For Rain Shadows and Dark Skies

AYA LOUISA McDONALD, PROFESSOR OF ART HISTORY, UNLV

The desert surrounds the Neon Metropolis of Las Vegas where we can live, and work, and play if the tourists keep coming. Despite the ever-creeping spread of development and uncontrolled growth, the desert dwarfs and swallows all - residents, tourists, casinos and neighborhoods in its vast immensity. Desert have always gotten a bad rap as the Collins Dictionary demonstrates: “wasteland, dust bowl, barren, dry, waste, wild, empty, bare, lonely, solitary, desolate, arid, unproductive, infertile, uninhabited, uncultivated, and unfruitful.” Not a single positive word or image; even the verb forms are negative: “to vacate, forsake, abandon, or betray. [1]

The deserts of the American Southwest, the Sonoran, Great Basin and Chihuahuan, and our Mojave Desert, born in the rain shadow of high mountains, belong to a celebrated “world class” of global deserts including the frigid Katpana Desert in northern Pakistan and the Atacama in the shadow of the Peruvian Andes. Nevertheless, our North American deserts have been shaped by Hollywood as places of violent encounter between cowboys and Indians, or as wastelands of unbearable heat and thirst littered with sun-bleached bones, shimmering mirages, and imminent death. Bob Nolan’s (1908-1980) Cool Water (1936), a plaintive ballad about a man and his mule, immortalized by cowboy actor and singer Roy Rogers and the Sons of the Pioneers, sealed the image forever: [2]

All day I’ve faced a barren waste

Without the taste of water, cool water

Old Dan and I with throats burned dry

And souls that cry for water

Cool, clear water

American myths about the deserts of the Southwest, built on romantic distortion of historical truths and the blatant and racist erasures of indigenous peoples, have obscured an important power long recognized the world over by mystics, poets, shaman, and artists that the desert land holds within its vastness a timeless spirit of energy and life, and a beauty both fragile and resilient. The land remembers; it wears the traces of trauma and bears the scars of the past into the present. It sings of the cycle of life as it makes a home for the gopher snake, the tortoise, and the tiny pocket mouse, and weeps for the fallen cactus wren and the black-tailed jackrabbit, the feral burro or the child of man. A force divine, if not indestructible, then infinitely renewable.[3]

The history of art is filled with examples of artists who were deeply moved by the awesome spiritual powers of nature that live in the mountains.[4] The unspoiled wilderness, the vast grandeur and stunning immensity of the purple mountain majesty of North America evoked awe in the eyes and hearts of 19th Century painters like the English-born Thomas Cole (1801-1848) of the Hudson River School, the German-born Albert Bierstadt (1830-1902), and photographers like Carleton E. Watkins (1829-1916), who immortalized not without a touch of romantic nostalgia the Yosemite Valley, the Rocky Mountains, and the Sierra Nevada Mountains.[5] Already in Cole’s time there was a fear among early environmentalists that these national treasures, if unprotected, would succumb to the destruction of human encroachment. Cole wrote: 

“I cannot but express my sorrow that the beauty of such landscapes are (sic) quickly passing away. The ravages of the axe are daily increasing. The most noble scenes are made desolate, and oftentimes with a wantonness and barbarism scarcely credible in a civilized nation.” [6]

Cole was an activist artist, possibly the first, but he did not act alone. He and other mid-19th-century American artists and photographers paved the way for the United States to declare Yellowstone a National Park in 1872. The idea of nature conservation was born, and since President Woodrow Wilson signed the National Park Service Act in 1916, millions of acres of ecologically rich natural beauty, flora, fauna and habitats have been brought under the protection of the Federal Government.[7] No logging, no mining, no fracking, no drilling, no hunting, no dumping, no wind farms, no fields of solar panels, no commercial activity, and development only as necessary for public education. But also, unbelievably, no indigenous peoples, no Native Americans. In the creation of National Parks hundreds of thousands of native peoples were forcibly removed and prevented from returning to the land.[8]

“Viewed from the perspective history, Yellowstone is a crime scene.”[9] As contemporary Americans continue to grapple with, or ignore, our dark history of colonialism, racism, genocide, and associated crimes, an argument has recently been made – partially in response to unparalleled wildfires, drought, and flood crises tied to climate change, and partially tied to an idea of restorative justice - that the National Parks, “the jewels of America’s landscapes,” should be placed under the management of an indigenous peoples’ tribal council.[10]

Spirit of the Land argues in equally eloquent tones conveyed through the skill and passion of artists working in word, image, and artifact for the sacredness of the magnificent, hauntingly beautiful Spirit Mountain and surrounding landscape. In more secular terms, Nevada Representative, Dina Titus, who introduced the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument Establishment Act of 2022 to the House of Representatives wrote: 

“It is the purpose of the monument to conserve, protect, and enhance for the benefit and enjoyment of present and future generations the cultural, ecological, scenic, wildlife, recreational, dark sky, historical, natural, education, and scientific resources of the monument.” [11]

However, in Section 4 (c) Management, part (3) of the bill, Native American Access and Use is specifically guaranteed.

In Spirit of the Land and its local satellite exhibitions in Searchlight and Laughlin, curators Kim Garrison, Checko Salgado, and Mikayla Whitmore, artists too numerous to name here, participating and advising tribal members, beginning with artist and poet Paul Jackson, Fort Mojave Tribal Elder, Marjorie Barrick Art Museum leadership and staff, and members of the larger community, have formed a uniquely subtle, but unapologetically powerful activist collective around the principles of non-discrimination and inclusion, not only to illustrate the unique features of Avi Kwa Ame, but to honor and celebrate the direct, unmediated, individual human responses to this irreplaceable, endangered landscape without right in our own backyard. Let it be.

Note: I wish to acknowledge and especially thank Kim Garrison, of United Catalysts, UNLV MFA 2006, for the invitation to write about Spirit of the Land, and Deanne Sole, Publications Editor, Marjorie Barrick Museum of Art, for her kind and tireless assistance.

[1]  https://www.collinsdictionary.com/us/dictionary/english-thesaurus/desert Accessed August 5, 2022. Roy Rogers (1911-1998), who was born in Ohio, claimed Choctaw Indian blood on his mother’s side. https://www.nytimes.com/1998/07/07/arts/roy-rogers-singing-cowboy-dies-at-86.html Accessed August 5, 2022.

[2] https://whentcowboysings.com/bob-nolan-cool-water/ Accessed August 5, 2022/

[3] For example, the British Victorian poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins (1844-1889), a Catholic Jesuit priest whose poetry was only posthumously discovered, wrote: “The world is charged with the grandeur of God. It will flame out, like shining from shook foil; it gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil crushed…Generations have trod, have trod, have trod; and all is seared with trade…and wears man’s smudge…the soil is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod. And for all this, nature is never spent; there lives the dearest freshness deep down things; and though the last lights off the black West went Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs – because the Holy Ghost over the bent World broods with warm breast and with ah! Bright wings.” https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poems/44395/gods-grandeur Accessed August 4, 2022.

[4] One immediately calls to mind the sublime, mystical landscapes of the German Romantic painter, Caspar David Friedrich (1774-1840), particularly Wanderer above the Sea of Fog (Wanderer uber dem Nebelmeer, 1818) Oil on canvas, 94.8 x74.8 cm. in Hamburger Kunsthalle. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wanderer_above_the_Sea_of_Fog Accessed. August 5, 2022. The deeply spiritual Daoist and Neo-Confucian content of Chinese monochrome ink landscape painting has been well documented since the late 10th Century in China. The Chinese, like Native Americans, believed mountains and water were dynamically alive with the creative power of the universe expressed as yin and yang. One of the best surviving examples is the large silk hanging scroll by the revered master, Fan Kuan (c.950-1032), entitled Travelers in Mountains and Streams, c. 1000, Ink and light colors on silk, 206.3 x 103.3 cm. National Palace Museum, Taipei. https://www.comuseum.com/painting/masters/fan-kuan/travelers-among-mountains-and-streams/ Accessed August 4, 2022.

[5] Thomas Cole, The Oxbow (aka. The Connecticut River near Northampton, or View from Mount Holyoke, Northampton, Massachusetts, after a Thunderstorm), 1836. Oil on Canvas, 51.5 x 76 in., The Metropolitan Museum of Art, New York City. https://www.metmuseum.org/art/collection/search/10497 Accessed August 4, 2022. And, Albert Bierstadt, In the Sierras, Lake Tahoe, 1868. Oil on Canvas, 12.9 x 15.9 in., Harvard University Art Museums (Fogg Art Museum), Cambridge, MA. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Albert_Bierstadt_001.jpg Accessed August 4, 2022.

[6] Thomas Cole, “Essay on American Scenery,” The American Monthly Magazine, vol. 7, January 1836, p. 12. 
https://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101015921271&view=1up&seq=15 Accessed August 4, 2022.

[7] https://www.nps.gov/articles/quick-nps-history.htm Accessed August 5, 2022; See also Tyler Green, ‘How Thomas Cole’s Landscapes Opened the Path to National Parks,” March 12, 2018, Modern Art Notes. https://www.metmuseum.org/blogs/now-at-the-met/2018/thomas-cole-national-parks Accessed August 5, 2022.

[8] For the full story of Native peoples’ resistance to environmental injustice and land incursions, and a call for environmentalists to learn from the Indigenous community’s rich history of activism, see: Dina Gilio-Whitaker, As Long as Grass Grows: The Indigenous Fight for Environmental Justice, from Colonization to Standing Rock, Beacon Press, 2019. 

[9] This statement was made by David Treuer, a Leech Lake Ojibwe novelist and historian the author of The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee: Native America from 1890 to the Present (Penguin/Random House, 2019) a Finalist for the National Book Award, in an article for The Atlantic Monthly: “Who Owns America’s Wilderness? Return the National Parks to the Tribes,” The Atlantic, May, 2021 Issue; Photographs by Katy Grannan. Published online April 12, 2021. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/05/return-the-national-parks-to-the-tribes/618395/ Accessed August 7, 2022. An interview with David Treuer can be found on National Public Radio. https://www.npr.org/2021/04/15/987787685/national-parks-should-be-controlled-by-indigenous-tribes-one-writer-argues Accessed August 8, 2022.

[10] Treuer, op.cit.

[11] H.R.6751 https://www.congress.gov/bill/117th-congress/house-bill/6751 Accessed August 8, 2022.