Wisdom Sits in Places

Keith Basso's work with Western Apache people at Cibecue produced one of the clearest accounts anywhere of a religion carried by geography. Western Apache place names are descriptive sentences: water flows downward on a succession of flat rocks, or shades of shades of shades. Each names a place precisely enough to picture it, and many are attached to a historical tale about something that happened there to someone who behaved badly.

Those tales are used. To quote a place name at a person who has done wrong is to remind them of the story attached to it, and the technique is described by Apache speakers as shooting someone with an arrow. It is meant to sting, and then to keep working on them afterwards every time they see the place. Basso records people saying that the land stalks them, and that this is what keeps them living right.

The consequence is that Western Apache moral instruction is stored in the country rather than in a scripture or a code, and it is available to anyone who knows the names. It also means that removal from the land removes access to the tradition, and that the destruction of a place destroys what that place taught. Neither of those is a metaphor, and together they are the reason land questions in this article are religious questions.