In a Future Far, Far Beyond the Festival
At the start of November I returned to the Mojave Desert to attend Ridgecrest’s 10th annual Petroglyph Festival. I’d been following the event for a decade, ever since I became obsessed with the petroglyphs on the China Lake naval base while writing my first book, but something felt different this year. At first I couldn’t figure it out. Outside the main gates I met the same protestors, members of the local Kawaiisu Nation, who continue to oppose the festival and the permanent petroglyph reproductions displayed throughout the city. Inside, beyond the quiet picket line, there were the same paid Native Americans who had traveled from New York, North Carolina and elsewhere out of state to don feathers, pound drums, and offer up prayers to a Christian God. I bought a corn dog, skipped the kettle corn, admired the dreamcatchers galore and cedar incense and saw the same howling wolf hoodie made in Bangladesh I bought way back in 2010 at the Crazy Horse Memorial in the Black Hills of South Dakota. A wild donkey rescue called Breakfast Burrito kept Christina engaged as I wandered on, circling the arena where a hoop dancer, Eric Hernandez, who’d driven up the night before from Los Angeles, like us, put on an impressive, athletic performance for families and children perched on bright haybales. And none of it, the same as always, had anything to do with the petroglyphs, the ancients who created them, nor the local tribes who revere the Coso Range as the hallowed ground of all creation. A little after noon, in a large tent that functioned as a green room, Bob Blackwell, a representative of the Kawaiisu, approached Eric as he sat breathing through an inhaler, winded from another masterful hoop performance. Bob handed him a flyer. “I didn’t know anything about this,” Eric said, referring to the Kawaiisu’s ongoing condemnation of the festival, which the Kawaiisu have not been invited to join. “It would be like back east if the city hosted a pow-wow and did not invite the Lumbee.” A Ridgecrest city official then entered and told Blackwell he was trespassing. He was invited to leave, and I was informed I’d be receiving emails from the city attesting to the fact that Kawaiisu had been invited to attend the festival. Those emails, however—I suspect much like the actual invitation—have yet to be sent. A Petroglyph Festival that invited the culture of the Kawaiisu would not help fill city hotels. A festival that invited the history of local tribes would not be good for business. Their lodgings would take longer to erect than the Costco pop-up tents. Their clothes would look less colorful before the cameras. And the prayers, not offered in English, might fall on deaf ears. Rather than the PA-amplified tales about Coyote and Rabbit, the history of the locals would have to include the horrors of being hunted, mass slaughter, forced removal, slavery, disinheritance and—finally now, at last—their sacred symbols, the petroglyphs, being sold off as crappy kitsch for bored tourists. Or perhaps not. In all fairness, there was one element absent from the festival this year. And it was this omission that took me a moment to notice. Petroglyphs. There were no petroglyphs displayed throughout the actual festival grounds. Not that I saw. On the one hand it is a profound victory for the local tribes who object to the exploitation of their culture and religion for monetary gain. On the other, the defeat of the festival, so complete it can no longer display its namesake images, lent an eerie atmosphere to the day’s proceedings, especially after the wind picked up. The artwork was both there and not there. Palpable, a possibility scintillating at the periphery, but everywhere absent, omitted. Named but refrained. It felt off, ghostly even, like the glyphs that line the long lava hallway of Renegade Canyon, climbing higher and higher along the walls in layers of tortured palimpsest until the artwork and eons end abruptly at
