by Noe Alvarez
Her parents are survivors of the residential schools—the network of government-funded programs in Canada, administered by Christian churches, that removed Native children from their homes for the purpose of assimilating them by force, depriving them of things like their language, culture, and exposing them to abuse. “My dad had a lot of problems with alcohol,” she says. “When he would get drunk, he would talk to me. He’d get real sad and tell me about residential schools and about what had happened to him.” He was taken away from his family, he and his siblings, at the age of four, she said. His family had no say in the matter. “He would cry. He never cries. Barely smiles or shows emotion,” she says with difficulty. “He’s a blank wall usually. But when he would drink he would tell me traumatic stories.” My father would sit me down in a similar way as a kid. Regular lessons in the hard life of our parents. “His parents had fought and fought for him and his siblings to come home. But they were given only one child of the three.” She sighs before continuing, “They would starve them in school. They had a huge garden, and the children picked things like carrots and potatoes but never got to eat any of it.” When she tells me that her father used to hide vegetables in the coals of the fireplace so that he could sneak out in the middle of the night and find carrots and potatoes in the coals to eat, my heart breaks.
The run does not lack for stories like these, and these are the stories that move me to run even harder.
“They starved them,” she says. “I think that’s why many of us are unhealthy and overweight now. When people like my dad escaped residential schools, they ate everything they could. It was a survival mechanism, as they lived in fear that food wouldn’t be available another day. Future generations packed on weight to have a better life, a better chance of our children surviving.”
When her father finally came home, the damage had already been done. His parents worked hard to bring him up in the traditional way—a practice that brought back some healing to some people in the community, but not her father who did his best to teach Zyanya Lonewolf about this history.
“I wasn’t shown praise or affection from my dad, but deep down I knew that he loved us.” Love was him teaching her how to shoot a gun, she says, or how to identify different trees, how to cut them down to make a fire. Things that had helped him with his trauma.
She tells me that living off the land saved her life, and I wonder about the ways in which the land has saved my parents in Yakima. “My father taught me to never be afraid of the truth,” Zyanya Lonewolf concludes.
10
La Cruz de Campos
My father was birthed in a house fashioned from mud and sticks in an arid land still unrecognized by many maps. There, in an impoverished town tucked between the folds of steep, sweltering mountains, among two siblings and his single mother, Guadalupe Campos Dominguez, my father got his start in life.
At eight years old, he comes up the rocky trail on his donkey, accompanied by his three dogs running ahead—Pololo, Titan, and Cutri. He unloads two buckets of water collected from a gully.
“Any news from your father?” his mother asks.
None.
Weekly he’d been sent to make inquiries at the post office in town, three hours away by donkey—that is, when the stubborn thing agreed to walk. Had his father, who had been away many years in Los Angeles, California, given any sign of his returning—letters, money, anything?
Nothing for the starving family.
They gather around for dinner. A single tortilla. The boy, seeing his mother separated from them in the corner, approaches her and asks, “Mom, you’re not eating today?”
“No, mijo. No tengo hambre hoy.” No, son. She caresses his face. I’m not hungry today, she says, and encourages him to eat without her.
A boy never forgets something like this.
That boy, my father, was of a spirit born of hunger who has been forever defined by the pangs of an empty stomach and the mindset that if you don’t fight, you die.
This boy often canvassed the bush, high in the mountains, in search of things to eat, looking for help in a land that wouldn’t help him. He collected sapodilla chico fruit, captured birds and iguanas to take back to his family, and spent entire nights on the shores of the Pacific Ocean hours away in search of turtle eggs.
“I went out on rainy nights,” he told me once, because turtles come out at night. Having filled his stomach, and too tired to make the trip home, he’d slip into a culvert to sleep—where he felt most protected. He learned to fish for crab, casting pieces of iguana meat into the ocean, and reeling them in. “The crabs attached themselves to the meat.”
Sometimes, his mom sent him to ask neighbors if they had extra feed for their pigs. When people did, it was foul. “The worst tortillas.”
“We didn’t have any pigs,” he finally admitted to me.
It was around this age of eight that my father found his first job handling fiery chiles on a chile-pepper farm. He remembers with joy running every pay day to purchase harina and masa for his mother.
“For the first time in my life we could all eat enough tortillas and with chile,” he said.
11
Glacier Dip
Mount Currie, British Columbia, Canada. Roughly 430 miles from Prince George, B.C., Canada (via Alkali Lake and Lillooet). About 130 miles left until we reach the U.S. border town of Blaine, Washington.
Somewhere on a mountain, near Melvin Creek, is an elderly man who lives alone in a cabin. Hazel of the Stetliem Nation. He is reoccupying his land, he says, fighting timber mills denuding the land and ski resorts making preparations for the Winter Olympics. The Olympics devastate lands and displace people.
We enter the drafty, dark space of Hazel’s home where dust kicks up at every step. Pots and pans hang from above and knock about like wind chimes. Native wool blankets faded of their colors but not of their people’s magic, animal bones, and brittle furniture accentuate the room.
“I’m here to keep watch of the forest,” Hazel says without any hesitation that he was brought into this world for the sole task of protecting the earth. He offers us the mulch of coffee that is as black and bold as the wet soil to enrich our spirits. The runners take their seats wherever, sipping in his words.
“Mother Earth is crying harder than ever before. It’s time we listen to her, to her animals, to our surroundings. She’s been crying for a very long time,” he says. Native Americans have no economic strength, he tells us, because “we have to buy the land that was stolen from us.”
I swallow the last of my coffee, rinse the cup, and step out into a mist that chills me to the bone and that reveals the watermark that is Tlaloc engaged in a private moment with nature, seated on the hood of the van, under a poncho, cross-legged.
“Can you please move?” he tells Chula Pepper, who happens to walk by. “I’m trying to see something beautiful.”
After a gang conflict left him with a bullet wound in his leg, Tlaloc relocated to Arizona to live with an uncle. But while in L.A., his family believed that he had fallen in with criminal organizations. They believed that he was arrested for extorting money from people he preached about helping. Immigrants. That he had exploited undocumented workers looking for jobs and mediated for employers looking to employ them.
From an early age, Tlaloc hustled, went where the job opportunities took him and wherever he could make a quick buck. The nine-to-five workweek was never an option for him, a brother of his would recount.
He had purchased a police scanner once, and listened in the dead of night in his car for the police codes that alerted him to accident scenes. He raced through the streets of East L.A. in pursuit of opportunities to find representation for undocumented immigrants for lawyers who had unofficially hired him.
After some years in Arizona, Tlaloc returned to East L.A. a different man, tougher, changed in the eyes of his siblings, with the bullet and emotional baggage still lodged in his leg. Arizona had exposed him to new ways of dealing with gang vio
lence. He had gained something of an activist mindset, specifically around Latinx and Native American issues.
In the 1990s, before Arizona, Tlaloc and a sibling of his discovered Islam. They found a brotherhood offshoot of Muslim men who at the time seemed like the only people canvassing the ghettos of East L.A. and helping keep youth off the streets during one of the most violent times in East L.A. history. It was a time when there were no youth groups, and when people were left to their own devices for survival. People created their own way because they had to. Everyone knew that it was only a matter of time before the gangs got to you and you became affiliated with them.
When the brotherhood handed Tlaloc and his brother a flyer, they were already starved for a reality that was different from what they were experiencing. They started studying with the Muslim brotherhood—as ghetto Latinos attending mosque, a brother of his would say. Accepted among family.
It was here that Tlaloc learned discipline.
He began thinking about Native beliefs, too, and adopted these beliefs as his own. He talked to his family about Mother Nature, and how he was strongly against barriers and borders. How humans belonged anywhere they wanted to belong.
But Tlaloc’s path forward was not a simple upward arc. He’d formulated his worldview and had often come home professing ideologies as extreme as the life he was leading, and having shoving matches with his brother. Drugs believed to belong to Tlaloc would be found in their mother’s house, and she would be imprisoned. Legal statuses would be revoked, including Tlaloc’s, his brother said.
Tlaloc went on to work with several other activist groups, including the Brown Berets who organized around issues including farmworkers’ rights and police brutality, and continued on a path that would finally lead him to Peace and Dignity Journeys.
When Hazel walks us through his land to a spring, a water source still pure enough to drink directly from, we follow and dip our heads under the water for cleansing.
Zyanya Lonewolf asks the water for protection—for us on the run, and for her father, in jail after a drunk-driving accident that left the other party paralyzed.
“My father often contemplated suicide,” Zyanya Lonewolf says. “I knew him as a strong guy. Those schools messed him up really bad.”
After Cheeto dips his head in the water, he tells me he runs in support of women like his mother, the only constant in his life after his father left the two of them in Mexico to move to the U.S., and his grandmother, a Native woman he never met.
We fill our water bottles with spring water and leave Hazel to his land.
12
Washington Gray
We cross the Canadian border into my home state of Washington, where everything looks gray. The sort of gray that makes one contemplative. I feel the power of the rain most strongly along the Olympic Peninsula, running through Port Angeles and Neah Bay on June 12, and more intensely when we reach the Quileute Nation territory in the village of La Push—a place that averages seventy-eight inches of rain per year. The village is on the edge of a rainforest teeming with moss from floor to ceiling, teeming too with stories of Sasquatch. Along the Pacific shores where fishermen’s boats ply, bald eagles, seagulls, otters, seals, and sea lions congregate on small islands of rock.
Here I recognize the ways in which running is transforming me. Through it, I am inflicting violence upon myself and my body, submerging myself in pain like I did when working in the warehouses alongside my mother, so that I may control the turmoil within me. But unlike any other labor, running relieves me of the weight that I should become better than my parents, my people. I still don’t know that it is okay to be unexceptional, ordinary, unremarkable. That there is greatness and pride to being common, so to speak. But I am learning to believe that it is okay to be flawed, imperfect. Running is helping me to see that.
I hear Chenoa and Andrec arguing over the Mohawk Warrior Flag, a feathered staff that Chenoa feels is representative of true revolution and wants to run with, and that Andrec feels is too aggressive a flag to be flown on the run. To Andrec, the flag clouds the mission of peace and dignity.
Tlaloc joins the argument and strips Andrec of the flag, supporting Chenoa. Because the staffs are believed to hold special powers—imbued with the spirit of ancestors, they are to be treated respectfully as if alive, as if we were in the presence of a relative or an ancestor.
Andrec walks off. The magic between a staff and a runner must not be disturbed.
The run proceeds through this majestic landscape onto the Rialto Beach trailhead. Cheeto, Andrec, and I follow well behind Tlaloc and his crew of alphas through what looks like an enchanted forest of luscious green trees, ferns, and exposed root. Sitka, spruce, and evergreens accentuate life here. The trailhead opens to reveal a marvelous ocean before a graveyard of fallen fossilized trees along the shore and turned gray by the water. The icy waves, furious and too terrifying for me to approach, rip into the sand like bear claws.
Suddenly, like the dozens of bald eagles and seals tearing into the flesh of fish along the marina, Tlaloc and Marx claw into Cheeto like carrion, unprovoked, putting him into a headlock.
“Back off, man. Chill.” Cheeto struggles to escape. They throw him to the ground and Cheeto storms off cursing under his breath and massaging his neck.
Tlaloc, like many things he does, approaches the ocean without fear, strips down, and plunges into its frigid water like he belongs there. A merman. Others join him more timidly. Myself, I sit on a pile of petrified wood, watching the misty shoreline, fog, and frothy sea, occasionally turning back to see rain run down and blacken the cliffsides like mascara.
At Closing Ceremony, the elder Ipana gives a few words of inspiration, English being her nonnative tongue.
“Yeah. Many times life is too hard for me. Physically it’s hard.” She takes long calm breaks between her words and frail breath. “We lack sleep, I know. I also really miss home and people at home.” The run is a real challenge to everyone. “Up in Alaska, it’s harsh, cold, and really hard conditions. Our people there live just to survive. There’s no extra stuff. We don’t own extra stuff. We don’t have that kind of time. We keep straight forward to survive. We lead village life. That’s all I knew when I was growing up. My parents, really strict about protecting environment. Very strict about many things.” She talks about how the run is helping her to see the many ways that her people are related to so many other cultures. “One of the reasons I decide to run, is my health is not that good. I know I’m an age where I might get diabetic. I think running will be good for my health.”
She then discloses that she will leave us for Alaska because her people have summoned her back for work to protect the caribou—a lifelong struggle for her people. “They are like buffalo. Our food, our shelter. We used to live in caribou hides. They are our tools, our clothing, our way of life. That’s who we are. We’re a caribou people. They migrate through our country. That’s how we eat good again. And that’s threatened now. Taking away our way of life. Taking away our humanity.”
13
Goldendale
A year into his new life in Yakima, in 1979, my father, then age seventeen, had hitched a ride to work in the hop fields in Moxee, Washington, when he was stopped and apprehended by immigration officers at a roadblock near the Kmart. He and my mother were already together and, upon hearing of my father’s deportation, she went into hiding to live with my father’s brother, Gonzalo, and his family.
“They arrested us, put us into a bus, then dumped us in Tijuana,” my father told me once. There, in Mexico, he chanced upon a friend who had been deported from Yakima the day before. “He was hungry and had nothing to eat,” he said. “I had only seventy-five cents. So I gave him a quarter to eat a torta.”
They were alone, left to fend for themselves until they could put their heads together and devise a plan to return—he to his brother, Gonzalo, and to my mother. “We made arrangements with a coyote, that we told would get paid in Yakima. They took us acro
ss, then locked us up in a house in Los Angeles,” he said. When the coyotes left the house to confirm people’s contacts and payment, my father and his friends panicked. “I told my friend, ‘We better get out of here. Now’s our chance.’ We were scared they’d hurt us when they found out we were lying and didn’t have any money.” They broke through barriers and escaped to a nearby gas station and hitched a ride with someone who also wanted money. “We all emptied our pockets and put together fifty dollars.” Nowhere near the two hundred dollars the driver was asking.
My father labored for months in Mendota, San Joaquín, and Fresno, in California, looking for work wherever he could. “Three days here, one week there, we looked everywhere for work. Tried to raise enough money to get back to Yakima and your mom,” he told me. Finally, he and six others—none with a driver’s license—stuffed into a 1980s Thunderbird.
Just when they were entering the town of Goldendale, Washington, only seventy miles from the town of Yakima, a state trooper stopped them and asked them all to get out of the vehicle.
“This stays with me. ‘Walk the rest of the way,’” the trooper told them, as interpreted by others.
“He kept the car, then pointed toward the city. For us to walk,” my father said. He didn’t understand a word of English. “We walked a long time until we got to a pay phone, and I called my brother.” Gonzalo left in a dilapidated car not his own that along the way broke down and forced him to hitch a ride to where my father was. “Now there were eight of us,” my father said, in need of a ride home. Finally they secured a ride in a car so weighed down that it nearly scraped the road.