Remapping A Place: How One Tribe's Art Reconnects Them To Their Land | Short Film Showcase
We live in a world with many ways of knowing, with many different systems of knowledge. Knowledge that Zuni people have about the landscape has been underestimated, hasn't been clearly understood. It's time to assert that we have the knowledge of place and challenge the idea of what maps are.
About got the now, there okay. I'm CH, we, you're coming back, you got to eat up by rabbits, but you're making it. Oh, there's some ears! Even I've been planting 60 consecutive years, ever since I was in a cradle board. My grandma's and aunties put seeds in my hands, and then they put me over a hole. I planted, did it the next year, I planted, the next year, next year, next year. Everywhere I live, I always planted something.
Most of it here, Zuni is a place where most people live within two minutes of every living relative and dead relative. I think knowing where you're from and what other people call you is what really makes you up. This place, for some of them, know me as a farmer; some of them don't even know I'm a museum director. My name is Jim Enote and I'm the director of the Ashiwi Awan Museum here in Zuni, New Mexico.
There's my field right there, and I can see the corn is dead and dry. It's kind of creepy to look down on; it's disorienting. One time I showed my mother some aerial photos. Her first response was, "I'm not a bird." She says, "That's not how I look at things." She asked me, "What am I looking at?" I don't know what I'm looking at. Maps have done a lot to confuse things for people, and I think more lands have been lost to native peoples probably through mapping than through physical conflict.
I wanted to make some maps that were both elegant, evocative, and profoundly important to the Zuni people, and that's where the map art idea came from. These are at the American Museum of Natural History in New York City. Of course, it's going to be one of the last ones. I had no idea at the beginning that so much story would come out of this map-making process.
At first, I thought we would create some new kinds of maps that counter and challenge the notion of what maps are, where North does not have to be at the top, that scale is unnecessary. What's more important are these stories of the history described in these vignettes of experience. Now these are here for all Zunis to learn from. From here on, these maps become a thing that helps a family or a group to start speaking about places, to start learning from each other, and talking about places in a way that's uniquely Zuni.
If we were to go outside our doors now and walk downstream from the Zuni River, it would take us right back into the Grand Canyon. It's like an umbilical cord connecting us back to the place that we came out from Mother Earth. When I come to this place, it's like a special place on the bookshelf of our culture's library.
Well, today we take pictures, sometimes selfies of ourselves, but our ancestors were marking on the rocks here things that they saw, like turkeys and deer. There's stuff all over; you can see things, zigzags and hash marks. It's a fish—that's a really rare one. Religious leaders began to see petroglyphs here that are the same as those in the bottom of the Grand Canyon—a certain clan symbol, a certain way of making a spiral. It has a Zuni signature that helps us to connect these dots and bring the whole story together.
We limit ourselves if we think of maps as only two-dimensional. The map may be something we heard from our grandmother about a place. There are maps in songs and in prayers. There are maps that are etched in stone and woven into textiles and painted on ceramics. Google Maps and any other kinds of maps, really, while they're very helpful, the names around here are in English or Spanish, and so they completely leave off the meaning of the place.
It is replacing our language and eclipsing our language and knowledge with something different, something that's not really from here. This whole constellation of what makes up a map, to me, has always been far beyond a piece of paper. Imagine ancestors traveling for days looking for water, being parched, thirsty. Imagine coming to this valley and finding this. They said, "This is where we'll stay."
When you grow old with a community and all of their great-great-great-great-great grandmothers are from this place, that carries a kind of identity and profoundness that you can't find anywhere else. When people have a map that is part of affirming their identity, it tells them that they are of this place.
I feel part of something with this work. If my grandpa and grandma would see the Zuni maps, I think they would have recognized quickly, "Oh yeah, this is what's in that song, this is what's in those prayers." I think as their descendants, they would have been proud. A lot of things that our grandparents tell us and pass down to us, as they always say, "Remember these things, remember it." And too often things are forgotten, but I think the map art is going to be something where they'll say, "You remembered."