Locating and Retrieving Remains of Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women

“La Loba sings over the bones she has gathered. To sing means to use the soul-voice. It means to say on the breath the truth of one’s power and one’s need, to breathe soul over the thing that is ailing or in need of restoration.”

~Clarissa Pinkola Estés, Women Who Run with the Wolves

The Secret Knowledge of Water (almost finished)

"What’s the deal about the bones? Doesn’t the spirit just leave when we die?”

I was asked that question a couple of years ago and never answered it. I didn’t have the energy to put into words what the heart, the ground and my own body know: the bones know home.

And the ground knows where things belong. Bones and the ground are in relationship whether a body is breathing or it is not. ‘Spirit’ is not a separate aspect of human nature, a practice or idea or faith. It exists without us engaging in it. ‘Spirit’ lives within bones, the awareness ‘home’ and ‘belonging’ lives within bones.

We are more than the divisions we’ve created for ourselves. We are more than mind + body, more than body + soul, more than a vessel of sinew that happens to carry a ‘spirit’ that exists distinctly from physicality.

We’ve tried to taxonomize and classify ourselves like we do insects and fauna. In doing so, we miss the relationships that ‘spirit’ entails and relationships do not fit into organizational charts in the way we want them to. ‘Spiritual’ is of the heart, not the head (or the body) is one way the story is told and yet it’s just not true.

Colonizing explorers rarely understood the relationships people had with ‘the ground’ beyond the idea of staking a claim on it, ‘owning’ it, taming it, making it pliable. Thinking that making it ‘theirs’ was somehow God’s desire. They’d been removed just enough from their own ancestor’s relationships with physical spaces to have forgotten that home was more than just a place you might miss, a touch point to the past.

One of the things that’s been lost along the colonizing path, the religion that brought the destruction of Manifest Destiny and neo-spiritual whatnot is the awareness that relationship between us and anything, us and everything (including a sense of place and belonging), isn’t skin deep; it’s bone-deep, coursing through our corpuscles and between them. Many people have traveled to places and, for reasons inexplicable, know—just know that place. We say things like, “I must have lived here in a different life” and accept that as true an explanation as any other.

That the bones want to go home is a given to me. They know home in the same way I know it now, finally. However, it’s not just the bones, the bones are us (or at least these women and girls). First, these bones aren’t separate from the being, while breathing or not. No soul has left them behind. Figuratively speaking, anyway. Certainly those that have thrown them away and the others who know but won’t retriee have, but I digress.

Second, the ground has a full awareness of what belongs where it is and what doesn’t. The ground, too, knows home and it’s not separate from the prayers released by the bones to ‘take me home’.

I had an extraordinary experience last week. As energy from the ground somewhere else crawled upon and through my legs, like a beacon or a kind of internal compass…North, South, East, West, river,—seen and unseen have places on my legs, on my body. It’s how I differentiate who is where. I’d taken it for granted for the past few years but what happened late last week was this:

There was a profoundly striking awareness that settled into me:

What kind of love is it, that against all odds as most humans would believe, that The Absolute Goodness of the Earth, the Very Ground of Being(ness), would assure that Her daughters and their daughters, would go home? What kind of enormous, encompassing, unconditional love. And who am I to deny that to anyone whose prayers take me to them?

So, Sunday I’m going to locate remains. Probably four sets of women’s remains in Northern New Mexico. If they’re on private property, they’ll be retrieved while I’m there. If they’re on federal or tribal land, there may be twelve different layers of bureaucracy and the unwillingness of BIA and FBI to fund recovery but at least what remains of bodies will be located. And once they’ve been seen, they can’t be unseen.

That, in my ever-so-not-humble opinion, is the only way to repairing what is ailing, to reconciling the relationships and the broken hearts, and communities that need restoration.

I would appreciate anything you can give to help sustain me as I cross the high desert and search for those who are lost and ready to be found. I’m raising between $600 and $3000 because I’m anticipating three trips in August and early September. Car rental, gas, hotel and food are the expenses. My PayPal is @ingridoliphantllc, Venmo and AppleCash are 970-708-2716. Those who donate will receive updates when I am given permission to share publicly.

Or, if you care to, buy a painting! (or two!) www.ingridoliphant.com/visual-art Make an offer. And if there’s nothing there that tickles your fancy, there are two new ones in the last emails I sent out and on my FB.

Some of this may never be made public. There won’t benews stories or accolades and, perhaps with the exception of quiet family reunions, no acknowledgment. Though I know the names of most of the women and the general location of where they are, there are layers of law enforcement as well as family and cultural sensitivities that will be honored in the same way I honor the prayers to home. Though this work will be independent of law enforcement, I work with two BIA officers out of Albuquerque who will be aware of what I find (and don’t).

With great thanks and love,

Ingrid

This piece is the almost-finished The Secret Knowledge of Water, inspired by Craig Childs’ book of the same name.