On lands peopled by spirits

Paul SMITH lives on land once used by California’s desert Indians. He displays grinding stones, arrow points, beads and other artifacts found at the spectacular fan palm oasis in Twentynine Palms that has been in his wife’s family since 1928. “So how come there isn’t a five-story Marriott Hotel here?” says the lawyer, who runs an inn at the site. “There could be, but there won’t be. We’ve respected that.” Smith, who’s on the Joshua Tree National Park Assn.’s board of directors, worries that land managers don’t give sacred sites in California deserts that same respect. So he organized a conference Friday and Saturday -- with the Bureau of Land Management as a cosponsor -- to bring together Native Americans, archeologists, federal agencies and the public to explore what sacred lands are, who decides what they are and why we should care. “There are cultural barriers that exist, probably for historical reasons, where there is not good communication among land managers and Native American tribes,” says Smith. Members of the Native American Land Conservancy will discuss how the organization bought back 2,400 acres of ancestral land in the Old Woman Mountains west of Needles, Calif. Joe Benitez, a member of the Cabazon Band of Mission Indians, says the conservancy seeks to preserve “villages or burial grounds or shaman areas where medicine men went to meditate and regain spiritualness and so forth.” But there are artifacts, such as the roadrunner petroglyph, below, in Mojave National Preserve, that, though in an area not easily accessed, remain unprotected. For conference info, call (760) 347-0488 or go to www.caldesertindians.com.