Angel Sunset/ Shards of Time

Angel Sunset

By Brionna Garcia

Angel Peak

October 17, 2018

The first night we arrived to Angel Peak, our new temporary home for the next busy week, the sky gods left us a gift of inspiration. As soon as dinner was ready, we were spoiled with a breathtaking view of Northern New Mexico. Never before had I seen the gradient of sky colors in collaboration with the gradient of geological time. 

This view became our backyard/backdrop for all of the discussions we had regarding the ugliness of fracking, during most of our meals, and during the entirety of the creation process of our zines to bring awareness to the negative implications of fracking. 

Shards of Time

Brionna Garcia 

Chaco Canyon

October 17, 2018

Kyle and I made the hike to the top of the mesa at Chaco Canyon to view Casa Bonita from a bird’s perspective. On our hike we were stunned by the tinajas that were carved into sandstone by years and years of water erosion. While we were sitting in large tinaja to share rolled cigarettes and stone-ground chocolate, we were playing in the dirt and happened upon these ancient pottery shards. From my background knowledge of Chacoan pottery, these vessels were made from white clay and using a reduction fire process, the glaze painted on the pottery with yucca brushes appears black. It was incredibly fascinating to hold something made by an “artist” long ago. I wondered if they considered themselves an artist, or if they were making this piece for functionality. It made me feel tied to whomever had their hands in the clay. Did they know a thousand years later someone would be mesmerized by their vision of beauty and culture? We carefully placed the shard back where and how we found it sending veneration to the people that came before us.

Spider Naps

Spider Naps

By Kyle Holub

Four Corners

September 27, 2018

Blaise and I met this Desert Tarantula while reflecting on our time during the Fracking is Fracking Reality tour.
We followed it for a little while. It would nestle up to the bottoms of grasses and sage to get some shade,
and would take a little nap. After a minute or two, it would wake up and stretch its front 4 legs and continue
on its way. It repeated this cycle a number of times and seemed completely undisturbed by our presence.
It curled up in my shadow and fell asleep for a few minutes.

In strange contrast to the peaceful sleepy spider, another scene developed just down the hill from us.
A worker had come to service the gas well close to our campground.
He was checking gauges or something in a small shed and he left his door open to listen to the radio.
I could barely make out Rush Limbaugh’s voice. He was talking about Brett Kavanaugh.
In a similar spewing fashion, the worker walked over to a pipe, buried his face in his elbow,
and released some of its contents in a loud hiss that lasted a minute or so.
The spider didn’t seem to react.  

no.3

no.3

By Sarah Canelas

Angel Peak, NM

September 28, 2018

A lot happened here—and I still don’t know how to talk about it.

fracking and juniper trees and dreams and history and colonialism and horror and harvest moons

By Erin Gould

Did you know that the roots of the juniperus monosperma (one-seed juniper) species of juniper trees, one of the many, have been found to reach 200 ft below ground, making it the plant with the second deepest known root systems on earth? Isn’t that amazing?

Did you know the average fracked well is 8,000 feet deep?

Did you know that there are 40,000 wells in Northern New Mexico?

While we camped at Angel Peak in the Greater Chaco Region of Northwest New Mexico, I slept under the limbs of a juniper tree on the top of a hill. Just on the other side of this hill was a fracking well. The sounds of it, mixed with the whisper of swaying juniper branches, slept with me every night. I cried every day when I told that juniper tree that I was sorry.

I am so sorry.

Junipers grow very slowly. A five foot tall tree could easily be 50 years old. The average juniper lives to be 350-700 years old. The oldest known juniper tree, a Western Juniper, lived to see 2,675 years.

How long has my friend lived on that hill? How much has changed there? What did that hill look like when New Mexico wasn’t a state? Before European colonialism reach it? Did they know Juan de Oñate?

Gas was found in Seven Lakes, New Mexico, about 20 miles south of Chaco Canyon, in 1911. This tree was already huge by then. How old do you think that well is?

Oil and gas companies don’t have to disclose the chemicals they inject deep into the earth.

Did you know that two thirds of a juniper tree’s mass is underground? How sensitive do you think those roots are? Did this tree feel it when that well over the hill was being drilled? Does it feel the roar of the compressors?

During a discussion about self care, Asha had us root our feet into the dirt and asked us to imagine being a tree. I did this and could not stop crying. After this exercise, I hiked back to the tree under which I slept and explained why I had thrown myself into its branches and was leaking salty tears into its leaves. I told this tree about my horror, my disgust, my grief over the pain and suffering caused by human greed on this place, on the people who live here, on cultural traditions already ravaged by hundreds of years of racism, on the trees. I cried in the arms of a friend and felt better/ cared for/ loved.

I read that the Hopi believe that juniper trees carry the spirit of the caretaker of the earth.

How many collective years do you think the juniper trees in Northern New Mexico carry between them?

I am so sorry.

The Tower (Fracking at Greater Chaco)

The Tower (Fracking at Greater Chaco)
By Rowan Willow

few of the fracking wells at Greater Chaco are visible from highway 550. Some of the storage facilities and refineries look menacing, but the wells themselves don’t look imposing at all. If you were to drive by without the knowledge of the current struggle of the area with Big Oil, you might not notice anything out of the ordinary. Such large, oblong, sleekly painted shapes are a staple of highway life in the country, probably other countries as well. Chaco is a monument, ruins that can never be touched. Everything else is just business as usual.

These wells are fracturing communities. They affect the mental and physical health of the indigenous communities whose ancestors grew this land and worked with the magic of this place.

When I think of the fracking in the greater Chaco region, I think of the Tarot Card The Tower. The card is unanimously agreed to be a reference to the Tower of Babel, a tower where we tried to reach God through the heavens, and God- knowing we could not reach Him, made language divide so we could no longer communicate. The story does not communicate a disaster, instead it provides hope. The doorway on the card signifies that people were not forced to leave, they left out of their own volition, because the way to communicate with God is not through unattainable ideals, but through connection and cultivation of the earth.
Maybe our world is set up to make money off its exploitation, and maybe that exploitation will be realized until there is nothing left. But no matter how much we try to build our tower to utopia through oil, we will end up with the realization that we will only attain this utopia through working and understanding the earth and its wisdom.

Reality Tour

Reality Tour

By Blaise Koller

Four Corners

September 26, 2018

Things today going on the “Fracking is Fracking Reality Tour” with Daniel Tso

-Yellow Poles: Warning gas pipeline

-Loud, unrelenting ubiquitous motors

-Petrified Wood

-Huge circular pools filled with produced water (In traditional oil and gas wells, produced water is brought to the surface along with oil or gas.)

-Dog tracks

-White PVC pipelines

-Flat soft black plastic tubes

-Workers setting up a well

-Many semi trucks carrying water and other supplies with names unkown to me

-Huge blue storage containers professing “rain for rent” on the sides

-Pools from fracking water runoff

-White and pink tiny flowers on unknown plant

-Yellow and black bold sign “METHANE GAS ODORLESS TOXIC IN OUR AIR”

-Elementary school with very high readings

-Colorful sunset

-Fajada Butte in the distance looking from a fracking site

sometimes what lies in the open is invisible

nicholas b jacobsen

sometimes what lies in the open is invisible

Four Corners

October 12, 2018

Everyone who reads this entry is connecting with the lives within the sacred lands of Diné (Navajo) and Pueblo Peoples. As we begin our communications, let us fully acknowledge the place from where this writing originates and give thanks to the mountains, valleys, and waters, which sustain our lives, and form Diné and Pueblo ancestral homelands. Let us ground our interactions in awareness of where we are and may the mannerisms of Diné and Pueblo Peoples enter our lives and fill us with gratitude, love, care, and respect for all that is shared between us and all beings.

After experiencing the complex, heartbreaking reality of the Fracking is Fracking Reality Tour, led by Daniel Tso, we spent some time absorbing and reflecting. We heard about the fractured social and physical health of the communities in Northwestern New Mexico. We saw the oppressive density of oil and gas wells. We smelled and tasted their toxic tailings. We listened to the omnipresent vibrations of the pumps. We touched the poisoned ground, where seeds of sustenance and lives of ancestors lie. We felt the heartaches and headaches that daily impact the lives of those whose homes are deeply rooted here in the “national sacrifice zone.”

We were charged by this community to hold this experience within our hearts and to share what is forming there with our communities. In there own words, we pass this charge on to you.

“We’re speaking from the heart, in the hopes that it touches your heart, motivates you to join our work. This is a critical time. The balance of nature is disrupted. We all need clean air, water, a place to live. Talk to your family, friends. Ask them to call and write to their representatives. I hear there is a thing called ‘Instagram.’ You can Instagram it.” - Daniel Tso

“The reality that we’re facing is we need help. People are dying. The land and water are suffering. We shouldn’t need a PhD to say harm is happening. It’s the culture of violence that needs to be disrupted--violence on our land, violence on our communities.

It’s time to take a hard stand, what side we’re on.

Are we for life or death?

Peace or violence?

It’s going to come with a lot of sacrifice, changes in the way we live. We were given everything we need--land, water, seeds. We now have an obligation to grow together. We need everyone to work together, because of the urgency.” - Anonymous

For more information and to learn how you may help the efforts already underway, please visit the Greater Chaco Coalition @ frackoffchaco.org, and on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram

Thank you

On the methane flares on northern New Mexico

By Paul Ross

Angel Peak, Four Corners, NM

September 22, 2017

They say that when it rains, it rains around it.

An inverse to the pet thunderclouds that follow the glum and unlucky in the world of cartoons.

A howling field, which pushes all good things away, such as the rain.

What a preposterous sin, to banish this connection between earth and sky

They cannot touch each other.

Rifted by and angled iron arrow,

Loosing the daemons safe beneath earth’s skin

As odorless, insatiable flame.

Two kinds of pumps

I wanderwalk along the badland valley floor, amongst dwarf cottonwoods and natural gas pump stations.

I think of the ‘bad’ in ‘badlands’ as less of a negative term and more in the way that skater kids in high school say ‘bad.’ Impressive. Sort of scrappy, and capable.

Sounds of my heart and the stations comingle…

Two kinds of pumps

Divinity and Fried Bread at Angel Peak

By Alex Kinney

Angel Peak, Four Corners, NM

September 22, 2017

Angel Peak was a weird place and was not what I expected. I learned a lot about people here and Sunny’s storytelling and healing exercise was engaging and thought provoking. I think, mentally, this site was the most exhausting in a way. The drawing above is a symbol for the divine. Sunny had us draw things very quickly as a part of a healing process. Divinity is about goodness, coexistence, and protection. It is a very high energy!

Opening Up

By Adele Ardent

Four Corners, NM

September 22, 2017

There is a moment that often follows a sudden opening-up of space.

Sometimes, you meet this moment bleary-eyed, stumbling from a late bed to pull aside the curtains and reveal a morning already half-lost to the high-climbing light; sometimes, it finds you when the incoherent pools illuminating unfamiliar city streets resolve into a coherent narrative threaded in orange and gold light. In that moment, eyes and mind look past confining spaces to focus on further, and yet further, distances.

The lands here in the Southwest seem to live in that moment of readjustment ceaselessly, with the earth both perpetually torn open to the sky and yet always frozen in the moment of tearing wider still. It is easy, standing here sky-washed, to imagine each breath borne high and away by untouchable rivers of cloud and star.

It is easy, under these skies, to believe the lie that there is an “away” at all.

I find myself wanting to believe this lie; I find myself wanting to believe that everything will be fine.

In taking pictures of the human disruptions caused by fracking, I’ve found myself focusing upwards instead. Using the panorama algorithm on my phone, I’ve tried to stitch together as many bolts of blue sky and filmy cloud as I can gather by reaching arms overhead and bending back (and back and back further still.)

I want these human disturbances to be as minuscule as they look to be when compared to the immensity of the air. Little truths told by other senses out this lie, of course—a tightness in the chest when Daniel Tso led us on the tour of fracking sites, the sudden pain when blood drips from the nose in the bright-ringing dawn of a bell-clear day, dreams filled with generator vibrations, traveling along eardrum and jaw into gritted teeth.

I want to return to these places to put more pieces of sky together, and reconcile conflicting aims: I want to see the sky as a giant quilt of breath that I can rest comfortably under, big enough to forgive any stain. I want to piece together a way to reveal the lie.

Untitled

By Ruby Pluhar
Angel Peak, Four Corners, NM
September 21, 2017


Gaining an understanding in to the Navajo culture and how it has been exploited by oil and gas extraction units was incredibly overwhelming during our stay at Angel Peak, where we camped right in the middle of it all. At night, the view became a sea of flashing artificial lights pinpointing where all of the fracking was going on and I was left with constant headaches from all the gases roaming in the air. Working with activist Daniel and storyteller Sunny gave an immense amount of insight firsthand in to how their native lands have been totally disregarded and we gained history of their beliefs and traditions. I feel these portraits share insight in to their characters. I really connected with all the stories Sunny shared with us as we sat together through rain and sunshine. As Sunny so rightly stated, “Art heals.”.

The Flare, or for those who can't escape

By Viola Arduini

Angel Peak, Four Corners, NM

September 22, 2017

Excerpt from infrared video of a gas flare, some goats around

The Four Corners region is a heart-wrenching land. 

Beautiful and fierce as the South West often is, it is also a land of deep, human-made, wounds. The metal pipes cut and pierce the ground, the noise and the smell are sometimes unbearable. Sonny told me "Look at that, knife blades inside the flesh of our mother Earth". I follow her gaze to a big oil pump. A mix of anger, sadness and frustration made my heart accelerating.  

Sometimes, there is a cloud of methane on the region that is visible from the space. On the other hands, stars are becoming more difficult to see now from Chaco Canyon due to gas and light pollution in the area. 

We all felt sick on the first few days at Angel Peak. But we eventually left, toward new sites. What happens to all those people, human and non, that have their home on that suffering land?  

I Luv Shadows – photo evidence

By Mikala Sterling

Chaco Canyon, Four Corners, NM

September 24, 2017

Apparently was brought here as a baby and set down in a nicho and almost bitten by a rattlesnake… I have no memory of this! It’s all hearsay-

Mesmerized by Chacoan relationship with architecture and astronomy

Shadow (and light) moments:

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