Throughlines: An Afterword

Stories are complex, layered, and contested. That’s what my students and I talk about each fall as we read Lauret Savoy’s brilliant memoir, Trace: Memory, History, Race, and the American Landscape. A geologist who writes like a poet, she weaves together seemingly disparate strands into a compelling whole. Some of my favorite passages emerge in her incisive interrogation of what she calls the “bordered land,” that is, Arizona’s southern desert.

One morning’s hike led her down a trail that followed the serpentine flow of the San Pedro River, “an exposed shadeless walk one and a half miles into glare.”¹ Her destination was the ruins of Presidio Santa Cruz de Terranate. Its crumbled condition did not evoke a nostalgic rumination but instead elicited a powerful critique of the New Spain imperium that this outpost sought to uphold. Savoy is as tough-minded when it comes to her visit to a succeeding empire’s military domination of the region, embodied in Camp Grant and Fort Huachuca. These twin strongholds were key to white Americans’ ability to occupy and control the landscape and to violently subordinate its people, Indigenous and Mexican. Exploitation, extraction, and erasure then ensued, a punishing reality one of my students underscored in her copy of Trace (which at semester’s end she gave me to share with someone enrolled in the next iteration of the class).

Her first aqua post-it marked Savoy’s concluding comment about her experience at the San Carlos Apache Cultural Center, the website of which noted that the associated reservation was “the world’s first concentration camp still existing to this day.”² Her second post-it, two paragraphs down from the first, highlighted Karl Jacoby’s assessment of the 1871 massacre of the Apache near Camp Grant: “Violence may begin as a contest over resources,” he noted in Shadows at Dawn, “but it often ends as a contest over meaning.”³ Hoping that their version of the brutal slaying of men, women, and children prevailed, “the perpetrators tried to ensure that their actions and reasons for acting had prominent and positive places in historical accounts.” They did so, Savoy discovers, by establishing the predecessor organization to the Arizona Historical Society. “Silenced from public history were not only those killed; muted, too, were voices of the survivors.”⁴

The story did not end there, as Savoy insinuates in her introductory paragraph to her walk on that scorching April morning: before she set out, she listened as the large-screen TV in her motel aired a conversation between Arizona governor Jan Brewer and a Fox News anchor discussing the Supreme Court’s 2012 decision that upheld portions of Arizona SB 1070; of particular note was their discussion about the power of police to check the immigration status of those they suspected of being undocumented. Savoy tried not to “replay” the interview as she headed outdoors, but we know, as she does, that it would frame her subsequent reflections about this bordered land, these borderlands, which for centuries had been and remained hotly contested ground.⁵

Narrating this, or any other past, requires a deep appreciation for the interconnections between now and then. That challenge—and it can be daunting—is what makes Trace so powerful. Indeed, this also helps open up possibilities for future historians of Arizona’s environmental history to lay out their transects across time and terrain. Such explorations would be place-based—that is the point of a transect, after all. Yet what if these lines of inquiry were extended across political boundaries and jurisdictions that mountains, rivers, and other geophysical structures ignore; that migrations of flora, fauna, and people call into question; and which fires, earthquakes, and floods transcend? Writing about any of these subjects requires an expansive vision, a wide-angled view, and a transdisciplinary perspective. This is akin perhaps to Meg Perret’s focus on Kyrsta Schyler’s wildlife photography along the U.S.–Mexico borderlands, which Perret argues depicts “the interconnectedness of biological and cultural diversity, and makes visible some of the common political and environmental threats faced by both human and nonhuman borderlands inhabitants.” To make her case, Perret draws on aesthetic theory, ecocriticism, and feminist scholarship to “consider how wildlife photography and film encode and reinforce historically contingent understandings of human gender, race, and nation.” In this complex rendering, we learn much.⁶

Another rewarding pathway might lead us to step outside ourselves. Consider conservationist Aldo Leopold’s kōan-like admonition—“Thinking like a Mountain,” which reportedly welled up after he gunned down a mother wolf and her cubs in Arizona’s rimrock country.⁷ He meant the concept metaphorically, but what if writers took it seriously, seriously enough at any rate to imagine full-blown environmental histories of the border-defying mountains of the Colorado Plateau, the Peloncillos in Arizona’s southeastern corner, or the Pajaritos in the southwestern?

That stretching of political boundaries to match physical geography might lead to cross-state collaborations. Look no further for this fertile possibility than the innovative engagement between the Arizona and Kentucky historical societies. The Autumn 2023 issues of the two organizations’ respective journals published paired sets of articles. One such pairing focused on environmental history explicitly, and asked a penetrating question: Does Region Matter in Environmental History? The quick answer is yes, but the variety of responses from the roundtable participants is a reflection in part of the diversity of their home grounds (and their perceptions of them). Other allied discussions in the two journals include Borders and Borderlands, Labor and Extraction, Foodways, and Indigenous Histories. Readers are treated to historians of these subjects in conversation with one another, a comparative approach that is as potent as it is heuristic.⁸

Another option would be to expand this comparative pursuit and extend it along a transcontinental interstate highway. That is the organizing conception of the Arizona State University–sponsored project, TenAcross (or, TenX).⁹ It uses Interstate 10 as a collating corridor running between Los Angeles and Jacksonville, with Phoenix serving as one of its animating hubs (Think: LAX to PHX to JAX). The ambitious goal of TenX is to pull together researchers, public officials, corporate and non-profit entities, and academics to address shared issues confronting the nation’s southern tier. Almost all of the identified subset of challenges are environmentally framed and climate-stressed—water and land use, equity and the built landscape, energy, disaster, and resilience. I have attended several of the annual meetings and have found them to be richly suggestive of how historians might tap into the contemporary social and spatial dynamics that confront Phoenix and Tucson, for example, and then contextualize them by reference to those evident in El Paso, San Antonio, or New Orleans. Air and water pollution; waste management; stormwaters and floodwaters; the inequities embedded in political and social structures; grassroots mobilizing around environmental justice and/or environmental racism—the list of possibilities is endless.

These infinite opportunities in turn should generate a limitless array of new stories. Whatever their source, stimulation, or sensibility, regardless of tone, tempo, or temper, and however theoretically infused, let these narratives be as intricate and layered as they are nuanced and penetrating—throughlines to an as-yet unwritten future.