In the Shadow of Sun Mountain (Tava Kaavi)

The Psychology of Othering and the Origins of Evil

“By taking this land for granted, we’ve anesthetized ourselves to history... we live in a state of blunted feeling, capable of cheerful indifference when we visit land once steeped in human agony. Contemplating this indifference can be, at first, infuriating. Americans ought to know what acts of violence brought them their right to own land, build homes, use resources, and travel freely in North America. Americans ought to know what happened on the ground they stand on; they surely have some obligation to know where they are.”

From the book “Sweet Medicine” by Drex Brooks, 1995.

This project is a poignant reflection on the historical and psychological dimensions of land ownership, colonization, and the human experience of mortality.

These images represent an esoteric conflict that’s rooted in our unconscious denial of death. That conflict is the psychological underpinning of the atrocities that happened on this land. I’ve connected these ideas through the content of the images and the materials and processes that I used to make the photographs and paintings. These ideas are represented both symbolically and literally. 

I lived in the Rocky Mountains of Colorado, just west of Sun Mountain (Tava; the white man called it Pikes Peak), for almost four years. I lived on the land where the Utes (Tabeguache band) spent their summer months hunting and fishing for hundreds or thousands of years before the white man arrived on this continent and dispossessed them of their land, culture, and lives.

This is a story about how these psychological theories about knowledge of death (knowing we are finite) played a central role in the atrocities committed against the Native Americans in Colorado, specifically the Tabeguache Ute.

I've conveyed these concepts through photographs and paintings depicting the Tabegucahe's ceremonial plants, medicinal flora, the region's landscapes, and sacred rock formations. My paintings grapple with the emotional chaos and confusion that these historical events engender in me. Most of my painting is nonrepresentational and might be considered a form of abstract impressionism. I’m addressing how the white European colonizers dealt with their own sense of mortality.

“The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity—designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.”

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death

Terror Management Theory (TMT) is a psychological theory that suggests that humans, aware of their inevitable mortality, adopt cultural belief systems, or meaning systems, to alleviate fears about death. These beliefs, whether religious or secular, give people a sense of purpose and hope for some form of immortality, either through an afterlife or through leaving a legacy.

These belief systems also require validation from others. When individuals encounter people with different worldviews, it threatens the validity of their own beliefs, often leading to negative reactions, including hostility and aggression. Terror Management Theory posits that the more rigid a person’s belief system, the more it protects them from death anxiety. However, this rigidity could make them less tolerant of others with differing opinions.

“Even evil is just the fear of death. Our heroic projects that are aimed at destroying evil have the paradoxical effect of bringing more evil into the world. Human conflicts are life and death struggles—my gods against your gods, my immortality project against your immortality project. The root of humanly caused evil is not man’s animal nature, not territorial aggression, or innate selfishness, but our need to gain self-esteem, deny our mortality, and achieve a heroic self-image. Our desire for the best is the cause of the worst. We want to clean up the world, make it perfect, keep it safe for democracy or communism, purify it of the enemies of god, eliminate evil, establish an alabaster city undimmed by human tears, or a thousand-year Reich.”

Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death