- [Jim Enote] This is a harsh place.

To live in this part of the world, you need to live near water.

You're also looking for places where there's shelter and where there are places to collect certain plants, or nuts to gather.

Is there enough game nearby?

These are centuries and centuries ago, a time when people were focused on creating a very highly developed relationship to cosmological processes.

A difficult place, but what is going to sustain us?

How are we going to sustain the rest?

How are we going to be sure that nature is taken care of?

How do we help nudge the sun to come up every day?

And so I think in this area, this part of the world, we turn to stone.

(soft music) (rattlesnake rattles) To see these panels, that is telling you that this is a good place to live.

At least it was then.

What's in those petroglyphs was expressions, hardship, struggle, maybe even near-death experiences.

I can relate to that.

I think there's also images that relate to a kind of belonging, that these are here, these are my people, my kin, other sorts of beings around us, and the relationship to them.

These are experiences, and they represent patterns of lives.

What was here?

What was here then?

I look at them now, and I think what could be here today.

(truck rumbles) (truck whirring echoes) These are important places.

Where there are petroglyphs, there's going to be people buried nearby.

And when these places were blessed, they were blessed in perpetuity.

When you or I and others pass by a cemetery, there's some humbleness to that, right?

We don't throw our bottles in the places like that.

We don't make loud noises; we shouldn't.

We respect places like that.

And this is also art, a particular kind of art, without paper.

If you have the right eye, you can see that, when artists repeats.

You go down through the panels, and you'll see that artist again somewhere else.

They have a signature style.

And there's been times where I would study them and look at them and see the depth, and see how much energy they used to strike.

I think we have grown to understand Abstractionists, or Cubism.

Why can't this be accepted for that?

Why not accept this as part of the national and human experience?

We have monuments throughout our nation to great works by great people.

Do you really want to cast a fog on those in a way that you would with multiple trucks moving quickly and creating dust and sending this clouding, literally clouding our collective heritage?

(vehicle whooshes) The people will always be there.

Is this the direction that our nation is taking?

We care less.

We care less about people, and care less about things that are important.

And then later, we lament on what we lost.

Is that our future?