTHA SEN: I'm from India. So I guess I will always call Dehli my home, if they'll allow it. I've kind of grown up all over the place in India, and I've lived in New York before this, and that city shaped me in more ways than I can even begin to count. These are all the places I'll list when someone asks me, “Where is home?”
And to be honest, to be completely upfront, I've been having trouble envisioning any thoughts of future possibilities—not just of Vegas. You know, I think we're living in a time where it's so easy to be exhausted, to be resigned, to be present and not think about, a future of any sorts. In both horrible and not horrible ways.
[laughs] I really want to say something hopeful.
I will say this: I'm teaching creative writing this semester and my students, who are undergrads, constantly surprise me and make me so, so glad to be with them right now. They're so tired and so bright all at once and they're making the best of it. They're struggling, like the city is struggling right now. And in some ways, they are the place for me, they are Vegas for me. And so the future, I would say, looks like them.
Right now, I don't think I can live the life of someone who can plan their arrival and departure in this country. [laughs] There is an expiration date on my VISA right now.
JONNETTE PADDY: That's such a complex question. If I would have to say one place, it has to be the house I grew up in North Las Vegas. When I think of home and when I close my eyes and I imagine a place where I'm the most comfortable, that's it.
Cause you have to be comfortable to grow. You have to feel safe and be around familiarity. And so that's kind of how it allows me to grow, making me feel like I have a safe place to be, to try new things and to really kind of venture out.
[quiet electric buzz of neon]
Especially during the summer, I think about how unnatural it is for so many people to be living here, and all the water that's wasted, all the electricity that gets wasted, and how Vegas is kind of bad for the environment. It's definitely unnatural; all these people living here and it's unfortunate. But it's also so beautiful.
The future of Las Vegas looks different from the future of any other city. We shouldn't be looking at the future of this city to be like New York or LA, because the city is completely different.
I do see Las Vegas becoming more diverse in the economy, because I know that coronavirus definitely opened a lot of people's eyes as to how dependent we are on the hospitality industry in the city. And how, if that one thing falls, the whole city can fall.
I actually have plans to move from Las Vegas in a few months. But, I am Navajo and something that I've always been taught as a Navajoman, is that you go off and you learn different things. You travel, you build yourself up as a person, and then you go back to your home and you bring all those experiences and all those teachings that you had, that you learned, and you use them for your home to make your home a better place.
In the end game, I definitely see myself coming back to Vegas and retiring here and getting old here. Cause it is home. [laughs]
VERA BLOSSOM: I always felt that home was somewhere else. I don't know if that was because I missed being by the water, or if it's because I resented my parents and I just thought home was not where my parents were.
I actually frequently had daydreams about the smell of the ocean while I was walking from home to school. If you listen to palm trees waving in the wind, it can sound like water crashing. That made me really homesick.
I think at some point I felt that Las Vegas had left its mark on me and I started considering this place my home.
The things that encouraged me to grow were all of the adversities that growing up here gave to me. The lack of resources here, the lack of infrastructure, the lack of places to go as a young person—Las Vegas is built for people who are 21 and up who want to play hard. I, as a 16 year old did not like parties and I just wanted a place to feel safe. And I don't think I had that, so I had to find out how to make myself feel safe in places that felt hostile and in places that felt indifferent towards me. I had to get really comfortable with myself.
[laughs] Yeah, Las Vegas definitely gave me some tough love. The desert makes me feel so exposed. It feels impossible to hide from other people or from yourself.
The most difficult part of living here is that it's hard to think of yourself as someone who is trying to live a sustainable life, and who wants to connect with your community when the community is spread like really thin butter over the whole Valley. Urban sprawl just keeps crawling out.
I think I feel a sense of guilt for living here. I feel a motivation to leave because I feel like staying here might be contributing to an unhealthy relationship that this city has with the land it's on.
MIKAYLA WHITMORE: I'm living in my childhood home. The same home that I've lived in essentially my whole life.
It's interesting because I was never really aware of how special growing up in Las Vegas was when I was growing up in it. I knew that something was unique about it, but I couldn't quite understand it until I got a little bit older. And that that was interesting ‘cause we're such a small town. So like, feeling both sides of that coin.
We're like a mirage in the middle of the desert.
I think that was a very big part of my upbringing, escaping to the desert. And feeling the most safe actually, when I was in the desert.
Growing up and living here, one of the most difficult parts was being subjected to seeing the perception of Las Vegas, and the perception of who lives here on the national and global scale and how that comes back into our physical landscape, and then alters the way people treat and respect us.
I think on a grander scale, what was difficult about it was just this kind of widespread perception that our existence as a town was to serve as a tourist attraction on a national level. So no matter what, we're always having to sacrifice our wellbeing and say "yes" in order to provide just for our basic needs of life.
I would love to see a future Las Vegas that really is a safe space for all of its inhabitants, allowing people the freedom to live and enjoy some form of their life. Las Vegas is such a beautiful and special environment. I always wanna be here. This is my home. Even if I left it, this is my home, this would be a homebase. This is somewhere I’m always going to have a tie, connection, and interest in protecting.
As long as there’s water, I will be here.
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ORTIZ: If you call the Las Vegas Valley home, we want to hear your answers to these questions. You can find them posted on blackmountainradio.org, where you can leave us a voicemail or a written message. P.S. We love postcards.
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ORTIZ: We truly hope you enjoyed this inaugural episode of Black Mountain Radio.
ORTIZ: Black Mountain Radio is a project of the Beverly Rogers, Carol C. Harter Black Mountain Institute. Joshua Wolf Shenk is the artistic and executive director.
SHENK: And Sara Ortiz is program director, and directed this episode.
ORTIZ: Production assistance by Vera Blossom and Layla Muhammad. Sound design by Nicole Kelly. Our musician-in-residence for this episode is Jeremy Klewicki; art by Jesse Zhang; graphic design by Lille Allen.
SHENK: This episode featured stories by Soni Brown, Claire Mullen, and Kyle Paoletta.
ORTIZ: Special thanks to Kenny Anderson, Jimmy Santiago Baca, Fawn Douglas, Toni Jensen, Marta Meana, Jonnette Paddy, Sreshtha Sen, endawnis Spears, David Treuer, and Mikayla Whitmore.
SHENK: Thanks to the rest of the team at the Black Mountain Institute: Kellen Braddock, Daniel Gumbiner, Haley Patail, Kristen Radtke, Summer Thomad, Michael Ursell, and Haya Wang.
ORTIZ: Big thanks to our sponsors at Zappos who helped make this episode possible and who contribute to Las Vegas’s creative communities with playful, people-first approaches to arts and culture.
SHENK: And thanks to the Hank Greenspun College of Urban Affairs, the home of KUNV. Special shoutout to our engineer Kevin Krall.
SHENK: Black Mountain Radio is broadcast from Southern Paiute land., with the support of the Rogers Foundation and the College of Liberal Arts at the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.
So we can come back on air soon, please consider supporting this project and all we do as a Friend of the Black Mountain Institute. We welcome volunteers and advice, and urge anyone who is able to go to blackmountaininstitute.org, and make a donation of $10 a month. In addition to a heavy fallout of cosmic gratitude, you’ll get a subscription to The Believer, a thank you in its pages, and other tokens of our appreciation. Learn more at blackmountaininstitute.org
ORTIZ: Thanks for listening.
SHENK: Thank you Sara.
ORTIZ: Thank you Josh!
We truly hope you enjoyed this special pilot episode of Black Mountain Radio. We will come back in the spring with new episodes.
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