It is most important to know where we have come from. Where I live, from our front doors we look north and see the very mountain at which we were created—bluish and zigzagged with bright white granite and a little lopsided from when the super boy tried to lift it but could not. Out our back doors, we look south and see the jagged purpled peaks, cobalt snake of river, and pale dunes where we will pass when we leave this world. Each day, we walk between these two points of our existence—our life and our death—the possibilities and the limitations of our bodies.
At 'Avi Kwa'ame, the creator stabbed his staff into the ground and water poured out and became our river. We are the mixture of clay and river. We are of the earth. Our land is fed by the river. Our very name, ‘Aha Makav, describes us as the people at the side of the river—the river and the land are how we call ourselves. We cannot be separated from our land or our water any more than we can be separated from our name. Without the river, without the land at its side, we are not who we were created to be. We were not just made up from our land, we are our land.
Our lands and our bodies are connected in a way that creates a specific knowing of each. They cannot be parted. They exist as extensions of the other. The word for earth, land, dirt, is ‘amat. The word for body is ‘iimat. The abbreviations for both are mat-. Mat- is the prefix that begins many Mojave words that describe or are connected to the body and the land. Our language is corporeal, carrying with it both the body and the land.
Mojave land can be brutal. Unless you know it, it can suck the very life from you. There is a heat in this desert that most cannot endure. A hunger and thirst in the very land, animals, and people that can devour a stranger or even a friend. Our bodies have been broken into and scarred again and again by history, just as the land has been. We hold both the beast of this landscape in one fist and the beauty of it in the opposite fist. Through my land, I will show you the miracles of our bodies. And through the body, I will show you the marvels of this land. Wild. Violent. Filling. Emptying. Free. What is in our bodies to be told has come from the land—on the page, I become the creator of both, and I press my pen into them, like a rib.
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