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Many Stories Spoken No More

2008

Chaco Canyon Revisited, “We Can Never Speak Their Names; No More”.

About the Exhibit

Chaco Canyon Revisited, “We Can Never Speak Their Names; No More”.

Today’s headlines detail the failure of our way of life, a human system on the brink of Collapse. This is not a new story in the history of civilization. It is a story of transition from the past to the present and an uncertain future. Several years ago, I read Jarred Diamond’s book Collapse. He writes about the people of Chaco Canyon and the failure of their system, their way of life. They exhausted the natural resources that had been the source of their success as a culture. In the end the climate, the environment changed and civilization failed. Throughout the Western United States lay the ruins of the past. The people vanished as their environment no longer sustained them, from the Wupatki culture http://www.nps.gov/wupa to the Chaco Culture http://www.nps.gov/chcu they were gone.

Today the reasons why these civilizations failed is part speculation and part science, the mystery of what, when and where they went remains un-spoken in stories of a vanished civilization.

After reading Diamond’s account of the failure of the Chaco Culture, I wanted to go to New Mexico and see for myself this place of mystery of un-spoken stories.

As I embarked on my expedition of discovery, I went as an Artist not as a Scientist. My discoveries are intuitive, based on my feeling about this place. My intuition, my gut feeling about what happened and what remains were my source, my sense of this place.

Diamond writes about an enterprising culture that had a purpose to develop beyond their limits and technology to sustain them. They were a culture that destroyed their sustainable environment for the sake of development of expansion. It is un-clear in the forgotten stories why this development was so important to the Chacoan’s. Some archeologists believe the pueblos were only used during ceremonial seasons and that only a small population of people inhabited the area year round. As the story goes, thousands of visitors would come to Chaco during the ceremonial seasons to celebrate their stories, their beliefs. Perhaps this account is true or maybe there is a story untold.

Diamond writes about how the people deforested the landscape. They cut down all of the trees of what once was a forest far beyond what the eye can see into the distance from the canyon so they could build their city. What remains is a desolate landscape void of any large trees. Ponderosa Pine covered the landscape before. Diamond estimates that the Chaco people cut down tens of thousands of trees as far away as a sixty-mile radius from the Chaco site. This was a time when horses did not roam the landscape and all of the timber moved was by the manual labor of the people. They carried or pulled the fallen trees to the city and they built great structures. In the process, they changed the flow of water of their life substance and slowly the environment turned against them. Corn, which was the food of the gods no longer, grew in this place. Slowly they vanished as a culture. There is evidence that the last Chacoan’s began recycling. They salvaged material from older buildings and reused them to continue building new ones. But this was an effort too late because the environment became the master of this land-- a land unable to sustain a human presence. To be sure, descendants of the Chaco Culture still exist throughout the region. Fragmented disenfranchised from one another they either sought survival on their own or assimilated into other groups. They became us a thousand years into the future beyond Chaco.

As I drove toward Chaco Canyon in December 2006 Diamond’s description of the landscape became un-mistakable, a desolate place, a vast void in the forest. Traveling many miles from anywhere, you come to the canyon. At first, you look hard to see any remains, any ruins, as they appear camouflaged, assimilated into the cliffs of the canyon walls. Then the ruins rise up out of the ground and the land takes on a new presence, a human presence.

As I walked through the ruins, I imagined the stories told and the laughter in the Kivas, circular rooms where people gathered to enjoy the company of others. Room after room the presence of the people remains. The great canyon wall that shelters the city is a place for stories bearing evidence of art and culture. Rock Art, perhaps the billboards or the signs of the culture tell the story-- water, rain, of corn, and of new comers. I think many of these drawings are maps, signs for the next generation that tells where the water flowed and where you plant corn. Stains in the rock face of the canyon show the eons of sediment from the flow of water now gone.

Images of plenty, of corn and raindrops on water and an awareness of time speak to me from the images of ancient artists. Artists who were aware that they had the ability to speak beyond their own time, to communicate into a future they would not know themselves.

The question I asked myself was, “Did their simple depictions of life in Chaco etched into the rock hold the key to the complexity of their culture?” Like images in a child’s picture book absent of sophisticated language, the artists tell their stories. Stories told with the awareness of time for us. Stories told with the intention to teach generation after generation. As time flowed where water stopped, the lessons have changed. Are we now today looking at our future through the eyes of the artists and builders of Chaco Canyon?

This is the very premise that Jarred Diamond writes about in his book. It is the awareness that systems fail, that things fall apart. It is the idea that if a culture can recognize these changes-- the limits of their environment soon enough, that they can change their behavior to ensure their sustainability.

It was not war here in the Americas or some far-reaching natural disaster like an asteroid impact that brought failure to the Chacoan’s. It was a system design of their own making that brought upon them the end of their culture. A failure just as we are surely bringing upon ourselves.

This series of Photographs will perhaps tell the story of my intuitive feeling about the stories and names we can speak No More.