Healthy soil and sustainable growing

["Tradingpost" <tradingpost@lobo.net>]

(Read a book of hers years ago, and lived across the road from her in Chimayo 
in 2000 without knowing it)
-------------------------------------

A Map: From the Old Connecticut Path to the Rio Grande Valley and All the 
Meaning Inbetween
by Chellis Glendinning
Nineteenth Annual E. F. Schumacher Lectures
October 1999, Salisbury, Connecticut
Edited by Hildegarde Hannum
©Copyright 2000 by the E. F. Schumacher Society and Chellis Glendinning
http://www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications/glendinning_99.html

May be purchased in pamphlet form from the E. F. Schumacher Society, 140 Jug 
End Road, Great Barrington, MA 01230, (413) 528-1737, 
www.smallisbeautiful.org/publications.html.

You can listen to this lecture online at Archive.org


Introduction by Kirkpatrick Sale, Member of the Board, E. F. Schumacher 
Society

I was reminded, hearing Bill Schambra talk about the bureaucracies in 
foundations and government and Jerry Mander talk about global bureaucracy, of 
a story Fritz Schumacher used to tell about three men arguing over which of 
them had the oldest profession. The doctor argued that doctors and midwives 
were the oldest profession because they had to see to life coming into being 
on the earth. The architect said No, before life there had to be a structure 
to the earth and the universe, and it was the architects who, with God, 
created that on the earth, creating it out of chaos. And the bureaucrat said, 
Ah, chaos. And who do you think created that?

I was also reminded as I listened to this morning’s presentations that there 
is a marvelous meeting of the right and the left when you get down to the 
bottom. Whereas Bill Schambra is for self-governance and Jerry Mander is for 
local empowerment, Chellis Glendinning, as she may presently tell us, is 
actually for the secession and independence of the county where she lives in 
New Mexico, Rio Arriba County. So you see that you can come to this business 
of decentralization from all kinds of political perspectives, and, regardless 
of which one, it still is the bedrock truth.

I have been preoccupied with technology, which Jerry pointed out this morning 
threads through almost all the other ideas and themes that are before us in 
the world today, and this is why I’m writing a book about Robert Fulton and 
the technology of the American dream. But of course the point that Jerry 
made, and others need to make, is that technology per se is not what it’s 
really all about. The French philosopher Jacques Ellul called it the 
technological milieu as opposed to the social and the natural milieus. The 
technological milieu has now become transcendent over the other two. 
Schumacher also talked about this, about what he called industrial society.

In his book Good Work Schumacher asked:

      Why should industrial society fail? Why should the spiritual evils it 
produces lead to worldly failure? From a severely practical point of view, I 
should say this:
            1. It has disrupted, and continues to disrupt, certain organic 
relationships in such a manner that world population is growing, apparently 
irresistibly, beyond the means of subsistence.
            2. It is disrupting certain other organic relationships in such a 
manner as to threaten those means of subsistence themselves, spreading 
poison, adulterating food, etc.
            3. It is rapidly depleting the earth’s nonrenewable stocks of 
scarce mineral resources—mainly fuels and metals.
            4. It is degrading the moral and intellectual qualities of man 
while further developing a highly complicated way of life the smooth 
continuance of which requires ever-increasing moral and intellectual 
qualities.
            5. It breeds violence—a violence against nature which at any 
moment can turn into violence against one’s fellow men . . . .

Schumacher is talking about technology, yes, but he’s talking about a 
technological society and what will happen to it, and that’s the concept we 
have to keep in front of us, looking for the pattern behind the ideas that 
are being presented to us today.

So it is the milieu, the technological milieu, and the culture as a whole 
from which it stems, that is the danger for us all, and no one understands 
this better, I think, than our next speaker, a brave and dedicated warrior 
for many years in the contest against this deadly force. She’s a psychologist 
and an activist and the author of several books, including one with the 
wonderful title, My Name is Chellis and I’m in Recovery from Western 
Civilization (she’s very fortunate because most of us are not yet in 
recovery). She is a real person doing real work on the ground with Chicanos 
and Indians where she lives in New Mexico, and she has just been appointed to 
the Land Authority of Rio Arriba County. She works there daily, bringing her 
insights to that life and taking the insights of that life into her, which is 
in effect what her newest book is about. She’s consented to bring to us today 
her deep wisdom, commitment, and inspiration along with her sparkle and 
laughter: Chellis Glendinning.

* * * *

[Music is playing through the sound system, a “corrido” or story-song by 
Tobias Rene of Albuquerque. It is about the legendary Mexican revolutionary 
Valentín de la Sierra.]

I come to you from a place where the earth is pink. Where the sky rises like 
a cathedral of blue. I come to you from a place where the river weaves 
through the villages like a string of sheep’s wool. Where men’s jeans are 
made threadbare by seasons of mending fences. Where women know the plants. I 
come to you from a place where people speak a language that is called Spanish 
but to the student of language is in fact indecipherable because it’s 
peppered with the history of Aztec and Tewa and Navaho—all blended together 
like green chili stew.

I live in Chimayó, New Mexico. In the Tewa language the place was originally 
called Tsi Mayoh. It’s disputed whether that means “flaked obsidian” or “the 
place where two rivers meet.” The Santa Cruz River snakes down from the 
Sangre de Cristo mountains and flows through the village. Everywhere smaller 
waterways weave. They are called “las acequias” or irrigation ditches, canals 
dug with shovels to divert the water to the houses and the fields and then 
back to the river again. From an ecological perspective, these canals extend 
the riparian areas with their birds and small animals into the dry terrain.

The land is desert uplands, about 6200 feet above sea level. Surrounding us 
are the badlands, “los cerros y las barrancas,” and in the midst of this 
desert is Tsi Mayoh, an oasis of cottonwoods, of pi–on and olive, of chili, 
corn, tomatoes, and apples. We have a system of barter that is centuries old. 
Each village has a specialty: Velarde, apples; El Valle, sheep; Chimayó, 
chili; San Luis, up in Colorado, potatoes.

The people in the village are a beautiful mix. Some of the blood comes from 
Europe: Spanish, Moorish, Jewish; some comes from Mexico: Aztec, Mayan, 
Toltec; and some from those who have inhabited the land for ages: Tewa, 
Navajo, Apache. In the slang of the Pachuco, which is the urban Chicano 
renegade culture of the 1940s and 1950s, the village is called Chima. And 
Chima is where I live.

It has become indistinguishable from who I am. I had a visitor from 
California recently (“Califas” in Pachuco), and all she wanted to do was talk 
about what’s inside the skin—feelings, perceptions, analyses—which I found to 
be a familiar mode, having moved to the area from Califas, but a mode that 
had grown foreign and old and small. When I first came to New Mexico, I had 
an inkling this would happen. Once, when talking with the Tewa scholar and 
author of Tewa World, Alfonso Ortiz, I asked, “When Native people get 
together, do they talk about themselves? Do they say: I feel this, I had this 
experience, in my childhood this happened?” He didn’t give me an answer; 
instead, he laughed uproariously. So sure enough, in time, with the help of 
the pink earth and the barrancas, the vaqueros and the curanderas, who I am 
has expanded beyond this skin to become the land and the village and the 
history and the purpose and the soul of the place. As my friend the poet and 
social activist Jaime Chavez writes in a poem called “Ventanas”:

                        Camino encapotado en hierbas
                        bebiendo de las aguas
                        dando a la tierra;
                        cada estación llena
                        las huellas de este jornada
                        reclamando vida
                        entre las cosas simples
                        hambriento con la esperanza
                        y promesa
                        escondido en la tierra

                        I walk cloaked in herbs
                        drinking from the waters
                        giving unto the earth;
                        each season fills
                        the tracks of this journey
                        claiming life
                        among simple things
                        starved in the hope
                        and promise
                        hidden in the land

We all have stories about relationship to place. In 1991 I went to the World 
Uranium Hearing in Salzburg, Austria, a gathering of indigenous peoples: 
Mongolians, South Pacific Islanders, people from Chile, from Africa, Alaska, 
and the American Southwest. All these indigenous people from all over the 
world came together to talk about the effects of nuclear technology on their 
lands, cultures, and health. I made a pilgrimage to this gathering as a 
member of the Board of Listeners, and my job was to sit in the audience for 
five days and listen. So I took my cowboy boots, and while I was there, I 
spent time with the Native peoples from the Southwest, from my own 
bioregion—Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo Indians. I was especially struck by one 
man named Rex Tilousi, who was startingly calm and humble. He was the 
governor of the Havasupai, the caretakers of the Grand Canyon. But I saw him 
only when he was on stage. I asked a Keres man from Acoma Pueblo why that 
was, and he said, “He’s homesick; he feels so out of himself, so disconnected 
from the Grand Canyon that he is grieving in his hotel room.

Another story comes to me from my friend Larry Emerson, a Navajo from 
Shiprock, New Mexico. He’s an educator, and he’s training in the medicine 
ways of his tribe. Larry tells me that when he travels from his people’s land 
to another people’s land—in this case the Ute—he stops in the boundary lands 
and says prayers. He says good-by to his homeland and his people, and he 
prays and honors the sacredness of the other people’s place. I think these 
two stories say a lot about what lies beyond our skin in terms of what it 
means to be a real human being and to be connected to place, what it means to 
be made of one’s place.

For myself, it is strange that fate landed me in a desert village in the Rio 
Grande valley. My people are Celt and German, hailing from the northern 
forests of Europe and eventually from many of the nation-states of northern 
Europe: from Wales, Scotland, Ireland, and England, from Holland, Belgium, 
France, and Germany. The first of my people to come to this continent was the 
Reverend Thomas Hooker with his family— his wife, Susanna Garbrand, and their 
children Joanna, Mary, Sarah, John, and Samuel. They came first to the 
Massachusetts Bay Colony. There a political-philosophical argument ensued, 
with Thomas Hooker on the liberal side. After all, he had been banished from 
England for his radicalism and nonconformity. As it’s told in my family, 
Hooker wanted the right to vote to be granted to all the men in the church, 
not just the land-owning men. The argument went so badly that Hooker left the 
Colony on May 31, 1636, with the members of his family and a hundred 
followers and, quoting from a journal, “160 cattle and fed of their milk by 
the way.” They headed south through the thick forest along the Old 
Connecticut Path and found the place called Suckiaug, which in Pequot means 
“black earth” and which later became Hartford, with its meadows between the 
Connecticut River and the Little River. There they joined settlers who had 
already made that journey from Newtown (now Newton, Massachusetts).

My ancestor’s focus was the spiritual uplifting of the parish. His goal was 
to make New England a positive model against the spiritual corruptness of Old 
England. However, it says in Hooker’s biography, “He preached on Sundays and 
fought Indians the rest of the week.” Lo and behold! He was involved in 
spearheading what the history books call the first major Indian—but what I 
call European—war. A thousand Pequot were killed, some of their heads and 
hands sent back to Boston, and five hundred were taken as slaves. Thus was 
founded the Colony of Connecticut.

What I’m doing here is presenting a map of the forging of empire on this 
continent and pointing out the immense ironies involved. We are all 
inheritors of this map. As the Arab-American social critic Edward Said has 
put it, “Hardly any North American, African, European, Latin American, 
Indian, Caribbean, or Australian individual—the list is very long—who is 
alive today has not been touched by the empires of the past.“ Not Pequot or 
English, not Mapuche or Spanish, not Tibetan or Chinese. If we’re talking 
about empire, we’re talking about a system that we all depend on for 
survival, that we’ve all been harmed by, that we have learned to critique and 
in many cases have come to abhor. Whether we call it too big, too cruel, or 
too much in denial, whether we refer to it as mass technological 
civilization, patriarchy, the dominant society, or the global economy, the 
empire I’m presenting to you—this map of expansion and domination has 
affected every single person in this room.

My own people went on to extend their appetite for land beyond Connecticut’s 
watershed. They formed the Connecticut Land Company in 1797 and traveled 
directly west to colonize what they called the Western Reserve of Ohio, just 
south of Lake Erie. A hundred and fifty years earlier Massachusetts Bay 
Colony Governor John Winthrop had said, “Westward the course of empire takes 
it way.” And indeed, my people headed out with wooden carts and again battled 
Natives, in this case the Shawnee and the Delaware. I have photographs of my 
great-grandfather on horseback on the land that was acquired in Defiance, 
Ohio. But that wasn’t enough, Flowing with the economic tide, they then 
embarked on another journey. They moved north to Cleveland to amass not 
fortunes but at least bank accounts alongside and in the wake of 
industrialists Andrew Carnegie and John D. Rockefeller—whose steel 
production, shipping, and railroads made Cleveland what I grew up being told 
was the stepping stone to the “civilized” East. It was not the much feared 
savage-ridden West.

Oddly and perhaps inevitably I, their descendent, ended up crossing the 
continent to that much feared and savage-ridden West. I too traveled there 
along the highways of empire, in my case on a United Airlines flight in 1967, 
but with a different kind of defiance. And here I am, a Connecticut girl from 
Ohio, now living with Native peoples, dedicating my caring and my talents to 
the survival of their place-based, bioregional, community-oriented, 
ecological ways. And perhaps most importantly, learning for all of us how we 
may survive.

And now the map turns to sustenance: A maiz y chile y alazány calabazitas y 
el agua, siempre el agua y también a la musica y la comunidad y el espíritu 
(to corn and chili and elk and squash and to water, always water and also to 
music and community and spirit).

In order to re-map the dominant society, we must turn to this kind of 
awareness, to this kind of place-based sustainability. to this kind of 
place-based sustainability, But because the wholeness and ways of our lives 
have been so fragmented by what is required to conduct the bigness of empire, 
we—like Rex Tilousi in a cold hotel room in Salzburg—are left with disparate 
parts disconnected from one another. What I can tell you, from a place where 
the earth is pink and people grow chili and hunt elk, is that we were right, 
and we are right. Living in land-based community, making the future with our 
bodies, knowing the seasons and the land is a better way. It feels better; it 
looks better; it politics better; it lives better. For myself, I am in a 
constant state of amazement that I have the opportunity to live my life, not 
according to a bird’s-eye-view map of nonsustainability limited to visual 
cues but rather according to the cartography of a living, breathing, dreaming 
experience of sustainability.

Every day in Chima is a day of low-level glee for me, and so I’d like to tell 
you a little bit about the village. Traditionally the villages of northern 
New Mexico have survived by hunting, fishing, growing, and gathering. Women’s 
place is the village: taking responsibility for the garden, the house, and 
the animals (although they ride horses and hunt if they want to). There is a 
power to this place of theirs. It is unlike living in the dominant society, 
where the power has been sapped out of women’s role. There’s a big power and 
a big independence for women in the village. Men’s place is the forest, la 
sierra, the hunting grounds, and it is their responsibility to provide for 
the village.

When I was growing up in Cleveland, I lived in a four-bedroom brick house. We 
had colonial silver and furniture from Connecticut; we had electricity; we 
had showers, radio, and TV. In 1948 my father bought a Packard. My neighbors 
in Chima who are my age grew up in one-room mud huts; they had wood stoves 
and candles; the water came from the river, and in 1948 the chosen method of 
transportation was burro. I will tell you that living in this place I’ve 
learned to dig irrigation ditches, I’ve learned to hunt, I’ve learned to 
fish, Perhaps oddly—and I think this may be a result of the women’s 
movement—I’m attracted to activities that are traditionally male. But I’ve 
also learned to grow corn and gather herbs, and I’ve learned to dance to the 
music of rancheros y corridos.

I had a lover in the village, a man named Snowflake Martinez, who became a 
character in my new book Off the Map. Snowflake Martinez isn’t his real name. 
Courting begins by somebody coming around in a truck and claiming that their 
horses have gotten away and they need to give you their phone number in case 
you see the renegade animals. I’d like to make a little aside to the women 
here and give a big hint to the men: Snowflake would ride over to my house on 
his mustang at midnight under the full moon wearing a Mexican serape. 
Snowflake is a man who has always lived in the village. He makes less than 
$3000 a year; everything else comes directly from the land.

During the time when I was seeing Snowflake, my kitchen was filled with food 
from the land. There were eggs with little feathers still stuck on them; 
there was elk meat that his son had hunted a few days before; there was 
chili. He didn’t grow the chili himself, but a friend of ours did, and 
Snowflake would repair the friend’s hunting Bronco and in exchange he would 
get enough chili for the whole winter. There was apple juice from his 
grandmother’s orchards. Two days before Thanksgiving he would kill the 
turkey. On my birthday we had a matanza, which means that we killed Isabel 
the pig, stripped her down, and put her in a hole in the earth with burning 
coals. What I learned from all this is that a sense of community with the 
earth, of satisfaction, of fulfillment is not something you learn in a 
workshop. It’s an everyday experience when your food comes from the earth,

Once I went trout fishing with my friend Antonio DeVargas. We went from 
stream to stream, through the afternoon and into the night, but the water was 
too wintry and the fish were still asleep under the rocks. I was thinking, 
“Why don’t we just stop when this obviously isn’t working?” But he kept 
wanting to try another part of the river. Finally, when it got dark, we went 
back to the village. Some of his friends were waiting in his trailer. There 
wasn’t anything to eat, and so we just sat around and talked. Around ten 
o’clock I decided to leave, and as I was driving away I realized that I had 
money in my pocket and if I wanted something to eat, I could stop along the 
way. I realized that for them, no fish meant no dinner.

Allow me to make an aside here: When I was first invited to speak at the 
Schumacher Lectures, I looked at the collection of previous lectures in 
People, Land, and Community to see what kind of lectures have been given. I 
noticed immediately that the speakers tend to quote other people, so I 
thought, “Well, I’ll have to do that too.” Here is my chosen quote: as Eeyore 
so brilliantly said in The House at Pooh Corner, “We have been joined by 
something.” And indeed, in the 1930s roads were built for cars to reach an 
area that until then had truly been isolated from the outside world. In the 
1940s Los Alamos Scientific Laboratory, which later became Los Alamos 
National Laboratory, was built, bringing with it the cash economy and 
changing life in northern New Mexico forever. Telephones came in the 1970s. I 
would say about half the people in the village now have a telephone. Running 
water didn’t come to my village until 1979, which made me realize that the 
purpose of the ditches was not just to irrigate but to bring water to the 
houses so you didn’t have to walk so far with your pail.

A Wal-Mart Superstore has opened in the nearby town of Española. Now, sadly, 
in the past year the freeways have suddenly been widened, bringing to us 
we-don’t-yet-know-quite-what—but certainly paving the way for more people. 
And believe it or not we now have cell-phone towers, so cruelly and 
undemocratically radiating microwaves at our bodies. Last fall, after the 
industry was deregulated by the Telecommunications Act of 1996, the number of 
cell-phone towers in Española went from zero to eight, in Chimayó from zero 
to two. What are these towers for if not to provide for a growing population? 
Before I left New Mexico to come here, when people asked me where I was 
going, I told them I was coming to Connecticut to talk about life in our 
village. One person said, “Well, don’t let them come here!”

The constant theme, then, is the chronic and unwelcome interface of that 
which we have been joined by with sustainable ways. And these interfaces are 
striking indeed. Let me tell you a story that comes from Laguna Pueblo, about 
forty miles west of Albuquerque. The people of the pueblo decided they needed 
a new tribal truck. Someone called up the car lot in Albuquerque where they 
had previously gotten trucks and asked what was available. The salesperson 
said, “I’ll have a fax for you.” So the Laguna man got into one of the pueblo 
vehicles and drove all the way to Albuquerque. He walked into the office and 
announced, “I’m here for my fax.”

Another story comes from Snowflake Martinez. In the late 1980s friends asked 
him to fly to Cincinnati to help drive a car back to New Mexico, and they 
mailed him a plane ticket. He had never traveled that far before, and he had 
never flown on an airplane. Then, right before he left, Snowflake got a call 
saying that the car had broken down. He got ready to go, and what did he take 
with him? What would you take if you were going on an airplane trip? Would 
you take money? He didn’t take money. He wasn’t used to using money. Did he 
take the phone number of the people he was going to meet? He wasn’t used to 
using the phone, so he didn’t take the phone number. There was only one thing 
he felt was important and relevant to take: he took his tool box to fix the 
car.

What we have here are stories illustrating clashes of consciousness. These 
clashes don’t merely exist in a vacuum: they inevitably lead to politics. In 
our area they lead to the formation of groups like La Raza, to La Huelga, to 
Si Se Puede, to Tierra o Muerte. Once when I was riding in the badlands with 
Snowflake, I asked him for his impression of the state of the world. He 
thought for a long time. The saddles creaked. Tumbleweeds bounced by. Now 
remember, English is not his first language. Snowflake said, “The 
down-to-earth people are finishing.” Another time, an old friend asked me 
what my politics had grown to be, and before I could launch into my 45-minute 
rap about the global economy and Bretton Woods and the World Trade 
Organization, Snowflake—who really didn’t want to hear it all again—cut right 
in and said, “She is against the chain stores.”

Hey! Why write a book?

In the 1980s an unsuspecting multinational banking institution decided to set 
up an ATM machine in Chimayó. The thing was installed where the apple shed 
with the portal had been. The horses used to escape from nearby pastures to 
go and stand in the shade under the portal. In a belligerent mood about this 
invasion by the cash economy, the men of the village got together, took their 
hunting rifles, went to the portal, and shot the ATM machine to pieces.

You can see why I like living there.

In 1997 a Canadian mining corporation called Summo wanted to set up a copper 
mine in an area that was officially Bureau of Land Management land, but 
everybody in the area knew it was really the land of the Picur’s Pueblo 
tribe. According to the laws of the World Trade Organization and the 1872 
Mining Act of New Mexico,the Summo Corporation had every right to set up this 
endeavor. The obligatory hearing was held, and the Picurís governor and a 
group of warriors went to it, Their approach was to take the process 
seriously—even though the Summo people were obviously there only as a matter 
of form. The Picurís governor stood up and said, “If you put in this copper 
mine, we will go to war with you.” The Summo Corporation fled.

What I appreciate about living in this place—having the honor to live in this 
place, to be a guest in this place—is that it took me thirty-five years of 
being an activist and seven social-change movements, from the civil rights 
and women’s movements to the environmental and indigenous rights movements, 
to arrive at a comprehensive critique of mass dominant society. In my village 
the people already have a comprehensive critique in their bones. They’re born 
with it. And they express it with so few words.

The stories I’ve told you have to do with land and livelihood. What it all 
comes down to is that access to land makes sustainability possible. The 
empire’s primary mode of usurpation is to steal land. And indeed, los norte 
americanos stole the land of my compadres en Nuevo México.

The old land system was based on land grants, the central unit of 
sustainability and cultural vitality. Each land grant is an area that 
extended beyond the village, usually into the mountains. It is big enough to 
provide enough food from hunting and fishing, big enough to sustain the 
village and no bigger. It includes the area where you go to find medicines, 
to get dirt to make roofs, twigs to make brooms. Just big enough. Chimayó 
joined the villages of Truchas and Córdova to form a single land grant. It is 
called La Merced Nuestra Señora del Rosario San Fernando y Santiago, 
otherwise known as the Truchas Land Grant. After the Mexican-American War in 
1848 the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo mandated that the U.S, Government was to 
honor the land grants in the territories won from Mexico. Within the next 
hundred years, however, the land grants were systematically stolen by the U. 
S. Court of Public Land Claims, which, in line with Eeyore’s insight, came in 
and made bogus surveys. The Truchas Land Grant, for instance, originally had 
49,000 acres. By the time the surveyors were through, there were only 7000.

Some of the land grants were stolen by lawyers and land speculators. The 
bigwigs from Santa Fe came and said: “Oh you’re having trouble with the Court 
of Public Land Claims? I’m a lawyer and I can help you.” The lawyers would do 
whatever they did, successfully or not, and then they’d say, “Now you have to 
pay me.” Of course the people didn’t have money, and so the lawyers said, “Oh 
well, you can give us land instead.” Some of the land was even stolen 
directly by the government, which put up signs and barbed wire and redefined 
the land as “public lands.” A good deal of U.S. Forest Service and Bureau of 
Land Management land was originally Native and Chicano land grants. As my 
friend Lorenzo Valdez, now the Rio Arriba County Manager, told me, “The real 
La Merced went away. They left us with only enough land to raise 
rattlesnakes.”

In places where land and community are intertwined, history is not forgotten. 
In places where land and community are inseparable, the injustices of 
imperialism are not relegated to the past. The land-grant struggle is still 
alive today. In the 1960s Congressman Joseph Montoya, the first Chicano 
Congressman from New Mexico, introduced a bill in the House of 
Representatives to right the injustices. In 1967, a time of great tumult 
around the country, the R’o Arriba County courthouse was taken over by 
land-grant activists who, with guns, were inventing their own authority to 
take the land back. In 1997 we were amazed to receive a message from 
Subcommandante Insurgente Marcos, leader of the Chiapan insurgents, 
supporting us in our struggle for the return of the land grants and for the 
right to continue our way of life. In 1998, miracle of all miracles, a 
Congressman from New Mexico introduced a bill to study the land-grant 
situation. The bill actually passed in the House, but it never got to a vote 
in the Senate because the Monica Lewinsky debacle took center stage. In 1999, 
this year, our Senators Bingaman and Domenici are trying to put through a 
similar bill that would deal with the injustice.

The map I’m trying to draw exists against the backdrop of the global economic 
empire with all its power and bigness, its ugliness and injustices. And yet, 
I think it’s crucial for us to remember that what I’m talking about is really 
a map of love. In today’s world loving the earth is a political act. Loving 
your community is a political act, and the effort to attain sustainability is 
the basis for politics. I’d like to give another quote, this one from Che 
Guevara: “Déjeme decirle, a riesgo de parecer ridículo, que el revolucionario 
verdadero esta guido por grandes sentimientos de amor.” (“Let me tell you, at 
risk of seeming ridiculous, the true revolutionary is guided by great 
feelings of love”).

The real story of our times, I think, is not one of conflict, fear, and hate 
between one massive unsustainable system called capitalism and another 
massive unsustainable system called communism. I think the story that sets 
the stage for our lives is a story of love. It’s the story of the love on the 
part of the decolonization movements and the liberation movements from the 
1940s to the 1960s, movements having to do with land and community and 
sustainability, movements resulting in miracles of human dedication and 
heroism, accomplishment and creativity. It’s unbelievable that after three 
hundred years India broke from England in 1947! Vietnam broke from France in 
1954, Morocco from France in 1956, Cuba from U.S. influence in 1959, Nigeria 
and Uganda from England in 1960, Algeria from France in 1962.

A hundred new nations have risen up—peoples who before colonization had been 
sustainable within and among themselves, peoples who by dint of their heroic 
and loving effort threw off the yoke of imperialism. These are not stories we 
are told. I was born in 1947, and I was never told that was the year India 
freed itself from England. It was never mentioned. Of course, the tragedy is 
that these new nations entered into a world whose economic and political 
exigencies made them pawns in a struggle between global Cold-War systems 
that, by military and economic power, extinguished their chances for 
self-defined sustainability. And the tragedy at this late stage of 
globalization is the same, for the economic and political exigencies of a 
corporate-controlled world are everywhere limiting the chances for 
sustainability. Yet the effort to attain sustainability is the most important 
task on the planet. It includes opposing imperialism and protesting 
globalization. It includes being in place, being in community, being in love 
with the earth, and making sure that the down-to-earth people do not finish.

This is the map I want to pass on to you whether you reside in Chima fighting 
for a still-alive land-based culture or in Connecticut creating land 
trusts—what we in New Mexico might call modern land grants. Or in Havana, 
Cuba, where every single apartment has a garden and organic agriculture is a 
national policy, Or in the inner cities of the United States where people are 
growing food in bureau drawers they pick up at used-furniture stores. Or in 
Chiapas, Mexico, where people are struggling to save Native land-based 
cultures and livelihoods. We all face the same challenge: to choose 
sustainability, to choose the small and human scale, to choose, quite 
frankly, life itself. Because at this very moment, all life stands luminous 
and fragile against the destructive forces of mass dominant civilization. 
Life meaning this breath, life meaning what you give your talents and care 
to, life meaning that you are willing to die in pursuit of your goals. 
Subcommandante Marcos is speaking from a place where issues of sustainability 
versus unsustainability are played out to gargantuan proportion when he says, 
“Here we are, the forever dead, dying once again, but now in order to live.” 
And as his hero Emilio Zapata once said: “Es mejor morir de pie, que 
continuar viviendo de rodillas” (“It is better to die on your feet than to 
continue living on your knees”). And so our map too: to give our lives to the 
death of the old for the life of what Helena Norberg-Hodge calls ancient 
futures.

I’d like to close with the words passed on to me by my friend Lucy Lippard, 
the art critic and author, whose most recent book is The Lure of the Local. 
She, like me, lives in a small village in northern New Mexico, Galisteo, 
where one of her neighbors said to her, “When you get old, Lucy, you will go 
back to your country.”

So here I am, growing old, and here I am, having traveled from the Old 
Connecticut Path to the Río Grande Valley and back again.

[Music: “Valentín de la Sierra”]

Excerpts from Question and Answer period

I’d like to ask about the effect of casino life in that part of the world. I 
think there are twelve casinos in the environs of Santa Fe and one right near 
you in Española.

It’s a thorny issue. At first I thought, “Oh no, this means gambling 
addiction, perhaps prostitution, poor and working class people losing their 
homes from gambling, increased alcohol and drug use, all these dreadful 
consequences.” But I quickly came to the realization that the underlying 
issue here is sovereignty for the Native people. It’s a conflict of values to 
say, on the one hand, this isn’t a healthy activity and, on the other, I 
believe in sovereignty, Restoring the sovereignty the empire took away is 
what, at this moment, I favor.

On a Native American call-in program that comes out of Albuquerque someone 
asked the question, “Is it going against the sovereignty of Mexico for Native 
people from North America to send a contingent from the United States to 
Chiapas?” I think this is a question that only the Native mind would concoct. 
People from the dominant society would take it for granted that they could 
go. The answer that emerged on the program was that the Mexican government 
itself does not have proper sovereignty because it is linked so tightly with 
multinational control and oppression. Its policies are not land based, not 
water-shed based and not community based. Therefore, it is all right for 
Native people from the United States to go to Chiapas to witness and help 
their brothers and sisters of the tribes there.

Given all the forces moving us in the other direction, do you really think 
the world is ready for sustainability?

I can’t answer for the world, but one thing I know is that the dominant 
population of the earth is not people who live in the United States and have 
jobs and are able to support themselves within this system—in other words, 
pay the rent and have food on the table—but rather people living in poverty 
in the rest of the world, like the several hundred thousand demonstrators in 
Bangalore, India, where the people are wearing threadbare saris and walk 
barefoot. Speaking personally, I feel that when it’s a matter of the survival 
of life on the planet, regardless of whether it’s popular in a particular 
milieu or isn’t, I am not deterred from doing all I can to fight for life.

It behooves every single one of us to find ways in which we as individuals 
can become sustainable, whether we live in a land-based community in New 
Mexico or in the city of Hartford. It behooves us as well to create 
institutions of sustainability, and it behooves us to challenge the forces 
that are destroying life and sanity.

[question inaudible]

In northern New Mexico there’s a Native American preparatory school that 
graduated its first class this year, and all the graduates are going to 
college, including one who is the first reservation-bred Native American to 
attend Yale.

I have a number of Chicano friends who work in higher education, and they 
want to help young people get scholarships to go to school. One friend works 
for an education and economic opportunity center, and he is ambivalent about 
what he’s doing. He has a Ph.D., but this means he’s disconnected from the 
land. He tries to fish and do things like that, but he just squeezes these 
activities in on the side, He really wants others to have the opportunity 
he’s had, but on the other hand he asks himself, “Opportunity for what? To 
participate in the global economy?”


Concluding remarks

I’ve talked a lot today, so I thought I’d conclude by reading a passage from 
the last part of my book Off the Map. It starts off with an illustrious quote 
from the character Rabbit in The House at Pooh Corner. It is a written note:

    “I AM SCERCHING FOR A NEW HOUSE FOR OWL SO HAD YOU RABBIT.” The creatures 
of 100 AKER WOOD are on a similar quest. It is a quest that captures the 
imaginations of millions of adults and children throughout the American and 
British empires. I am holding my mother’s tattered copy of Winnie-the-Pooh, 
the one inscribed to her from Aunt Ellen on Christmas Day, 1926. The 
publisher’s page shows that the first edition comes out in October. By 
November, the thirty-ninth edition has already left the printer and arrived 
in Cleveland. And here too is my mother’s musty copy of The House at Pooh 
Corner. It has her name scrawled HOOKR [with the “R” backwards] in orange 
Crayola on the front-inside cover. The first printing is September 1928; the 
thirty-fourth, September 1928. Why does it sell so wildly? 
Rum-tum-tum-tiddle-um. The stories are fanciful, the language inventive, the 
“decorations” by Ernest Shepard priceless. I am particularly enamored of the 
use of CAPITALS, which appear throughout like good-natured parodies of 
Chaucer and Milton and Shakespeare. But as Eeyore announces in a hoarse 
whisper, ‘We have been joined by something.” One current of literary 
criticism identifies deeper themes in children’s stories—critiques of the 
British monarchy hidden within Alice in Wonderland, for instance. I wouldn’t 
have seen it without Snowflake Martinez’s sharp eye. The bears and donkeys 
and tigers and heffalumps of 100 AKER WOOD are not just from England. Like 
us, they hail from divergent habitats throughout the empire. Each is unique, 
some not even suited to the English countryside. And yet here they are, 
living in a land-based community (bioregional, you might venture to suggest) 
hunting woozles, celebrating birthdays, surviving weather, writing songs 
about their lives, rebuilding homes, helping each other, being irritated with 
each other—doing all the things our ancestors did together, in a simple way, 
before imperialism and the industrial revolution and the global economy 
disrupted our ways of life. Doing all the things the readers of England and 
the United States would be missing round about 1926 and 1928, one hundred 
years after the great garden party of empire and industrialism melded 
land-based communities into mass technological society.

    At the end, Christopher Robin is going away. Pooh and Piglet and Rabbit 
cannot imagine where—off the map, for all they know—and yet we the readers 
know he is being sent away to school. School where he will study “People 
called Kings and Queens and something called Factors, and a place called 
Europe, and an island in the middle of the sea where no ship came, and how to 
make a Suction Pump (if you want to), and when Knights were Knighted, and 
what comes from Brazil.” Not how to seek out breakfast in the forest, 
identify animal tracks in the snow, live through rainstorms and floods, give 
medicine to a child, sing songs of praise and honor. No. Christopher Robbin 
will study the knowledge of pink and mustard-yellow globalism.

    Pooh is worried. He senses he will not be smart enough to understand what 
Christopher Robbin will know when he returns. (And this from the bear who has 
written “all the Poetry of the Forest.”) Christopher Robbin is also upset. 
“Pooh,” he pleads, “promise you won’t forget about me, ever. Not even when 
I’m a hundred.”

    The journey home severs us from empire’s constructions of kings and 
suction pumps, of linear perspective and kilobits per second microwave. We 
make our own maps—maps not of parchment or cyberspace, but of twigs and corn 
husks, of shells and buckskin, of our bodies lying against the reverberations 
of history. Maps not of destinations, but of directions and currents, of 
visions and relationships. We place small stones on these maps to remind us 
of the strengths and awarenesses we must bring to the trek. Look at them 
carefully, study them, memorize. Take a full breath. Now: leave all the maps 
behind. We do not know precisely where we are going or how we will get 
there,. But thank Creation, we are not alone any more.


    CHELLIS GLENDINNING is a psychologist and author whose works include the 
acclaimed My Name is Chellis and I'm in Recovery from Western Civilization, 
the Pulitzer Prize-nominated When Technology Wounds, and the forthcoming Off 
the Map (An Expedition Deep into Imperialism, the Global Economy, and Other 
Earthly Whereabouts). Her writings address both the ecological and human 
costs of technological progress and the psycho-spiritual promises offered by 
a renewed relationship to the natural world.Ê She was a Phi Beta Kappa 
graduate from the University of California at Berkeley and then went on to 
receive a doctorate in psychology from Columbia Pacific University.Ê 
Glendinning lives in the village of Chimayó, New Mexico, where she works with 
Chicano and native people for environmental justice and cultural preservation.