Nine miles down a primitive trail, over hills of
sand and rock, across ankle-deep streams, and around mires of quickmud
lies Kiet Seel, a 13th century ancestral Puebloan ruin. This is the
place, ancient and enduring, from which Margaret Randall begins her
meditations in Stones
Witness.
Randall explores her connections to land and landscape, history and
culture, language and memory, drawing from the events of her own rich
history to create a universal link between place, time, and identity. A
fluid and provocative collection of poetry, prose, and photographs, Stones
Witnes is in part an account of an extraordinary
woman’s radically committed and inventive life. Widely known
as an author, activist, oral historian, photographer, translator, and
teacher, Randall has dedicated her efforts globally to achieving social
and environmental change. Yet with a life so varied and so prolific,
Randall maintains permanence through her relationship to the earth and
its sacred places. And as she situates her own political involvement
within a larger cultural context, again and again she returns her focus
to the land, the spaces in which people have “birthed and
buried . . . made art” for centuries. Randall’s
tone is lyrical and elegiac, urgent yet gentle, a collage of words and
images that is at once gratifying and morally intense.
With an artist’s sensibility, Randall explores landscapes of
the soul and of the past, histories of conquest and assimilation,
nuances of gender and womanhood, love and difference, power and its
abuses. While Randall’s words probe timeless and intimate
questions on the nature of being, she grounds these reflections in
place. Her words and photographs take us from the paintings surviving
on the walls of Kiet Seel to the paintings preserved on the walls of
the Metropolitan Museum of Art. With her we visit red rock canyons,
touch ancient stones, and feel the ebb and flow of the natural world.
In a text—a testimony—that is always in motion,
Margaret Randall transcends the boundaries between politics and ethics,
culture and environment. Stones Witnes
sutures the edges of time, the gaps of language, the connections
between person and place that are essential for the earth’s
survival—and for ours. |
Stones Witness
by Margaret Randall
University of Arizona Press,
2007
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