Opinion • Julianne Chandler • September 20, 2024 • Leer en castellano

On my first morning in the Gila Wilderness, I woke up early and felt the sun warming the dew that clung to the roof of my small tent. I unzipped the tent door to take in the view: a carpet of yellow wildflowers stretching across the meadow, stout juniper bushes with their blue-hued needles, ancient ponderosa pines. Drought-resistant, their trunks were tinged black from wildfires past. A red-earth rock face careened upwards from the creek below.

The sky was cloudless, piercingly blue, and I could just make out a murmuring creekbed in the distance. I first heard about the Gila, located in southwestern New Mexico, as a kind of mythical wilderness wonderland. Encompassing over half a million acres of untrammeled wild lands, the Gila sits just west of the Aldo Leopold Wilderness, both of which are encircled by the Gila National Forest, a 3.3 million acre buffer zone that extends to the White Mountains to the west and the Sonoran and Chihuahuan Deserts to the south. 

Established 100 years ago as the United States’ first designated wilderness area, the Gila is larger and more diverse than Yellowstone National Park. But it is so removed from major metropolitan areas that only local residents and the most devout wilderness buffs make their way there.  

“Gila” is an appropriated name, as are nearly all the commonly-accepted place names that dot this southern landscape, the culmination of multiple layers of violence and dispossession that erased the ancestral stewards of this land. “This is Apache country. We call it Nde-Benah. It is the Northern Stronghold of the Nde people,” Chiricahua Apache council member Joe Saenz told me, during an interview at his home in New Mexico’s Arenas Valley. 

Though archeologists claim Apaches settled in the area around 1150 CE, Saenz and the elders of the Apache nation disagree. “We were created here,” said Saenz. “We emerged from the ground just like the volcanoes, that was part of our emergence.” 

Remembering Nde-Benah

Official celebrations of the 100 year anniversary of Nde-Benah have centered Aldo Leopold, a Yale-educated naturalist and conservationist whose advocacy and concept of "wilderness" led to the creation of the Gila Wilderness area in 1924, four decades before the 1964 Wilderness Act. While Leopold’s thinking on the topic evolved over time, he viewed wilderness as a place untouched by humans, preserved for the white man's rest and recreation. 

The North American project of wilderness has long been one of exerting control over landscapes deemed wild. "American wilderness sits with its soul hollowed out, emptied of the peoples who help animate the land," writes Priscilla Solis Ybarra, a professor of Latina/o literature at the University of North Texas.

I spoke with Solis Ybarra in early September, after spending seven days backpacking through the Nde-Benah ancestral territory. The daughter of a Mexican migrant mother and Mexican-American father, Solis Ybarra's scholarly work revolves around unearthing and uplifting the environmental insights of Mexican-American cultures and paying “deep attention” to the ecologically-oriented consciousness that shaped her upbringing. 

Solis Ybarra recognizes that work is not without its own contradictions. “Mexican Americans’ mixed identity includes our past as both colonizer and colonized,” she writes. Spanish colonization efforts began in modern-day New Mexico at the end of the 16th century; after the Mexican-American war, approximately 110,000 Mexicans chose to remain on lands annexed by the United States. Many of them saw their lands dispossessed by the U.S. government in the aftermath of the war. 

Solis Ybarra makes a distinction between “American environmentalism,” largely centered on a recognition of damages perpetrated against the earth and efforts to repair that injury, and recognition of the interdependent human and land relationships that can be found in the historical arc of Mexican American history and writing—what she calls good life values.

Referencing the work of Indigenous philosopher and environmental justice scholar Kyle Whyte, Solis Ybarra urges us to move beyond cosmologies of crisis, which inevitably replicate cycles of exploitation and abuse, and put into practice a knowledge system grounded in coordination. 

“It’s slow and it’s process-oriented and it’s frustrating,” said Solis Ybarra when we spoke over zoom on September 10. “But if you look at the history of colonization, that is the only way that cultures have managed to endure and survive.” 

A living archive of culture

On my fourth day in Nde-Benah, I hiked along the West Fork of the Gila River into a deep canyon of lush tree systems and cliff faces crowned by minarets of red rock. While wading through a curve in the river, I came across an astonishingly well preserved cliff dwelling tucked into a recess of the rock wall and suspended precariously above the riverbed. There was no signage, no fence, no barrier to prevent one from climbing the canyon base and approaching the archway, a portal to another time. This is one of the benefits of the wilderness designation—unimpeded contact with the land and its living history. 

According to the U.S. Forest Service, the Gila Cliff Dwellings were built in the late 13th century by the Mogollon people, descendants of the Southern Ancestral Puebloans. Just outside of the Wilderness area, a national monument preserves a collection of these dwellings and artifacts, equipped with road access and tourist infrastructure. Along with hunting and fishing, the Cliff Dwellings are a major draw to the area. A visit to the museum and archaeological site, however, leaves the distinct impression that the Native cultures that once inhabited the Gila are long gone.

Apache council member Saenz says the National Parks service narrative is a pack of lies. “They never consulted us,” Saenz told me at his home, not far from his ancestral homeland. Saenz is part of a movement of Apache people that have returned to the Nde-Benah area from Oklahoma, Texas, California, and elsewhere after being forcibly removed through federal policies of relocation, largely during the Apache Wars between 1849 and 1886. 

Since 1998, Saenz has run horsepack trips through traditional Apache territory as a way of reviving his connection to his ancestral lands and educating people about Nde history and culture. “It is also my way of keeping an eye on this place, on what they’re doing back there,” he said.

Saenz explains that the Warm Springs and Chiricahua Apache tribes have been permanent inhabitants and stewards of this land. Other groups, like the Pueblo, Comanche, and Navajo, have separate traditional homelands and were only passersby on Nde Territory. 

“The wilderness was and is a sacred place for us,” said Saenz. “They tell us, ‘you guys didn’t leave much so you must not have been here.’ But we were a basket people. You’re not supposed to leave things, and what we did leave was reclaimed by the earth. They used our culture against us.” 

Today, Saenz and the Chiricahua tribe to which he belongs are unequivocal about their demands: they want the land back. 

They also have a plan for how it should be managed. “The first thing is to get rid of the hunting and the fire fighting,” he said, pointing out that the native elk species in the area went extinct in the early 20th Century. “And then mitigation with the wildlife species that are there.” Today, hunting and firefighting are major economic drivers in the Gila Wilderness, which have suppressed the forests’ systems for balance and self-regulation. 

Once praised for its progressive fire mitigation policies—meaning managed burning was permitted as a critical natural process—recent decades have seen a shift towards total fire suppression. That approach, combined with the increasing incidence of drought caused by climate change, led to the 2012 Whitewater–Baldy Fire that burned nearly 300,000 acres of the Gila National Forest—an area the size of Los Angeles. It was the largest wildfire in the recorded history of the state of New Mexico. 

Land Back gains momentum

On my last day in Nde-Benah, I sat on a stone in the river and watched the sunlight dance through the trees. I was struck by the feeling that I’d been there before, that my own history was imprinted on this land. 

A century after the establishment of the country's first wilderness area, I considered whether Leopold’s 20th century construction of wilderness as an isolated area for leisure and recreation—bestowed by a stroke of white innovation and generosity— still serves us today. 

Both Saenz and Solis Ybarra made clear that, from their perspective, wilderness is stolen land. It’s very existence is predicated on the ongoing dispossession and genocide of Indigenous peoples. 

It is in this context that the movement for Land Back is gaining momentum across the United States and Canada. It’s taken on many forms, from buy-back programs to public-private agreements and co-stewardship initiatives between the government and tribes. In some cases, individual families have devised ways to return to the land. 

Land cuts through every major issue in our lives today: climate change, water justice, human rights, conservation, bodily autonomy and economics. Solis Ybarra and Saenz remind us that there are other stories, vocabularies, and models of stewardship that we can draw from as we think toward our shared future on an imperiled planet.

“Wilderness is a hugely influential, romanticized notion of something that doesn’t really exist,” said Solis Ybarra. “It reifies colonial constructs and responds to a white savior complex. Its time has passed. So let’s sink our energy into Land Back.”