Walking in Beauty: Harmony, Balance, and Entanglement

For my presentation, I wanted to focus on thinking about balance, connection, entanglement, and harmony, centered in the context of nourishment and food and the relationship between these two things and communities. I spent 2 months in a rural part of the Navajo Reservation in Northern Arizona and I was honored with learning and experience while there. Before I continue my writing, I want to acknowledge the land we are on. 

We gather(learn, share, and grow) on the land of the Three Fires Confederacy: the Ojibwe, the Odawa and the Potawatomi. They speak Anishinaabemowin. Kalamazoo College itself is located on a part of the reservation established for Match-e-be-nash-she-wish and his band of Potawatomi. I acknowledge the stewards of this land and our privilege to produce,co-create, and benefit from this insitution built on stolen land. 

Secondly,  I also want to preface this post by urging you all to consistently remind yourself and me, as we read, think, and discuss that indigenous communities everywhere should not be reduced into one single moniker or identifier. I acknowledge the land we are on as Ojibwe, Odawa, and Potawatomi, the knowledge I was gifted as Dine/Navajo, and privilege in mobility and settler identity in moving knowledge across the country as a second hand experience. 

When I lived on the Reservation, the very first thing I learned--in addition to how good fry bread is--was the concept of Walking in Beauty. I was working in an Indian Health Service clinic that incorporated the concept of Walking in Beauty into their protocol, their mission, and their values. I soon discovered that this concept was ingrained into law, farming, schooling, activities, and just about everything else. As an English speaking person, when I heard the word beauty, an aesthetic and moral valorization was usually attached to it, bringing with it a connotation of desirable emotion, mental placement, and rightness.However, the use of this word escaped my tongue's grasp, my imagination and interpretations could not capture the difference between desirability and beauty, the way in which beauty was something inherent, light, built in to our beings rather than something gifted to us by an observer's judgement. The way of Walking in Beauty is captured declaratively in prayer and ritual and it becomes the foundation for relating, grounding, and guidance. If you would like to hear a version of the prayer, narrated by a member of the Dine, you can find that here https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Idgz85YS70o&feature=youtu.be. The prayer written out has many variations, but the following is  one of the most accepted. 

In beauty I walk
With beauty before me I walk
With beauty behind me I walk
With beauty above me I walk
With beauty around me I walk
It has become beauty again
Hózhóogo naasháa dooShitsijí’ hózhóogo naasháa dooShikéédéé hózhóogo naasháa dooShideigi hózhóogo naasháa dooT’áá altso shinaagóó hózhóogo naasháa dooHózhó náhásdlíí’Hózhó náhásdlíí’Hózhó náhásdlíí’Hózhó náhásdlíí’
Today I will walk out, today everything negative will leave me
I will be as I was before, I will have a cool breeze over my body.
I will have a light body, I will be happy forever, nothing will hinder me.
I walk with beauty before me. I walk with beauty behind me.
I walk with beauty below me. I walk with beauty above me.
I walk with beauty around me. My words will be beautiful.
In beauty all day long may I walk.
Through the returning seasons, may I walk.
On the trail marked with pollen may I walk.
With dew about my feet, may I walk.
With beauty before me may I walk.
With beauty behind me may I walk.
With beauty below me may I walk.
With beauty above me may I walk.
With beauty all around me may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, lively, may I walk.
In old age wandering on a trail of beauty, living again, may I walk.
My words will be beautiful…

The relationship between the land, each other, and time is highlighted as being the base for a life that is fulfilling and above all centered in happiness, harmony, balance, and joy. In the interest of not redoing work that has already been done--acknowledging that so much is lost in translation--this https://nativeamericanconcepts.wordpress.com/walking-in-beauty/ is one of the better breakdowns of the concept that I have been able to find on the web. Please peruse it and write down any initial questions, challenges, or thoughts you have. As you will read in this piece, the concept is suspended around the root, or the idea/symbol/word hozho, which means natural order. Whenever this natural order is disturbed, we fall into dis-ease, a state that is only remediated by seeking, enacting, and embodying balance, communication, and understanding. Fundamentally, living beautifully is about healing--it is a way of life situated in time, movement, growth, and connectedness.

I was inspired by Yuri's presentation and their use of the Biocultura theory in understanding our relationships to food systems, the land, and our placement in the world. What I found myself constantly asking as I read was how we begin to center and privilege indigenous way of interacting and acting with and on the land in ways that sustain and implicate. As I remembered what I was taught about Walking in Beauty, I realized how much the Dine had impacted my engagement with and understanding of extraction, ritual, relating, and time. When people would fall into dis-ease, rather than throw pharmaceauticals at folks, a big swa dance was performed, in addition to speaking to the person, holding the person, and feeding the person. This took time, energy, community, and compassion. They taught me to apply the same concepts to food, violence, alcoholism, and ownership. I bet at this point youre wondering what this has to do with food. This may be the longest preface in the world but what this has to do with food is the way that storytelling, ritual, dance, and song can not only entertain us but sustain us, can be movement and body and also offering and honor. Accepting that we are entangled is the only way to walk in true beauty. Judith Butler argues this beautifully as she talks abut mourning. She says, 

See, even though I was taught what corn means for the Dine--and even for the Hopi as I was privileged enough to also learn and live with them for a bit--the actions of the State and the general state of  our world was one where people told how to do and grow to people who could not afford to as poverty is rampant, the land is not theirs, and the rains cannot feed the soil. This is not true for the entirety of the Reservation but where I was, where fields once stood, lived a greasy chicken hut and a pizza parlor. For the entirety of the surrounding communities, all that could feed people was fast food and one grocery store. Industries such as coal mining are what keep many Navajo employed, something I was told was akin to needing to feed yourself with the blood of your children. Walking in beauty, I was told, meant self-sustenance, integrity, and pride, a growth of self that came with helping the Earth grow too. Removing the conversation from the Reservation quickly, the concept of Walking in Beauty is something that could change the way that we interact with the world; acknowledging this way of life, is to acknowedge that we are entangled and inseparable from one another and therefore have a responsibility to nourishing one another spiritually, mentally, and physically, particularly through the modality of food. How do we over work land? How do we choose what will be our crop? What is a weed and why? When is it a weed and when is it life? Why do we fear the world's natural processes of destruction and decompostion?

        “Be still and the earth will speak to you.”

-Navajo Proverb

Here is some beautiful news from a part of the reservation very close to where I stayed. 

https://www.hcn.org/articles/state-of-change-navajo-small-businesses-stabilize-booms-and-busts it is a 2 part series so please read both and again note anything you see--language, rhetoric, mission, ideology, structure, etc. 

Lastly, I want to talk about the difference between desirability and beauty--mostly the way that beauty is a relationship and a component of love. Beauty is about ritual--the process of storytelling, dancing, retaining tradition, and cultural production. Beauty is about connection--the earth speaking to you, you paying attention, you both giving and taking. Beauty is about performance--the respectful stewardship, the honoring of land and being, the celebration by eating. Beauty is about joy--the conversation, the laughs, and the stories. Beauty is about change--the temporality of everything, the evolution from seed, to kernel, to husk, to dust. Beauty becomes about the presence, the commitment, and the connection, not just the extraction. Beauty is about the dichotomy--the you in me, and the me in you, the entanglement of particle, breath, body and soul. Beauty is about us. Peace be with you. 

1. How can you envision/how have you embodied Walking in Beauty in your own life? What words stand out to you and how do you live them? 

2. Thinking back to our piece on Biocultura and our conversation about community and nourishment, how do you find yourself implicated in the systems that govern our food interactions? Do you feel like this is a violence done unto you, that you participate in partly, or that there is ownership to claim in that violence(according to your upbringing and current positionality)? What informs that and how does even that understanding rely heavily on privileging one way of knowing over another? 

3. When is the last time you listened to the Earth and let it speak to you? Was the moment beautiful? Explain. 

4. How do we Walk in Beauty together? How can we think of walking as a unit with independent parts but that is a collective nonetheless? What are the barriers? What is surmountable? What brings you joy? 

5. If you would like, please reflect publicly. Are you in a state of dis-ease? Have you any beautiful rituals that recenter you? Is it done in community or alone? 

p.s. i dont like how this is written all the way but its cool to read about initiatives that are Native led. (we should hear from them more!) https://civileats.com/2018/10/17/how-the-navajo-nation-is-reclaiming-food-sovereignty/