With university student pliability they rolled out of the van.  They’d come for a week of conversation with valley ranchers, spiritual guides, farmers, and Tribal politicians.  Our work today was to talk about the valley’s history, politics, religion, spirit, hurt, joy and their landscape intersections.

The morning was cool but not cold.  Just after sunrise.  We met at the panaderia on the town’s mainstreet.  There were a number of murals downtown and I was going to use them to talk about the valley’s reservation history.  Afterwards we would head to the farm where we would talk about intersections between the valley’s natural landscape, settler colonialism, and our natural existence in place.

As folk slowly exited the warm panaderia, they gathered at a bench a few yards away.  Warm coffee and pan dulce felt good in the cool are.  We drank, ate, and introduced ourselves by name.  

Everyone listened as one another’s name were spoken.  As we finished naming ourselves, there was a familiar feeling in the air.  Now that we knew each other’s name, we were ready to move onto whatever is next—something more important.  The feel to the moment fits the profit, prestige, power era we live in.  Names are introductive.  Important, but a means to get onto “what we really need to talk about.”  This is why our talking for the day begins in town.  For the murals around us speak to lie that what we need, really need, occurs after our naming.

I understand the misperception of names and naming.  Most folk have forgotten—if they ever knew in the first place—the incarceration of American Indian children in US boarding schools.  How many to most of those schools—from the 1800’s to 1900’s—forced the renaming of children under a belief that a good Christian name would lead the child to become more fully human.  The taking and renaming of children though, is not forgotten on the reservation.

There is little more meaningful in a lifetime to name and be named.  Our name is a reflection of the timeless and natural presence of ancestors.  When we listen to our name closely, we hear the echo of our parent’s inward search, their ancestorial questioning, and their wonder of creation.  There is wonderment in the quest of name—that perfect name—which would come to identify the waking creation (us!) for a human lifetime.  There creational sadness that we’ve been taught, even encouraged, to forget our named existence has shaped our soul and spirit.

However, the wind and dirt and water has not forgotten our named existence.  Rather, each time our name is spoken, creation knows us as a little more ancestral and a little more natural.  Though we may not be aware, our creational ancestors regularly enjoy a laugh at how we choose to live out our given name, marvel at the wisdom we attain as we grow into our accepted name, honor us when community nicknames us, and hold us in grace in those few times when our interior calls us to name change.

Names and naming came up throughout the day.  How do we learn the names of others whom a world of commodification calls grass or copper or fir or salmon?  How naming holds our soul in relationship with the soul of grass or cloud.  How our earthiness binds us with the cosmos.  How the wellbeing of community is enriched when we need and care for the names of our communal siblings.  How names hold justice and care in harmony.  How we find rich and wonderful siblingship in the ordinary embrace place and voice.  How the speaking and hearing of our ordinary names is sacred practice.