Barry Lopez

My family moved from Mamaroneck, New York, to Reseda, California, north and west of Los Angeles in the San Fernando Valley, in 1948. This photo was taken somewhere in the valley, probably in 1949. I was four, and that’s my mother third from the right (or left). She was a dressmaker and also taught home economics at the valley’s first and only junior high school, in the city of San Fernando. She made the white shirt I’m wearing.

In May 1987 I was traveling with six other people across southern Africa. Here, on the Boro River in northern Botswana, we encountered a wounded male hippo. Hippos are very territorial, and this one was very agitated. There being little chance that he would move on, we had to devise a plan to get our mokoro (a mokoro is a narrow, shallow-draft, dugout canoe) around him. Our plan was, first, to have I and my tentmate Ben (in the red shorts) keep the hippo distracted on the cutbank side of the river by slashing at the water with ngashis (an ngashi is a slender, wooden boat pole). Once we got the hippo on that side of the river, the others could pull the mokoros out on the point bar side of the river—where there was no high bank to have to deal with—drag them downriver, relaunch, and pick up Ben and me.

The scene here looks more dangerous than it actually was. The hippo was unlikely to move away from the water, where it felt safe; to get to the top of the cutbank, the hippo, with its short legs, would need the time to make two strides; and Ben and I had a lot of unobstructed country behind us to retreat into. The chance the hippo would pursue us away from the river was virtually nil. At the moment the photo was taken, the hippo, until then standing on the bottom of the river and invisible to us through the muddy water, had just burst through the surface but, for the second time, broken off his charge.

We got around him and a while later arrived at a village where we learned that this hippo had been wounded earlier in the day by another hippo and that it had attacked another mokoro just a few minutes before we arrived at this spot. That boatman had been severely injured and had to be medevaced to a hospital in Maun.

Hippos kill more people in Africa each year than any other animal.

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On September 9, 2007, BL and others from Texas Tech University made a formal offer of reconciliation between the University, which stands on former Comanche ground, and the Comanche Nation. The ceremony, which took place at Comanche Nation tribal headquarters at Lawton, Oklahoma marked the culmination of many months of preparation. Story and photos below.

BL with Desmond Tutu in Indonesia, May 2006. Wilford Welch, who invited both of them to work with him in Ubud, Bali, at Quest for Global Healing, is at center. The gathering brought together 500 people from 40 countries for presentations and workshops.

During his field research for Of Wolves and Men, BL spent several weeks with Bob Stephenson (walking behind BL), a wolf biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. This heavily-sedated female wolf was six or seven years old and weighed about 85 pounds. See story below.

  On September 9, 2007, the President, Provost, and a Vice-Provost of Texas Tech University, together with a small group of representatives from the Texas Tech University community, including Barry Lopez and artist Richard Rowland, made a formal offer of reconciliation between the University and the Comanche Nation before representatives of the Comanche people. The unprecedented ceremony and presentation of gifts took place on ceremonial grounds at Comanche Nation tribal headquarters near Lawton, Oklahoma. It marked the official beginning of a collaborative effort between the tribe and the University to improve educational opportunities for Comanche youth and to open the entire University community to “a Comanche way of knowing.”

  The clay vessels, designed and built by artist Richard Rowland, were created from material that lies exposed in a narrow canyon on the eastern edge of Texas’s Llano Estacado, the site of a catastrophic loss for Comanche people. Here on September 29, 1874, more than a thousand rustled Comanche horses were shot and killed by troops of the Fourth United States Cavalry. BL and Richard Rowland dug clay and gathered other materials for the vessels at the site and fired them in an anagama kiln, using wood from several places in Texas and Oklahoma. The water for the ceremony was borrowed from a part of the Ogallala aquifer that lies beneath traditional Comanche country, land on which the University now stands.