When the Land is Family

There is a privilege in coming home.

I mean the profound privilege of returning to the land my family comes from—to wake beneath familiar skies, surrounded by mountains, desert, plants, animals, stories, ancestors, and Konitsaaii, the river that has sustained our people for generations beyond counting.

I get to live here, work here, and spend my days protecting the land and community that shaped me.

I do not take that for granted.

Some mornings, I look outside and am struck by the simple fact that I am home. Not visiting or passing through. Not remembering this place from somewhere else.

Home.

With that privilege comes responsibility.

For me, conservation has never been simply about protecting a beautiful landscape. Preservation is neither an abstract idea nor just professional work.

It is relationship. It is also faith.

The Sacred Is Not Separate From the Land

When people hear the word religion, particularly in this country, they often imagine a church, scripture, congregation, or designated place of worship.

But the sacred is not confined to a building.

For our people, relationship with the Creator cannot be separated from relationship with creation.

Konitsaaii can be a place of prayer. Mountains hold teachings. Plants carry medicine. The earth holds our ancestors.

The places where our people lived, gathered, prayed, conducted ceremony, buried our loved ones, and collected medicines remain part of our spiritual world.

Our ancestors are not simply historical figures or names on a family tree. We remain in relationship with them. We speak their names, carry their teachings, and care for the places where they walked and returned to the earth.

For my family and community, this is not abstract belief. It is lived responsibility.

We have protected an ancestral cemetery. We have confronted the removal of ancestors from the earth where they belonged. And we have carried the sacred responsibility of bringing ancestors home and returning them to that earth.

When you participate in returning an ancestor to their homeland, the meaning of preservation changes.

It is no longer about protecting something from the past. It becomes an obligation in the present.

It is ceremony, responsibility, and love.

It is also an acknowledgment that death does not end our relationship with those who came before us.

The earth to which we return them matters.

Place matters.

You Cannot Relocate the Sacred

If a church were destroyed, people would understand that something more than a building had been harmed. If a cemetery were bulldozed, they would understand that something more than soil had been disturbed. If access to a place of worship were permanently blocked, they would recognize that a religious community had lost something fundamental.

For us, all three can exist within the same landscape.

Our sanctuary may have no walls. Our altar may have no name on a map. Our cemetery may be centuries—or thousands of years—old. Our place of prayer may be beside Konitsaaii, within a canyon, beneath a dark sky, or somewhere our families have returned for countless generations.

Our congregation includes those living today, those who came before us, and those still to come.

None of this makes these places less sacred.

And sacredness cannot simply be relocated.

You cannot excavate our relationship with a place, document what you find, put objects into boxes, move ancestral remains somewhere deemed more convenient, and declare the spiritual loss mitigated.

You cannot replace thousands of years of relationship with another parcel of acreage.

Some things are sacred because of where they are.

When Destruction Becomes Grief

The destruction of public lands and sacred Indigenous places should feel like a gut punch to everyone.

Once an ancient landscape is bulldozed, blasted, excavated, fragmented, or permanently altered, we cannot manufacture another one somewhere else.

But when you are Indigenous to the land being harmed, there is another layer of grief.

The closest comparison I have is losing someone you love.

When I see this land threatened, I do not experience it only as an environmental issue. I experience grief.

When the earth is cut open, something in me hurts. When an ancestral place is threatened, I fear for something I love. When places where our people lived, prayed, gathered, buried our dead, raised children, collected medicine, and returned for generations are treated as disposable, I feel the helpless anger of watching something I love being harmed.

Because land is not simply something we possess.

Land is relationship.

Konitsaaii is relationship.

The mountains and desert are relationship.

Our ancestors are relationship.

Our spirituality lives within all of them.

Our ancestors are quite literally part of this earth. Their bodies returned to it. Their descendants remain beside it.

I know this not only because I was taught it.

I have placed our ancestors back into that earth.

I know what it means to stand with ancestors who needed to come home. I know what it means to help return them. And I know that protecting the earth where they now rest is part of the promise we make to them.

The Privilege of Coming Home

That is what makes coming home such an extraordinary privilege.

I have the opportunity to live on the land of my ancestors while working alongside my community to protect what remains and carry it forward.

I can stand beneath the same sky, touch the same earth, walk beside the same river, gather from the same landscape, and offer prayer in places where generations before me also recognized they were standing within something sacred.

Some of our ancestors are once again resting here because people chose to bring them home.

There is continuity and healing in that. There is also responsibility.

After fighting to preserve an ancestral cemetery and helping return ancestors to their homeland, how could I look away when another sacred place is threatened?

We Are Someone’s Ancestors

I often think about the generations before me who held onto this place through extraordinary change.

They endured. They adapted. They protected what they could.

Sometimes preservation meant refusing to leave or forget. It meant continuing ceremony, gathering medicines, telling stories, returning to Konitsaaii, and calling this place home.

Because they did, I can come home.

Now I think about those who will come after us.

One day, we will be the ancestors.

Someone may speak our names, stand where we stood, and tend our resting places. They may also ask what we did when this land was threatened.

They will inherit what we choose to protect—and what we allow to be destroyed.

That changes the question. It is no longer simply,

What do we want to preserve?

It becomes, What are we willing to lose?

And more importantly, What are we spiritually obligated to protect?

When you understand land as family, destruction is not development on a map, an acreage calculation, or an acceptable loss buried in a government document.

It can mean the destruction of a sacred place, the interruption of ceremony, separation from ancestors, or loss of access to the water, plants, mountains, caves, and places through which our religious practices continue.

It can sever a relationship that has survived for thousands of years.

And when you love someone, you do not wait until they are gone to explain why they mattered.

You fight for them while they are still here.

That is why I came home. That is why I pray here.

That is why we preserve our cemeteries and bring our ancestors home. And that is why I will continue to stand for this land and for Konitsaaii. Not simply because this land belonged to our ancestors.

Because our ancestors belong to this land.

And so do we.

Protecting it means protecting our relationship with the Creator, our ancestors, one another, and those who have not yet arrived. Future generations deserve more than our stories about what used to be here. They deserve to stand upon this earth, beside Konitsaaii, beneath these mountains and this dark sky, and know for themselves:

I am home.

— Christina Hernandez

People of La Junta for Preservation