This project is part of an ongoing audio-visual and research series, "A Sound Place."
Almost every day during the late summer of the pandemic, I walked a 900+ acre plot of wetland. As I would realize later, I could only call this place home for a few months. It was the only place I felt like I should be alone.
As I did, I built a conversation between the sounds of Port Ana and the landscape that unfolded around me.
At first, it was unassuming, but life and movements that were almost indiscernible to the eye became large and vibrant to me. I began to look further into archives and signposts that popped up through tall grasses.
This was once an ocean with swimming dinosaurs.
Thousands of giant grasshoppers jumped around my knees.
Yellow pollen spray painted my legs.
Serving for thousands of years as an Indigenous home and religious site, to the destruction of settler colonialism, to present-day legal battles to acknowledge the area as a Traditional Cultural Property, a complex, traumatic, resilient, and beautiful story of the area came into focus, the past very much alive in its present.
Just to the north sits Haskell Indian Nations University, one of the first native boarding schools in the US established in1884 to “kill the Indian and save the man,” which brought the area “over a hundred years of memories of Native children forced to grow up in isolation from their families and cultures” (sacredland.org).
Now, Haskell is led by and serves members of federally recognized tribes and continues to engage in contested rights and protections for the surrounding lands. As California fires raged, the orange sky reached the wetlands. It sometimes felt like a soft alien planet, with shadows that didn’t fall where they should.
After the controlled burns I witnessed, the land was open to the sky, rich and vulnerable.
The subtle and expansive tones of Port Ana moved through me.
More powerful than on a first listen or simply in my headphones.
I felt small, exactly how I was.
