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Local Native Americans are about to complete the longest indigenous prayer run in U.S. history. “Run with the Sun” is the brainchild of Lakeside resident Bobby Wallace, a member of the Barona Band of Mission Indians, in hopes of protecting waters across America.
“It’s been awesome making changes in people’s minds about water everywhere,” Wallace told East County Magazine in an interview. “We started running, traveling with the water over every footstep of this continent, over every major waterway, with a prayer for all water.”
The effort is supported by the Barona, Sycuan and Viejas tribes in San Diego’s East County as well as participants from other tribes across the United States.
The run began June 12, 2022, in Maine, with runners collecting water vials from tribal members nationwide.
On June 14, they will arrive in San Diego and hold a ceremony on the beach near Friendship Park at the international border, followed by a “Run for the Sun” concert June 16 at the Sycuan reservation.
Wallace says he came up with the idea while walking across the Mojave Desert in 2019, concerned that “water was getting killed everywhere” due to the effects of pollution and climate change.
The first leg of the run began at the West Quoddi Lighthouse at the border of Maine and Canada at “the very northeast corner of the U.S., the furthest place you can go” in the nation, Wallace recalled.
There, tribal women including from the Haudenosaunee from New York, Passamoquoddi from Maine, and Navajo fromArizona blended waters from their areas with waters from the San Diego River and the Pacific Ocean, historic Kumeyaay territory.
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