Inside the Art of the Indigenous Prayer Run

It wasn’t the body she’d been looking for, but there it was, lying neatly in the middle of the trail as though placed there. Teyana Viscarra slowed from her run. Her dogs were stopped up ahead, looking back at her in that expectant animal tongue that says: something’s wrong. The first thing she noticed that morning last summer, aside from the fact that he had been a tall man, was his workboots—sturdy things, steel-toed.

Though traumatizing, the discovery wasn’t exactly outlandish. Teyana lives in Chula Vista, California, a mere eight miles from the Mexican border. Worried she may have just stumbled into a crime scene, perhaps one with connections to cartel violence, Teyana scanned the surrounding brush and pulled out her phone. She felt lucky that she had it on her—not always the case while prayer running, when focus is paramount. Teyana first called Norm, then the police.

When they arrived, the cops were hardly surprised. It wasn’t cartel, they wagered—the wild temperature swings of California summers put crossing migrants at risk for both hypothermia and dehydration, and this time of year, it wasn’t uncommon for the sunburnt hills to lay claim to a couple of bodies per month. The man had likely died the previous night, his companions having dragged him out into the trail to be found before continuing north themselves.

Teyana led the cops from the trailhead to the body. They only allowed her close enough to place tobacco ties and bundles of sage nearby, offering prayer and medicine to honor the life and loss of the tall man in the work boots. She never learned his name.

Teyana (Piro-Tewa Pueblo, Apache, European) has long steeled herself for a finding like this. For years now, she has been running as part of her work to search, raise awareness for, and pressure authorities to properly investigate the national spate of missing and murdered Indigenous women (MMIW). The World Health Organization notes that 30% of women, globally, experience violence in their lifetime. For American Indian women, the rate is an alarming 84%—only slightly higher than American Indian men—and they are also twice as likely as white women to be raped. Considering that the national population of American Indians and Alaskan Natives ranks at approximately 3%, these numbers are profoundly disproportionate. They are numbers that often sink into the so-called jurisdiction quagmire between tribal, state and federal authorities. They are numbers enabled in part by the 1978 Supreme Court ruling in Oliphant v. Suquamish Indian Tribe, which stripped tribes of jurisdiction over all crimes committed by non-Indian offenders, meaning that many of these women could be preyed upon with practical immunity. They are numbers that Teyana and her partner, Norm Sands (Apache, Yaqui, European) know nearly by heart, and that, after years of individual MMIW advocacy, they’ve joined forces to reduce.

“We are in a spiritual warfare against Indigenous genocide,” Teyana declares. Their primary weapon in this war? Prayers, carried by their feet. Teyana and Norm aim to beat back the darkness with the ancestral tradition of Indigenous prayer running.

Practiced for a panoply of reasons across myriad tribes, prayer running is akin to a moving meditation. Runners marry a monastic mental focus with a profound physical trial, holding a specific intention in mind throughout the run’s entirety. Runs can span the length of an evening jog or for multiple hundreds of miles. Duane Humeyestewa, a Hopi documentarian who chronicled the journey of the first Indian runner to ever cross the Boston marathon finish line, describes prayer running as “a device and a tool to help carry spiritual messages”—messages amplified by the raw physicality of feet against earth. For the Hopi, prayer running has long been political. Po’pay’s Rebellion of 1680 saw Hopi ancestors enact a successful uprising against Spanish rule; runners were instrumental in the coup, serving as furtive couriers to coordinate far-flung villages in a unified revolt. Now, in the age of industry, the needs for prayer are legion. Some run for clean water. Some for clean air. Some run as a highly visible means of asserting their presence and combating the myth of Indian erasure, of communing with and tracing a map over the remaining native ecology of a plundered land, of suffering as a meditation.

In the long, grisly string of the missing and murdered, certain cases have proved impossible to ignore. In North Dakota in 2017, Savanna Greywind, 22 years old and eight months pregnant, was lured into the apartment of a neighbor who knocked her unconscious and performed an amateur C-section on her, carving her baby from her womb. The baby lived; Greywind’s body was found by kayakers, floating down the Red River wrapped in plastic. Half a country away, Teyana and Norm were shaken to separate action. After attending a prayer vigil for Savanna in Los Angeles, Teyana began a daily sunrise prayer run, which evolved into the creation of earthen prayer altars on mountain trailheads. Up California’s spine in the northern half of the state, Norm began erecting red tipis outside spheres of influence he deemed complicit in covering up or willfully ignoring the MMIW epidemic (Fox News broadcast buildings, local police stations, steps of Capitol Buildings).

In 2020, the Montana murder of 16-year-old Selena Not Afraid sparked a national outcry, and haunted Teyana especially, who lost the heart to maintain her daily altars.

And then tragedy struck practically next door. On a prayer run one winter day in 2021, Teyana happened upon a bright red missing persons poster, nailed to an old tree. She was shocked to realize she recognized the face: the gleaming eyes, the kind smile. It was Maya Millete—Teyana’s Chula Vista neighbor, someone she had passed before on the trail—who had vanished without a trace.

As the gears of the justice system ground glacially on, the community sprang to action. “We did searches every single week,” Teyana says. “Grid searches.” Alone and in groups, Teyana combed through the mountains and lakes that surround San Diego. Primarily, she did so while running. There was a practical element here just as much as a spiritual one. Runners could “cover vast amounts of land with a hydropack on our back and offer prayers while we’re doing it…and do these searches for the families,” who might otherwise be left to rattle the cage of dismissive authorities all on their own, she explains.

In 2021, with permission from the local tribes in San Diego—the county with the most Indian reservations in the country—Teyana had organized a 150-mile prayer run through the five Eastern Bands (La Posta, Barona, Viejas, Sycuan and Jamul) of Kumeyaay Nation.

In the wake of Maya’s disappearance, Teyana organized the Seven Peaks for Seven Sisters Prayer Rise—a grueling, back-to-back trail run through the same region. With each mountain peak dedicated to a different Indigenous woman gone missing or found murdered, Seven Sisters entails a total of 57 miles and nearly 16,000 feet of elevation gain and loss, all to be done consecutively—which is to say, often in the thick desert dark, by headlamp light. Last year, when record snowfall blanketed California and swallowed the trails, a few of the runners came down with COVID and the group lost its food supply, Teyana felt particularly tested. “I think I broke into a sweat, I was praying so hard running,” she says. The prospect of perspiring due to, say, her body temperature rising, her eccrine glands kicking into gear? It doesn’t seem to cross her mind.

Norm was a different story. There was no question as to why he might be sweating. The rookie to Teyana’s veteran, the Rocky Balboa to her Mickey Goldmill, he picked up running only recently, cutting his teeth on the inaugural Seven Sisters run. It was, to say the least, ambitious.

“I couldn’t run a quarter mile two-and-a-half years ago to save my life,” Norm admits, chuckling. “Smoked, ate all the bad things.”

Teyana concurs. “Oh, no,” she recalls thinking when Norm first joined the run, “a liability just came on board.” But she gave him a chance.

Norm counters: “I had one of the best trainers out there to really whip me into shape, and have me running up mountains backwards.” Teyana brushes this off, sharing the credit. “You’ve been carrying the prayers, Norm.” As in: doing the lion’s share of the work.

Unlike Norm, Teyana’s been running most of her life. Back in the day, she and her late husband, Donn, helmed a coaching business mushing Hollywood royalty up and down L.A.’s dry chaparral canyons. Teyana shares some of her clients, including Paula Abdul and Esai Morales, with pride. She also worked with Clarence Avant, the Black Godfather of Motown, whose wife Jacqueline, years later, was murdered, another victim of violence against women of color. Though decidedly more secular in those days, Teyana’s program always employed some of her current ecological ethos: she recommended her clients don “the lightest running shoe possible, ‘so [they] can feel the hill.’” (This, years before the barefoot running craze followed Christopher McDougall’s 2009 book Born to Run, and Vibram’s abominable toe shoes popped up on college quads the world over.) A string of publications covered the husband-wife team back in the day—there was even talk of a book contract with Simon & Schuster. And then Donn, having already undergone a triple bypass surgery before he and Teyana met, died suddenly after suffering a massive heart attack in Hollywood, in 1995.

For Teyana, this was an acute pain within a chronic one, concentric circles of grief. Widowed, now a single mother, she began turning more and more to prayer running—to Indigenous cultural practices, to healing with the land, to waging societal battles within a cosmic war.

“There is the spiritual confrontation going deep, deep, deep into the spirit,” she says. “So we confront...deities of darkness. We call them out in the spirit while we are running. And we stand up against them and say, ‘No more, stop this.”

Norm lays out the terms of engagement: “It’s going to take all of us.” He describes a vision of all of humankind coming together, eight billion strong, united against the scourge of the missing and murdered, steering us back from the path of extinction. In the meantime, he and Teyana run, speak, and hold ceremonies across the country, working as the “thorn in the side” of authorities and an indifferent public until they are forced to pay attention. And yet, Norm stresses, despite all the outrage and horror, prayer runners traffic in love: they are “not mad,” he clarifies, but “just in prayer, saying, ‘help us find our sister.’”

For better or worse, the two never have. Last summer, when she stumbled upon the tall man in the workboots, Teyana wasn’t on a grid search. She had simply risen with the sun and her dogs, as she had so many other mornings, and began carrying prayers up the mountain. Of course, it was only after countless hours of searching for Millete and others, only when her guard was down, that she would find a body. The irony blisters, harsh as the California summer sun.

Bodies are all around us now, dotting the trail every few yards, though the untrained eye wouldn’t know it. We meet at night, at the green burial ground where I’ve been employed since last January. A small wooded acreage south of Asheville, NC, we bury our clients unembalmed here—the way it had been done, as Teyana and Norm would say, since time immemorial. We let native vegetation overtake the grave mounds, headstones are flush with the earth—especially in the dark, you’d be hard-pressed to recognize you’re in a cemetery at all. I have to point this out to them, in fact, and note the link: my job is to bury the dead, theirs to exhume. Teyana cites the optics of two Indians meeting a strange white man in the woods at night. She and Norm crack jokes that they, too, might be about to go missing. The phrase “ax-murderer” is used.

I had hoped to join these two on a run at some point. My exercise resume historically veers more Norm than Teyana: I bought my first gym membership just last year, begrudgingly haunting my local Gold’s treadmill with a pair of cobwebbed VivoBarefoots that a hippie roommate loaned me in college. (Given that the shoes were practically rotting off my feet, I could certainly feel every footfall. I figured Teyana would approve.) By the time we do meet, though—the two pulling up in their packed-to-the-gills Toyota 4Runner, tipi poles strapped to the roof like luggage—it’s dark, and we seem to have misplaced our headlamps. I’m spared. Instead of a run, we meander through the boneyard trails at an easy pace. We talk for hours, eventually settling on a bench overlooking a restored wetland. Norm stands and leans on the backrest, accidentally snapping off a sizable chunk of the mealy wood; Teyana perches atop it, tapping her feet incessantly on the bench seat, trying to keep warm. The constant movement unties her sneaker. Teyana is mid-homily when, without a word exchanged between them, Norm leans down and takes her shoe in his hand, pulling the laces tight.

The two are like this: in sync, runners passing a baton. There is a rhythm between them. Some of their lines are well-practiced, boiled down to soundbites. Teyana’s raspy passion is a run-on sentence, Norm’s soft-spoken baritone its occasional punctuation. They will occasionally correct each other, every now and again butt heads. When I ask about how the intensity of this work has affected their relationship, Norm doesn’t miss a beat.

“We fight like cats and dogs,” he says, grinning. “And I love her to death.”

Cemetery notwithstanding, love and death linger in the air. The two have arrived in Asheville between ceremonies and conferences and on the heels of a visit with Teyana’s dad. I ask how he’s doing.

“Oh, beautiful,” she tells me. Just as with Donn, the heart haunts again: last spring, they found a 95% blockage in his carotid artery. And yet, there’s not a shred of sarcasm here. For Teyana, both things can be true at once: Dad, at 87, can have a heart surgery looming; Dad can be doing beautifully. These are the bifocals through which she and Norm view the world—soaked in blood and sundered hearts, sculpted in sickness, beating with hope. “Heartbreakingly beautiful,” as Norm likes to say.

Hope is what I ask about last. These days it can be a fickle thing. The two note recent progress: Justin Trudeau’s 2019 acknowledgment of Canada’s genocide against its Indigenous, the appointment of Deb Haaland as the first Native American cabinet member in U.S. history, meteoric rises in Indian representation in the media. Most notably, 2022’s reauthorization of the Violence Against Women Act addresses the Oliphant loophole, empowering tribes to bring charges against non-Indian offenders in domestic violence cases. There has even been a win in the Millete case. In October of 2021, nine months after she disappeared, Maya’s husband, Larry Millete, was arrested and awaits an August trial for murder, all without the smoking gun of a body. All of this, Teyana and Norm believe, is the direct result of prayer. “You think you're going to solve this?” Teyana says, incredulous of human hubris. “The prayer moves the action.” If anything, this is their refrain, a catchphrase of sorts. I hear them echo it, time and again, steady as a pulse.

Regarding hope, Teyana’s response is characteristically wide-ranging. She is connecting the dots in a sweeping, centuries-long conspiracy against her people, against people in general—she talks about the flood of Trump-era mining permits that have expanded the “itinerant man camps” abutting reservation land and threatening the safety of Indigenous women and girls, about pipelines and GMOs and chemicals in the water, about the sores her dogs get on their feet after it rains, about the interconnectedness and innate being of all things—when she stops mid-sentence.

“Wow,” she says. “Wow, wow.” She springs from the bench, stretching her arms toward the night. “The moon is coming out from behind the cloud and just shined the brightest light. Did you see that?! Oh my gosh, it’s like almost full!” She is awestruck, her inhibition banished. She is earnestly, entirely taken with the moonlight.

“Hope, you say—do we have hope?” She gestures to the land: the white pines whispering in the breeze, the moon flooding down cold silver on the buried dead—all of them named, all of them accounted for. “Like right now, just the sky and the moon and... yeah, how could we not have hope?”