In a society that values tangible and profitable results, it is a challenge to describe the benefits of forming a spiritual connection with the land and the people on it, but it is worthwhile to try. These intangible values fostered by such spirituality not only strengthen an individual sense of well-being; they also have endless potential to create balance in the world.

Eliza Naranjo Morse, House of Clay, 2017, pen on paper, 4 x 7 inches.

In 2007 I became a part of a cultural exchange between Centro de la Indígenas (CAI) and the Smithsonian’s National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI). This collaboration sounds formal and institutional, but the experience of participating in this exchange leaves behind notions of western thinking. The purpose of CAI, located in the Mexican State of Veracruz, is to maintain spiritual connection. For the NMAI, whose home exists in the center of bureaucracy, just under the U.S. Capitol building, the work of this exchange is a brave exploration into how a government institution promotes the intangible cultural values of the Indigenous people of the United States.

Veracruz rests inside a hook of a land alongside the Gulf of Mexico. An hour inland and less than two miles down a steep hill from the town of Papantla is a place of old pyramids, palaces and temples called El Tajin: a Pemex gas station, simple homes, vendors, and the home of CAI. Surrounded by a changing landscape and culture, the Center aims to carry the valuable cultural systems of the indigenous Totonaca people into the future. This goal is being met every day with a grace that comes from the confidence of believing entirely in the value of one’s relationship to the earth, the information collected and passed down by ancestors, and an ability to share this information with the surrounding communities.

Centro de las Indígenas, Veracruz, Mexico, March, 2007. Photo by Nora Naranjo Morse.

The House of Clay is one of several that make up CAI. There is also a House of Cotton, of Healing, Painting, Eating, and at the heart of this community, the House of Elders. These houses honor the natural elements they are named after and the human exchanges created over these organic materials. CAI, through its members, has ties to more than fifty communities.

My mom and I are from the United States. More specifically, we are from Santa Clara Pueblo, an indigenous community of people who call themselves Towa, who traditionally live in houses built out of mud brick along the Rio Grande River in northern New Mexico. With enormous tenacity, the community has survived colonization for hundreds of years. Its people also express the wounds of their earth value systems competing with Western systems of economy, religion, and individualism. The pueblo sits just under the Los Alamos National Laboratories, which in its hurried effort to make weapons of mass destruction in 1943, brought the Towa out of their fields and up a hill, creating roads and infrastructure for the work of scientists. This immediately began altering an essential aspect of the spiritual lives of the Towa: their daily relationship to the land. Without the ongoing personal relationship of accessing earth-based information for survival, I believe the relevance of ceremonial information became endangered. How well does one understand, for example, the relevance of the ceremony of the Corn Dance if they have never spent five months of a year devoted to a strong harvest of corn? 

I walk into the House of Clay at CAI when I am 27 years old. Although I have recently left waitressing to pursue working as an artist, I feel lost. I am searching for direction without strength. Although never wealthy with money, as I walk into the House of Clay I realize that I have been given an outrageous amount of luxury in my life from things I hadn’t considered before––things like faucets with drinkable water pouring out of them. I wonder if this has something to do with feeling somewhat lost; I have grown up with ceremony and connection, but these values are crowded by many aspects of American life that take me further from my center.

Women in the House of Clay, Veracruz, Mexico, March, 2007. Photo by Nora Naranjo Morse.

Wood beams and a thatch roof make up the structure of the House of Clay. Inside are tables, a simple wood-fired kitchen area and tubs for washing. A colorful shrine filled with flowers, devotional objects, and a thick stream of copal burning sits in the corner. Women of all ages are sitting in beautiful white dresses embroidered with flowers, or ordinary t-shirts and aprons. They are working on different kinds of vessels using clay that they have dug directly out of the ground without processing. I am amazed by the directness of this, which is very unlike our process at home of traveling to different places to collect different kinds of earth that we then sift several times, mix, and hang in pillowcases from trees to drain. Only then do we begin building with it.

In the House of Clay I feel I am in a place where the source for everything is very direct. Nothing is far from a combined center of earth and human connection. The children, ages six through fourteen, come in after school. One by one each of the children meets the hands of their elders in the House of Clay and holds them for a moment. I am included in this simple ritual of connection.

We spend the next three weeks returning to this idea of simple connection and building on it. Our afternoons are spent in different ways. We make carbon for drawing and collect natural materials to prepare paint. We pick up trash and drink soda on a family’s porch after walking along the road in their community. And we end every day spent together by playing a game called Sardines (or backwards hide and seek).

Zaira, Shannon, and Alexandra At Centro de las Artes Indígenas, March 2008. Photo by Eliza Naranjo Morse.

I eventually get to know Zaira, a seven-year-old who sticks close to her mom. She is careful to spend time with us, and when she gets comfortable it is an absolute joy to be around her, the kind of person who makes you feel more special for being in her company, for having her eyes meet yours. All the children offer their own version of this kind of quality and it feels wonderful to be surrounded by them. We share moments of carefully working together, trying to communicate through a language barrier. My favorite moments are when we quietly wait for the sound of footsteps as we are all squished and hidden together under a counter during Sardines. The mugginess of this tropical climate makes us all feel closer together and holds the quietness in the air until someone whispers, “Who farted?”  

Before political borders separated the landscape, a continuous exchange enriched the lives of the Indigenous people of the Americas who had different cultures but similar value systems, which honored the natural world and made great purpose of relationship, renewal, resourcefulness and exchange. From pueblos to pyramids was a long way to travel but seeds, stories, shells, and feathers all became a part of the ceremonial life that I see in my own land-locked desert community today. There were intangibles that connected us as well, those of the systems that I see my own community seeking to maintain: a creative sense of looking at the world based on those values of renewal, resourcefulness and relationship that are in all of our Indigenous roots.  

In June of 2016, almost ten years after I first visited the House of Clay, members of CAI made the challenging journey to northern New Mexico for the first time. María, the young woman who organized the passports, described the challenge of the US Government’s requests for documentation for the elders, such as proof of birth certificates––an absurd request for people who had never needed documents to prove their existence. There were more challenges once they arrived in Mexico City, navigating more bureaucracy and then finally a detainment in Houston where the choice to leave María Isabel (a lead organizer) behind while the rest continued was a frightening catch-22. Their determination to meet us still swells my heart.

Once everyone arrived and settled in Chimayo, a small village half an hour from Santa Fe, the days were spent traveling to the historical homes along cliffsides of my pueblo ancestors, meeting family members, conversing, and blessing the new life in our community, my twin brother’s baby. We also toured SITE Santa Fe’s biennial Much Wider Than a Line, which featured contemporary artwork by artists from the Americas, and we traveled to different locations in Albuquerque. Our hope was to share our lives with our friends.

The conversations we have had express the most unique aspect of the exchange. There is not an agenda of talking points, and there is no timeline. Silence, as well as the sounds of animals and air, is an active participant in the conversation. When words are spoken, they are translated sometimes two times, from English to Spanish then to Totonaca. A patience unlike anything I have ever witnessed in my formal education or work interactions guides simple questions like, “How are you feeling?” Over the eight days we spent together in New Mexico we acknowledged our past and moved into our future together.

Zaira is now fourteen years old and has begun sharing her understanding of the earth below her and her community with the youngest children who participate in CAI. Her thoughtfulness and patience is dazzling.

I imagine that the participants of this exchange would describe it in different ways at different points in our lives, as I have done over the last nine years. One truth that has remained constant is that the model of the exchange is valuable to all people, and it inspires me to reach into every aspect of my own life and acknowledge the shared relationship to the ground below that belongs to every human. It inspires me to investigate how to promote relationships to the world through connection rather than borders. And it affirms me; as my friends and I are walking atop the mesa; as we prepare to climb down a ladder into a center of the earth, into an underground Kiva used hundreds of years ago by my Towa ancestors; as Eneida holds my hand and tells me, “We are the same.”

Eliza Naranjo Morse has expressed formal creative effort locally, nationally and internationally including at The School for Advanced Research (Santa Fe, New Mexico), Cumbre de el Tajin (Veracruz, Mexico), Ekaterinburg Museum of Fine Arts (Ekaterinburg, Russia), IAIA Museum of Contemporary Native Arts (Santa Fe), The National Museum of the American Indian (Washington, D.C.), Chelsea Art Museum (New York, New York), SITE Santa Fe (Santa Fe), Axle Contemporary (Santa Fe), Praksis (Oslo, Norway), Sombrillo Elementary School (Espanola, New Mexico),  Poeh Cultural Center (Pojoaque, New Mexico), The Heard Museum (Phoenix, Arizona), and at her home in Espanola, New Mexico.