Native Americans--North And South--Span The Hemispheres On A Journey Of Discovery. By Gregory McNamee DARRY DOLAN WAS born the year sulfa was introduced to medicine, the year John Maynard Keynes offered his General Theory of Employment, the year Bruno Hauptmann went to the chair for kidnapping and killing Charles Lindbergh's infant son. Dolan's weathered face and long white hair bear every evidence of his having lived for all of 61 years. But his wiry body, all muscle and sun-bronzed skin, is that of a man decades younger--and one who takes very good care of himself at that. Running from Alaska to Mexico, he said with a grin, will do such things for a person. The journeyman plumber and one-time UA doctoral candidate, who goes by the nom-de-course Horse, is one of 30 runners, most of them Native American, who set out on May 1 from the Athapaskan Indian village of Chickaloon, Alaska, heading south. Having passed through Tucson on August 20, 11 runners from the original group will end their journey in Teotihuacán, Mexico, on October 10. There they will join a 30-member group of South Americans who began a parallel northward run, starting out from Punta del Fuego, Argentina, in late April. Intended, like the Olympics, to be a quadrennial event--the first took place in 1992, the year of the 500th anniversary of Columbus' arrival in the Americas--the run is sponsored by Journeys of Peace and Dignity/Jornadas de Paz y Dignidad, an umbrella group of Native American-rights organizations founded in Quito, Ecuador, in 1990. Its mission is "the unification of the peoples of the condor and the eagle"--the indigenous peoples of South and North America. The runners travel from Indian nation to Indian nation, carrying the message of native pride to groups that normally receive few visitors. Sometimes those groups live close together; Dolan recalled visiting 19 nations in 13 days along the Olympic Peninsula of Washington. More often, they lie at some distance from one another. A full week separated the runners' visit to a small Cocopah Indian community in Baja California from their arrival at San Xavier Mission, where Tohono O'odham residents greeted them with prayers, speeches and a feast of red chile. The runners, most of them in their twenties, average 10 hours a day on the road, covering as much as 80 miles in a single session. Despite the summer heat, they make it a point to run during daylight, so that, in Dolan's words, "one day every foot of the hemisphere will be covered by someone carrying a sacred staff" in the sun. Those sacred staffs have already seen a lot of ground, covered with eagle and condor feathers, deer hooves, and medicine bundles from dozens of Indian nations. On this long run, supplies are sometimes hard to come by. Dolan, for instance, was on his fourth pair of running shoes, expecting to use five or six by trip's end, and each runner has to provide his (or, at many points along the run, her) own equipment. "One Native woman in Washington was so moved by our efforts that she bought us all shoes and shorts--it must have cost her a couple of thousand dollars," Dolan recalled. A ready solution to such logistical problems would be, of course, to court corporate sponsorship and to keep support vans well stocked with steaks and Gatorade. The runners resist these temptations, although they in fact have been approached by sports-equipment and outdoor-supplies manufacturers seeking endorsements. Said Dolan, "If we sought publicity, we'd get a lot of it, I think. What we're doing is important, and people want to know about it. But we don't pursue publicity, mostly because we don't want to be co-opted by some corporation looking for us to say good things about their products--or some political movement riding on our coattails." As they travel, the runners pick up other runners who travel with them for relatively short distances; around the Bay Area, they ran with more than 100 well-wishers, and in Los Angeles, with its large Native population, many more runners came out to join them. At Tortugas, near Las Cruces, New Mexico, they expected to join with a band of other runners who had traveled along the Rockies from Colorado, visiting the Rio Grande pueblos as they moved south. Of Irish descent, Dolan was quick to note that Anglo, Chicano, African American, and Asian American runners had accompanied the original 11 at one point or another on their already long journey. Another runner, a 24-year-old Mexican from the state of Guerrero, Mexico, who goes only by the name Indio, added, "As long as you participate, it doesn't matter what your tribe is. The feathers on the family staff that we carry have a rainbow band: black, yellow, red, and white. We want people of all tribes and colors to know what we're doing and take the news back with them that Indian people are coming together." Ecumenical though he may be, Indio is content to keep the group of runners small. "It may be selfish of me," he said, "but I don't really want the run to get too much bigger, just because of the logistics. I like to run long distances for a long time, out by myself or maybe no more than six or seven people. If it gets too much bigger, I think I'll be spending a lot of time in the van waiting for people to catch up." Indio looked out over the assembled group of runners and well-wishers at San Xavier Mission, silent. Then he added, "I've seen a lot of pain out there on this run--people who can't change their lives, who are caught up in gangs or drugs or just making money. But everywhere I've run, I've also seen a lot of beauty in the land, and in the people. This is a start for many other journeys." Donations to Journeys of Peace and Dignity can be made c/o Tonatierra, P.O. Box 24009, Phoenix, AZ 85074. For information, call 1-602-254-5230.

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