Twelve essays on running — effort, ground, purpose, ease, scale and the shape of a loop — written by an outsider to the Indigenous nations whose practices some of them touch, and explicit about what it declined to take.
The source material behind this ring leans on running practices belonging to Indigenous nations of the Americas, and it is written by someone with no standing in any of them. That raised a problem the rest of this library did not, and it is settled at the front rather than in a closing note.
No homogenizing. There are hundreds of distinct nations in the Americas with distinct languages, histories and practices. “Native Americans believed” attributes something to everybody so it can be checked by nobody. Where a practice belongs to a named people, they are named; where a claim is general, it is general about running rather than about anybody’s culture.
No ceremony. A great deal of Indigenous religious knowledge is deliberately not public, and the appropriation of Native spirituality has been objected to formally and repeatedly by the nations concerned. This series does not describe ceremonial practice or convert it into technique. The eleventh essay declines to build itself on hózhó and explains why, which is the clearest illustration of the rule.
No past tense. Indigenous running is present-day. Billy Mills, whose 1964 Olympic 10,000 metres remains the only American win in that event; Wings of America, running youth programmes in Native communities since the 1980s; Jordan Marie Daniel and Rosalie Fish, who run carrying the names of missing and murdered Indigenous women. They speak for themselves and do not need an intermediary.
What is left is a set of observations about effort, attention, purpose, ease and scale that require nobody’s religion — read alongside the physiology and psychology, with the evidence stated at the size it actually is. Several of the findings usually attached to running writing are weaker than advertised, and those are flagged where they appear.
Read them in order, or take whichever title describes your week.