“Hi, what did you dream about last night?”
Instead of saying “Hi, how are you?” this is how the indigenous Tarahumara people of Northern Mexico greet each other.
Janneli Miller, a photographer and anthropologist, was drawn to the Copper Canyon region to study the birthing rituals of the Tarahumara, who usually walk into the forest alone, sometimes accompanied by a child, to give birth, she said.
She ended up living in the Sierra Madre mountain village consecutively from 1999-2001, and made frequent long-term trips for years after.
What unfolded was a reset to her perspective on life, as well as a collection of photographs that reflected the people’s culture and their willingness to let her in to understand it.
“Take my picture, please” came to be a common thing for her to hear. The Tarahumara don’t have cameras — or much modern technology at all, for that matter — and they were excited to hang her prints, she said.
She waited months before capturing the people through her camera lens.
“I didn't want to just be another white person with a camera taking pictures of the pretty Indians,” she said.
The moments in time will grace the walls of the Dolores Public Library’s gallery space for the month of September.
“These people taught me how to be human,” she said. “It’s not about how you dress or what ranking in society you are — it’s just about who you are. They’re genuinely good people, they live close to the earth, they work hard.”
She could talk for hours about all of the ways they embody virtue.
On Sunday mornings, any personal disputes are discussed with input from the entire community.
Nearby villages help each other out, especially if one’s crops aren’t doing well that year.
Dreams are celebrated in ceremonies, and are very much believed to be extensions of the waking world. Multiple ceremonies honor those who die.
But she doesn’t want the Tarahumara to romanticized. In fact, she think it is harmful to do so.
“Then they become stereotypes,” she said. “You kind of dehumanize them. So that’s one of my reasons for taking the pictures — to show the real life.”
Their agricultural lifestyle is hard to subsist, she said.
“A lot of the projects intended to make their lives better, they’re done in ways that are culturally inappropriate, so they actually make things worse,” she said.
For instance, government-gifted electricity lines left the village scrambling to find a way to pay for them after — and with now-disrupted scenery and no real need for it not having many electrical appliances in the first place.
“They don’t have any way to earn money,” she said. “They do day labor, building roads for $7 or $8 a day. So then how are they going to pay for electricity?”
Many of the photos on show wouldn’t hold the same aesthetic value if they were shot today with the addition of electrical poles and lines, she said.
The Tarahumara became well-known for their long distance, barefoot running.
“It actually serves to kind of redistribute economic wealth between two villages, because you'll have two villages compete,” Miller said.
They even participated in the Leadville Trail Marathon.
“Fifty-year-old guys with no shoes who stopped to smoke cigarettes on the way won,” she said about the indigenous runners.
The people are humble, though, and don’t idolize the fastest runners — or anyone, for that matter — because everybody has something to contribute to the village, she said.
The village culture is slowly seeing more Western influence, she said.
“I’'m not saying that westernization is bad, but you just kind of have to look at everything that goes along with it,” she said. “You’re saying total disruption of traditional life ways, and sometimes that's OK — and sometimes it's not.”
Miller dreams every day of when she can go back.
