Anthropologist, retired SJSU faculty member and tribal ethnohistorian Alan Leventhal, ’93 MA Social Science, led a team of SJSU and San José runners to participate in the 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon from 1980-1984. He still remembers the sensation of his tennis shoes melting against the hot asphalt as he ran through the Mojave Desert one summer. During one of the four summers he participated, he remembers a freak snowstorm interrupting their ascent through the Sierra Nevada Mountains on Highway 395.
“There was a heavy snowfall in June, and we couldn’t get back over the Sierras,” he recalls. Their transit vehicles had to backtrack to Markleyville, where the Washoe tribe welcomed the runners for a brief respite.
This fall, the Africana, Asian American, Chicano, & Native American Studies Center (AAACNA) at San José State’s Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Library, welcomed patrons to an exhibit entitled “Running in Prayer: The History and Purpose of the California 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon Relay Team.”
There’s still time to catch the exhibit at King Library. Read more on the SJSU NewsCenter blog.