Old Woman Mountains
In one photo, Matt Leivas Sr., a Chemehuevi elder and founding board member of the Native American Land Conservancy, holds a long walking stick as he poses in front of a rust-brown boulder surrounded by shrubs and protected by a wooden gate. Another photograph shows a petroglyph, which, according to Leivas, depicts a map of the Lake Havasu region, pre-contact. In the main photo for String fellow’s essay, titled “Bringing Creation Back Together Again: The Salt Songs of the Nuwu,” Leivas sits, face tilted upward, behind a rock outcrop at the Old Woman Mountains Preserve, a sacred site for the Nuwuvi (Southern Paiute) people. The sky is white and gray; spindly cholla and hedgehog cactus spring from granite crevices. He is singing part of the Salt Song, an interconnected ritual song map of the Nuwu’s spiritual and physical landscapes, of which the Old Woman Mountains are a part.
Leivas met String fellow, who is white, about a decade ago, at a dinner hosted by a mutual friend, the late ethnic studies scholar Phil Klasky. Afterward, Leivas said, they kept in contact, and eventually she invited him to participate in the Mojave Project. “I said, ‘Certainly,’ because nobody really knows about our history here,” he told me.
String fellow’s work, he soon found, unfolds slowly, with weeks, and sometimes months, of reading, driving and interviewing behind each dispatch. Over what he estimated were 40 hours of conversation with Stringfellow, both in person and over the phone, Leivas covered a wide span of topics: his family’s displacement from the Chemehuevi Valley after damming flooded the region in the 1930s; his spiritual awakening when he moved back to the valley as the chief tribal game warden, once the United States federal government recognized the Chemehuevi people and their rights to parcels of land in the area, his work to preserve the Salt Song cycle and his local environmental activism.
Mojave
The Mojave Desert spans 16 million acres across four states. The xeric shrublands in the Sierra Nevada’s rain shadow are home to 200 endemic plant species, hundreds of animals, rock formations that are billions of years old. Indigenous peoples have lived here for millennia: The Fort Mojave Indian Tribe’s point of creation is the mountain Avi Kwa Ame; for the Southern Paiute, creation stems from Mount Charleston and Mount Potosi, in Nevada’s Spring Mountains. Across the desert, Stringfellow has photographed, interviewed and written about a wide range of groups: Rockhounders and land racers. Amateur rocketeers. Water conservationists, UFO enthusiasts and small-claim miners.
In an interview for KCET, the Southern California public broadcasting outlet that has co-published most of The Mojave Project’s essays, Stringfellow spoke of the kinship she felt with Catherine Venn Peterson, a homesteader who initially moved to the Mojave in the 1940s, during a homesteading boom prompted by the Small Tract Act of 1938.
String fellow told me that she related to Venn’s independence, her love of the desert’s solitude, while also acknowledging that such homesteading, much like her own relocation to Joshua Tree, is often only available to the privileged. String fellow has never married. “I’m hard to be with,” she told me. She’s intense, a private person, and her work is often all-consuming. Her life has little to do with her art, she said. And yet, the personal and the artistic collapse in The Mojave Project: The desert is both her subject and her home.
String fellow is a newcomer to the desert, part of a movement of largely-white artists to the area starting in the 1960s. Raised in Renton, Washington, she grew up visiting her grandmother in Carson City, Nevada, and became fascinated with the desert ecosystem of the Great Basin. In 2010, she moved to Joshua Tree in search of creative community.
With tourists flocking to the national park, a popularity boom spurred, in part, by the pandemic, Joshua Tree has gentrified even more in the 12 years String fellow has lived there. The median housing price shot up more than 80% between the spring of 2020 and the spring of 2022. The number of short-term rentals in Joshua Tree grew by 64% during this same period. On String fellow’s street alone, three Airbnbs have sprouted in the past several years; one short-term rental owner chainsawed a Joshua tree to build a pool.
Meanwhile, over the last century, the Mojave has warmed by 3.6 degrees Fahrenheit. Bird species are declining, and Lake Mead is at an alarming historic low. Humans are part of nature, but, String fellow told me, “I wish we weren’t taking so many other things down with us.”
The morning after the protest at the Yellow Pine Solar project, String fellow and I drove back to Joshua Tree together, about 200 miles. We curved along a mountain road and descended into the Amargosa Basin, a region at the entrance to Death Valley, where the Mojave meets the Great Basin. The desert there was lush, nurtured by the 125-mile-long Amargosa River, which flows, mostly underground, from Pahute Mesa in Nevada to its terminus in Death Valley’s Badwater Basin. Thick vegetation — native screwbean mesquite and smoke trees, and non-native saltcedar and arundo — fawned over the road. “It’s almost like blackberry thickets,” String fellow said.
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