Artist's Statement

These two images respond to the call "Voices That Vanish: On the Disappeared and the Silenced."

The first is from Canyon de Chelly, in the Navajo Nation, Arizona. The hand and foot holds, first carved by the Ancestral Puebloans, were used by Navajo inhabitants to climb out of the canyon and escape the Spanish conquistadors, and later the U.S. Army soldiers under Kit Carson sent to drive them from their land. They resisted with courage until they were forced onto the Long Walk. Decimated but not erased, the Navajo endured and returned. Many live in the canyon still. This is their story of resistance, displacement, and survival. With this photograph, I can only record traces of that resilience in the red rock.

The second, "Remembrance of Resistance," shows the empty chairs of Plac Bohaterów Getta, a memorial in the former Jewish ghetto of Kraków, Poland. They stand for those forced from their homes and deported to the death camps, and for the fighters of the ghetto resistance. The chairs hold loss, courage, dignity, and survival in a single form.

— Michael C. Roberts