{"id":44826,"date":"2021-09-04T22:55:00","date_gmt":"2021-09-05T04:55:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/they-taught-me-how-to-be-human-photography-showcases-tarahumara\/"},"modified":"2026-03-31T03:21:58","modified_gmt":"2026-03-31T09:21:58","slug":"they-taught-me-how-to-be-human-photography-showcases-tarahumara","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/they-taught-me-how-to-be-human-photography-showcases-tarahumara\/","title":{"rendered":"\u2018They taught me how to be human.\u2019 Photography showcases Tarahumara"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"Janneli
Janneli F. Miller poses with her portraits of northern Mexico's Tarahumara Indigenous people as the photos were being hung at the Dolores Public Library Saturday. (Kala Parkinson\/The Journal)<\/span>Kala Parkinson<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>\n

\u201cHi, what did you dream about last night?\u201d<\/p>\n

Instead of saying \u201cHi, how are you?\u201d this is how the indigenous Tarahumara people of Northern Mexico greet each other.<\/p>\n

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.<\/p>\n

She ended up living in the Sierra Madre mountain village consecutively from 1999-2001, and made frequent long-term trips for years after.<\/p>\n

What unfolded was a reset to her perspective on life, as well as a collection of photographs that reflected the people\u2019s culture and their willingness to let her in to understand it.<\/p>\n

\u201cTake my picture, please\u201d came to be a common thing for her to hear. The Tarahumara don\u2019t have cameras \u2014 or much modern technology at all, for that matter \u2014 and they were excited to hang her prints, she said.<\/p>\n

She waited months before capturing the people through her camera lens.<\/p>\n

\u201cI didn\u2019t want to just be another white person with a camera taking pictures of the pretty Indians,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

\"Bryan
Bryan Kyle, Dolores Public Library assistant and art exhibit organizer, hung up Janneli Miller's portraits of the Tarahumara Saturday.<\/span>Kala Parkinson<\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/p>

The moments in time will grace the walls of the Dolores Public Library\u2019s gallery space for the month of September.<\/p>\n

\u201cThese people taught me how to be human,\u201d she said. \u201cIt\u2019s not about how you dress or what ranking in society you are \u2014 it\u2019s just about who you are. They\u2019re genuinely good people, they live close to the earth, they work hard.\u201d<\/p>\n

She could talk for hours about all of the ways they embody virtue.<\/p>\n

On Sunday mornings, any personal disputes are discussed with input from the entire community.<\/p>\n

Nearby villages help each other out, especially if one\u2019s crops aren\u2019t doing well that year.<\/p>\n

Dreams are celebrated in ceremonies, and are very much believed to be extensions of the waking world. Multiple ceremonies honor those who die.<\/p>\n

But she doesn\u2019t want the Tarahumara to romanticized. In fact, she think it is harmful to do so.<\/p>\n

\u201cThen they become stereotypes,\u201d she said. \u201cYou kind of dehumanize them. So that\u2019s one of my reasons for taking the pictures \u2014 to show the real life.\u201d<\/p>\n

Their agricultural lifestyle is hard to subsist, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cA lot of the projects intended to make their lives better, they\u2019re done in ways that are culturally inappropriate, so they actually make things worse,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n

For instance, government-gifted electricity lines left the village scrambling to find a way to pay for them after \u2014 and with now-disrupted scenery and no real need for it not having many electrical appliances in the first place.<\/p>\n

\u201cThey don\u2019t have any way to earn money,\u201d she said. \u201cThey do day labor, building roads for $7 or $8 a day. So then how are they going to pay for electricity?\u201d<\/p>\n

Many of the photos on show wouldn\u2019t hold the same aesthetic value if they were shot today with the addition of electrical poles and lines, she said.<\/p>\n

The Tarahumara became well-known for their long distance, barefoot running.<\/p>\n

\u201cIt actually serves to kind of redistribute economic wealth between two villages, because you\u2019ll have two villages compete,\u201d Miller said.<\/p>\n

They even participated in the Leadville Trail Marathon.<\/p>\n

\u201cFifty-year-old guys with no shoes who stopped to smoke cigarettes on the way won,\u201d she said about the indigenous runners.<\/p>\n

The people are humble, though, and don\u2019t idolize the fastest runners \u2014 or anyone, for that matter \u2014 because everybody has something to contribute to the village, she said.<\/p>\n

The village culture is slowly seeing more Western influence, she said.<\/p>\n

\u201cI\u2019\u2019m not saying that westernization is bad, but you just kind of have to look at everything that goes along with it,\u201d she said. \u201cYou\u2019re saying total disruption of traditional life ways, and sometimes that\u2019s OK \u2014 and sometimes it\u2019s not.\u201d<\/p>\n

Miller dreams every day of when she can go back.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Portraits capturing snippets in the lives of northern Mexico\u2019s Tarahumara go up on the walls of the Dolores Public Library <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":44827,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[],"tags":[363,28,167,29],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-44826","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","tag-arts","tag-headlines","tag-local-news-lead","tag-newsletter"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44826","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=44826"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44826\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":86242,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/44826\/revisions\/86242"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/44827"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=44826"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=44826"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=44826"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=44826"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}