Spirit Run

Spirit Run by Noé Alvarez

Throughout the pandemic, I’ve been running. I started with the aim of running a half marathon and, once I completed that, extended my goal to a marathon. In the course of these many months of training, I’ve run in the thickly drenching humidity of Louisiana summers. I’ve run in the mornings before hurricanes, when the winds whip the palm trees to and fro like flags or streamers and the light from the streetlamps is fogged with the moisture in the air. I’ve run in the rain, glasses off my face, shoes full of water.

None of this compares with the Indigenous-led ultramarathon, Peace and Dignity Journeys, that author Noé Alvarez chronicles in his memoir of his participation in the 2004 run. Tracing from Alaska to Panama, Peace and Dignity Journeys covers a 6000-mile course and is run in relays by a team of runners from Indigenous communities across Turtle Island. The runners connect with and participate in ceremony with the Indigenous nations and communities they pass on the course of their run, and undertake the entire journey as “the longest prayer in the world.”

This prayer, while deeply sacred, is by no means tranquil or easy or even unified. The runners who form Alvarez’s 2004 cohort come from different backgrounds, traditions, and communities; they do not all approach the run the same way, and there is constant conflict over which way is right, who should lead, and who should fall into line. The run is also undertaken with little food, little water, and little rest. With a low budget and tightly rationed supplies, the runners sometimes run up to 30 miles each day through all kinds of rain, cold, heat, and harassment from people passing by in cars. But each of the runners draw strength from their past experiences, their connections to their communities and traditions, and, sometimes, from one another. Alvarez, the child of two Mexican immigrants to Yakima, Washington, and the descendant (on his paternal grandfather’s side) of the Purépecha people, draws strength from his parents and his people. In vignettes that are simultaneously straightforward and evocative, refusing to flinch from hard realities but always taking time to document the smells, sights, and feelings of a given memory or story, Alvarez memorializes his parents’ childhood experiences in Mexico, their journeys from Mexico to Washington State, and the brutal labor and indignities many undocumented Mexican immigrants face in the racist, White supremacist, capitalist death cult that is the United States.

This memoir refuses to tie everything or anything up in a tidy bow—or even to tie up loose ends. It seems to gesture instead to the way that humans, especially those marginalized and oppressed, struggle to connect to the land, to their traditions, and to one another even when the abuse, terrorism, and racism of the system they live within is abundantly evident. It makes clear that making such connections is not a fairy tale but instead a complicated, exhausting, and powerful act of determination, participation, and witnessing. As a White descendant of colonizers, who took up running as combination mental health process and hobby during the 2020 pandemic, reading Spirit Run taught me, pushed me, and brought a new sense of humility and honor to each footfall during my morning runs. I can no longer take these steps without thinking, with each one, of the occupied nature of this land and how I too am a participant in this massive, collective, often-unconscious run we are all thronging in. Each run now is a reminder of what more I can ask of myself in contributing to the pursuit of peace, dignity, and justice.