December 2, 2022 Kim Stringfellow

High Country News features Mojave Project for the December 2022 issue

Journalist Meg Bernhard (New York Times Magazine, The Los Angeles Times, The New Yorker) wrote an in-depth feature about The Mojave Project for the High Country News December 2022 issue. Meg understands what is central to MP and did a wonderful job sharing my perspective and the creative/activist drive behind the project. Read the feature here: https://www.hcn.org/issues/54.12/features-arts-culture-an-expedition-through-kim-stringfellows-mojave.

EDITOR’S NOTE: Mythbusting in the Mojave

On a cold, clear evening last winter, I stood on my father-in-law’s porch high on a juniper-speckled ridge on the southwestern edge of the Mojave Desert. To the south, the San Gabriel Mountains were silhouetted against the sky-glow of Los Angeles, the only visible indication that a seething mass of 13 million people lived only 20 air-miles away. I considered how the early white colonizers — completely disregarding the Indigenous peoples who have inhabited this landscape for millennia — portrayed the Mojave as a desolate and barren wasteland.
Perhaps this was out of ignorance. Then again, by depicting the Mojave as no more than a blank canvas, they felt free to exploit and abuse it however they wanted, imposing their own desires and dreams on a land they never understood. By imagining it as a wasteland, in other words, they and their successors could turn it into one.

From where I stood, it looked like they succeeded. To the north, the Antelope Valley has become the place where LA exiles all the stuff it needs, but doesn’t want to look at: gravel pits and transmission lines; solar facilities and sprawling mono-architecture subdivisions; prisons and Air Force bases. Red lights atop wind turbines flickered in syncopated rhythm along the base of the Tehachapi Mountains. The Los Angeles Aqueduct reflected the day’s last light, a pink-tinged silver eel slithering across the dusky landscape.

Yet the Mojave is also a place — if “place” can describe an expanse so vast it warps your sense of space and time — full of wonder and weirdness and diversity and beauty. It draws eccentrics and artists, misfits and misanthropists, the priced-out and disenfranchised, making for a vital human community scattered across the desert. Artists like Kim Stringfellow — profiled in this issue — are trying to capture and communicate the Mojave’s unique qualities to permanently dismantle the wasteland myth.

And a coalition of Mojave Desert tribes — descendants of the people the “wasteland” moniker was largely designed to erase — is leading an effort to establish the Avi Kwa Ame National Monument on southern Nevada lands held sacred by Yuman tribes. This enormous swath of the Mojave has stubbornly resisted industrialization; it remains ecologically abundant and culturally significant, a place where springtime wildflowers carpet the rocky earth with stunning yellows, reds and blues, and where anthropoid Joshua trees enthusiastically wave their prickly arms against the blaze-orange sunset.

It is all a testament to the fact that the Mojave has never been a wasteland, but rather a land of immense, indomitable vitality and resilience. Despite everything, the Western landscape and its diverse inhabitants, both human and non-human, endure, tough and tenacious and vividly, uniquely alive.

— Jonathan Thompson, acting co-editor High Country News