Jim Enote, a Traditional Zuni Farmer and Director of the A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, Is Working with Zuni Artists to Create Maps That Bring an Indigenous Voice and Perspective Back to the land, Countering Western Notions of Place and Geog

The Zuni maps remind all of us that we, too, must take the time to deeply listen, to hear and share stories in which we and the land have equal voice.

TO DATE, THIRTY-TWO Zuni maps have been made, including two more painted by Ronnie: The Colorado River and Sites of the Grand Canyon. “All the maps have something to do with our prayer,” he says. “That’s our history. Our history just doesn’t start in the Grand Canyon and come straight to Zuni. No, it’s vast.”

Sites of the Grand Canyon is inspired by a boulder that Ronnie and the cultural advisory committee came across on one of their journeys up the Grand Canyon. The boulder is covered in ancient petroglyphs. After looking at it for a long while, Ronnie realized that the boulder itself was a map of the Colorado River, each petroglyph representing a place, a story, or a prayer.

“That’s the map of the river. There’s little side canyons and then there’s a little circle or a square and some even had little dots. And I believe those were highly significant places, or a place name. Those places had names. And then there’s other little petroglyphs, like the images that had the two tails hooked together. They’re jointed like that. At the very end in all the prayers that we have, we have a verse that says ‘Hold on to each other tight. Hold on, never letting go.’ That little petroglyph says to us: never let each other go. It has the tails hooked to each other, signifying that we’re never going to be apart and we’re never going to let go of our traditions. Never letting go of who you are is what it means. That’s the closest way I could say it in English. Never letting each other go. Never letting yourself go, meaning never forgetting who you are, where you came from, here in your heart.”

Footnotes:

(1) The first person to record the name Zuni was a Spanish explorer in the sixteenth century. The indigenous people who are federally recognized and widely known as the “Zuni” people call themselves A:shiwi, a word meaning “human being.” In our experience writing this essay, the names “Zuni” and “A:shiwi” were often used interchangeably by the A:shiwi people we spoke to. We have used both here. 

(2) “Invasion of America: How the United States Took Over an Eighth of the World,” eHistory, University of Georgia, accessed January 5, 2018.