Running in Prayer: The 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon

The “Running in Prayer” exhibit featuring items from the 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon is on display in the King Library’s AAACNA Center through January 5.

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.”

The Running in Prayer exhibit in King Library’s AAACNA Center includes a prayer blanket where visitors can engage with history in real time. Photo by Julia Halprin Jackson.

The exhibit is curated by SJSU Kinesiology Lecturer Marty Behler, ’79 History, who serves on the AAACNA advisory board, and Librarian Peggy Cabrera, who serves as the library liaison for the English, environmental studies, linguistics and world languages departments. It includes historic images, photo albums, maps, flags, running paraphernalia and a ceremonial blanket, all provided by former and current participants in the 500-mile run.

The 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon was established in 1978 by American Indian Movement (AIM) co-founder Dennis Banks and educator John Malloy, ’72 Sociology, ’85 MA Counselor Education, to commemorate the Longest Walk, a five-month journey of over 500 North American tribes who walked from San Francisco to Washington, D.C., to lobby for the Native American Freedom of Religious Act (also known as the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1978) and to protest anti-Native American legislation. 

The movement attracted the support of César Chávez, Dolores Huerta and United Farm Workers, as well as actor Marlon Brando, comedian Dick Gregory and boxer and civil rights advocate Muhammad Ali, among others.

In 1980, Behler joined the university’s Native American student organization alongside anthropologist and Muwekma Ohlone tribal ethnohistorian Alan Leventhal, ’93 MA Social Science, Hank LeBeau, a Lakota Sioux from Eagle Butte, Cheyenne River Reservation, and his wife Sherry Grimes LeBeau (Oglala Lakota).

“I’m Osage from Oklahoma, and I put my mattress on top of my car and drove out here after a divorce,” Behler recalls. “There were probably ten of us in the Native American student organization at SJSU, and I met John Malloy around then.” 

An active member of the Gathering of Academic Indigenous and Native Americans (GAIN), a faculty and staff affinity group at SJSU, Behler sees the AAACNA exhibit as one way to educate the greater SJSU and San José community about the contributions of Native and Indigenous Spartans to the AIM movement.

“The idea is to honor and run for yourself, your community, and the entire world,” she says. “And if you sweat [in a sweat lodge ceremony], it starts with prayers for one’s self, progresses to prayers for loved ones, and ends with prayers for the world.”

History in motion

Though not Native or Indigenous himself, retired SJSU Anthropology Lecturer Alan Leventhal has dedicated his career to unearthing and celebrating Indigenous and Native cultures alongside tribal members. In 1972, he worked at the American Museum of Natural History in the departments of anthropology and education as an undergraduate and graduate student before relocating to Nevada at the University of Nevada, Reno and working alongside the Washoe Shoshone and Paiute tribes on various projects. In 1978, he was hired to direct an anthropology lab at San José State, where he was first connected to members of the Muwekma Ohlone tribe in 1980.

SJSU Anthropology Lecturer and tribal ethnohistorian Alan Leventhal (left) with American Indian Movement founder Dennis Banks (left), circa 1980. Photo courtesy of Alan Leventhal.

He was first recruited to lead a team of SJSU and San José participants in the 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon in 1980. 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 Markleeville, where the Washoe tribe welcomed the runners for a brief respite.

Leventhal participated in the run from 1980-1984, helping coordinate the San José State teams, joining dozens of others as they trekked from southern California across the Tehachapi Mountains past Mono Lake and ending at Deganawidah-Quetzalcoatl University (D.Q.U.), the first tribal university established in California. The spiritual run encouraged runners to choose their distances, with transport vehicles picking up and dropping off relay participants along the route. Their days started with sunrise ceremonies and culminated in evening retreats, with participants camping or staying with Native and Indigenous friends or allies located along the route.

Alan Leventhal’s patch from the 20th annual 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon. Photo by Alan Leventhal.

More than 40 years later, Leventhal says that participating in the 500 Mile Run reinforced many of the central truths he was learning as an anthropologist, academic and ally to his Native and Indigenous colleagues, friends and peers.

“What the 500 Mile Spiritual Run taught me was that even though we ran it as a relay, there was still pain that we had to endure,” he says. “But after five days, the pain would end. For these tribes, their pain never goes away, and the warfare against California Indians and other tribes is not going to go, either. I’m not from California; I’m not Native American, but this spiritual run showed me that these people are running for their lives and the survival of their tribes. And that’s really the heartbeat of the 500 Mile Run. It’s more than just a political statement; it’s survival.”

Though Leventhal has retired from SJSU and relocated to Oregon, his archeological studies with the Muwekma Ohlone Tribe of the San Francisco Bay Area are ongoing. Throughout his academic career, he’s established a precedent of co-authoring papers alongside tribal leaders, ensuring that any studies of ancestral remains are not only made available to Native and Indigenous communities, but that the tribal archeologists and experts are given due credit for their contributions and insight.

“We are essentially challenging the notion that for me, as ‘Mr. Anthropologist, [approach]  a tribe, not for them, but for the information they’re willing to share, and then I would be conferred as the authority on the tribe,” he says. “Everything I’ve done with tribes is co-authored; all the archeological reports on the mortuary sites; they own it and control it. So we are shattering the myth.”

Native and Indigenous culture is alive and well 

In the four decades since Leventhal last participated in the 500 Mile Run, the movement has expanded and diversified. In addition to honoring spiritual and cultural traditions, each year the run is imbued with a special and often political purpose. One of the banners in the exhibit includes a list of American legislation that Native runners ran to support or oppose including laws impacting access to water, fishing and land rights. The movement’s primary message is “All Life is Sacred.”

Spirit runners gathered at SJSU during the Nov. 9 American Indian Heritage Celebration. Photo shared by the 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon on Facebook.

Runners train throughout the year — spirit runners held a training run around campus last month, coinciding with the American Indian Heritage Celebration — and people of all ages and walks of life are encouraged to participate. Participants run varying lengths, occasionally in intervals, and carry special staffs. Many of the plaques and posters included in the exhibit list the names of the original teams that ran the inaugural run — San José State among them.

“When we talk about Native Americans, we may not always conceive of them as living in contemporary society,” says Cabrera. “I think coming to [AAACNA] and seeing pictures of the runners is really important — it  helps people see them in the present tense.”

Behler adds that once organizations recite land acknowledgements in their events, it can sometimes feel like lip service instead of truly understanding and respecting Indigenous and Native traditions. “I wanted people to understand how much the run involved, from San José State [alumni like run co-founder John Malloy] doing unbelievable projects to lobbying Congress.”

In addition to helping lead the annual runs, Malloy founded and ran a school called The Foundry in San José for 30 years, supporting more than 8,000 students. Behler, meanwhile, got a teaching credential, coached soccer and later became a lecturer at SJSU. She is thrilled to see that as of this year, the Native American and Indigenous Student Success Center (NAISSC) now has a physical home in the former Spartan Memorial Chapel.

“When I was in the Native American student organization, Dennis [Banks] and [Lakota leader and advocate] Russell Means would say to me, ‘Don’t let the FBI catch you on the way home,’” she recalls. “We’ve come a long way. Now we have the Native American Indigenous Student Success Center, we have a Native American Studies Department team, and we have an Ethnic Studies Collaborative, which gives us a voice.”

Living history while celebrating the present

The exhibit includes a wooden map of California depicting the 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon. Photo by Julia Halprin Jackson.

Though the AAACNA exhibit closes in early January, the 500 Mile American Indian Spiritual Marathon — and, by extension, its movement— is far from done. Just ask John Paul Amaral, ’25 History, president of the Native American Student Organization and Indigenous student success advocate at the NAISSC.

“I work in a museum with a strong background in museum education, I teach beadwork at the Native American Indigenous Student Success Center, my studies at San José State University focus on Native American and American Indigenous History, and I have been raised to know the power of a proper education on American Indigenous peoples [for both Native people and non-Native people alike], which our education systems do not effectively provide,” Amaral says. “Museums and libraries are spaces that reinforce the education students receive in the classroom while providing more, and the 500 Mile Run exhibition bridges that in what we call ‘living history.’”

Amaral, whose tribal affiliations areTaos Pueblo and Jicarilla N’deé, worked alongside Behler as she and Cabrera curated the AAACNA exhibit. Its meaning is personal and political for him.

“Since the start of the American Indian Movement, we pushed for the shift from the ‘vanishing race theory’ in education to one that teaches non-Natives about us thriving, with our community members actively engaging in teaching our histories and ongoing success, traditions, rematriation and cultural practices,” he adds. “Visitors to the exhibit will not only see a history of the 500 Mile Run, but contemporary observance and practice, too, with the documentary on display, quotes and comments from the runners and camp supporters, and see how the 500 Mile Run serves Indian Country over time. I am honored to receive the opportunity to help my community by setting up the exhibition, and am looking forward to the one for 2025 Native American Heritage Month.”

Amaral credits four decades of SJSU alumni like Behler, Malloy and Leventhal for their activism, as they were essential in the organization of the American Indian Movement, and “provided the basis for Native American and American Indigenous Studies programs across the U.S.A.”

Visit the Running in Prayer exhibit at AAACNA through January 5, 2025.