An Ecocriticism Specific to Las Truchas, New Mexico

In his essay, “Place, body and situation,” Joseph Grange states, “Where’ is never a there, a region over against us, isolated and objective. ‘Where’ is always part of us and we are part of it. It mingles with our being, so much so that place and human being are enmeshed, forming a fabric that is particular, concrete and dense” (Grange 1986). Truchas, New Mexico can be characterized as a village with profound links between place, individual and community. This is not to say that Truchas is isolated or completely insulated. Rather along with Grange’s formulation, I also draw on geographer Doreen Massey’s nuanced view of place. For her, place does not exist singularly, cut off from the world around it, but is, on the contrary “outward-looking,” and connected to that which exists beyond, both spatially and temporally, as this paper will demonstrate (Massey 1991).

As Grange says, “where” constitutes identity, it is enmeshed within language, oral culture and ritual processions that forge links between humans and geography. As New Mexican anthropologist Sylvia Rodriguez states, “Processions belong to a genre of human ritual behavior that involves symbolic discourse…An annual procession reinscribes its pathway of spatial extension through a mapped cosmos. The coordinates of this map (features by which correspondence is established between physical geography and a cultural model of it) are the infrastructural artifacts of human occupation: acequias, roads, fields, houses, placitas, cemetaries, kivas, chapels and shrines” (Rodriguez 2006).

Deeply rooted in Catholicism, these processions or symbolic discourses have shaped the character of Truchas and other northern New Mexican settlements for generations, the most being prominent annual procession is the Corpus Christi procession, which takes place during Holy Week, the week preceding Easter. The movement of bodies across a landscape inscribes sacredness into the physical geography revealing an ephemeral and immaterial mode of mapping regenerated through repetition. Furthermore, important points along this map contribute to the quotidian discourse that founds documents like the Convenio.

Thus as Grange states, “place and human being are enmeshed,” meeting through the kinesthetic experience of movement, but are more deeply linked through a spiritual navigation of the land and the cosmos for which it stands (1986). Although this model in many ways diverges from previous ecocritical models because of the role that Christianity plays, it is nonetheless essential to recognize the productive possibility of thinking in and through one’s environment by way of this specific religious and cultural lens. Such a lens is not universal. Its power comes precisely from not being universal, stemming instead from a regional form of Catholicism within an amalgam of conditions, influences and geography.
The Convenio of 1900: A Landscape of Pasts and Presents

In this circuitous way, I revisit the document created in December 1900 and the blue, filigree-like cursive that gracefully inscribed a particular piece of Truchas, New Mexico onto simple lined paper. The Convenio was written during a particularly significant period in New Mexican history, the transition from territory to statehood. As such, the document mimics the precarious position that New Mexico occupied within its historical context and seeps with a kind of tension oscillating between presentness and timelessness, American legal traditions and New Mexican “legal” discourse, itself fabricated over long years under Spanish and Mexican governments. The result is a richly complex landscape of pasts and presents embedded within the document’s vernacular simplicity.

In an effort to give the document an air of contemporaneity, the author, Andres Romero, mentioned the date twice, once at the beginning and once at the end, and alluded to it once more within text. Its inception as what was then considered a legal document was also symptomatic of contemporary attitudes regarding the legality of property ownership in New Mexico that surfaced after the territory’s annexation by the United States in 1846 and exacerbated in the late 1850’s with the creation of Office of the Surveyor General.⁴ This government entity, whose primary aim was to verify the ownership of both land grants and private properties in New Mexico, was “…charged with ascertaining the origin, nature, character and extent of all claims under the laws, usages, and customs of Spain and Mexico.” American land speculators threatened New Mexico’s residents’ private property as well as various communal land grants despite a long history of interwoven Spanish and Mexican customs (Gonzalez 2003). I conjecture that it is, in part, within this historical context that warranty deeds in New Mexico began to surface.⁵

Typically, warranty deeds were written agreements made between a grantor (seller) and a grantee (buyer) guaranteeing that the parcel of land had a clear title, was paid off and thus could be sold legally. Within these documents, a description of the parcel of land is central and authorized by various interlocutors: grantor, grantee, witness, and notary republic or justice of the peace. Different systems of measurement instead of descriptions of the parcels of land are what separate the Convenio and later “Spanish” warranty deeds from their American counterparts.⁶

Kent Ryden, in his book Mapping the Imagination, expounds upon what is called the “metes and bounds” system of measurement used in the eighteenth century in the eastern United States. With the use of a compass, the surveyor Ryden states, “delineated a piece of property by measuring a series of straight lines from one landmark to another: when these landmarks were connected on paper, the resulting irregular polygon defined the ‘metes and bounds,’ or limits of the property” (Ryden 1993). Like my great great-grandfather and Jose Dolores López, Ryden posits that such a system of measurement “depended on the surveyor’s immediate contact with the landscape.” Nonetheless, emphasis here is given to the professional surveyor who, in later pages of Ryden’s book, is described with his tools of measurement. Against this American mode, my great great-grandfather and his neighbor were the surveyors, albeit not the professionals with particular tools like compasses as Ryden notes. Indeed they simply used the tools of description, signaling an interesting, yet dichotomous relationship between the system employed by northern New Mexicans and the system employed by Americans. Although each method required an experiential relationship to a respective environment—the landscape had to be navigated by each party using familiar landmarks as beginnings and endings— surveying and its rhetoric was the job of a professional within the American context, not of a layperson like Benito Montoya.

Furthermore, the American system of measurement radically shifted in 1785 with the introduction of Rectangular Lines System, a system based on Principal Meridians and Base Lines. The former run north to south and the latter from east to west, together forming precise right angles within a large grid, each module within containing 640 acres of land and further divisible into smaller and smaller units.⁷ Made in the name of ownership, these land divisions afforded near-precise descriptions of property based upon uniformity: each square was like every other square. And such descriptions and acts of boundary-making “guaranteed security of ownership,” making it “simple to transfer land, which aided in the success of claim associations and, incidentally, that of speculators; is also contributed to the attitude that land is a commodity, not a common good under the stewardship of its owners” (Ryden 1993).

Still in effect under Government Land Surveys, the Rectangular Lands System, otherwise known as the national grid, was developed as a result of the inaccuracy of the metes and bounds system (although in many states metes and bounds were and are still in use) and its use of what were considered arbitrary landmarks. Considering the context around which the Government Land Survey System emerged—only ten years after the America’s Independence—it is clear that the U.S. government was, in effect, creating cohesion and consistency through an abstract and hegemonic language of measurement. Such measurement did not merely demonstrate the continental, yet measureable scale of the nation’s real estate, but enacted the very conditions for its possibility and determination as such. Measurement, in general, and the national grid, in particular then, became a tool for flattening out the textures of everyday movements into very powerful forms of representation, creating surfaces on which to project unity, even if such unity was sutured together by the boundaries of the national grid. This projection, which oscillates between material and symbolic worlds, results from bureaucratic abstraction. Such abstraction by way of modulation, however, is inadequate or simply incompatible with other worldviews. As we will see in the Convenio, the boundaries of statehood and nationalism that the United States afforded could not completely erase a regional identity constructed within a Spanish Colonial and Mexican context.

And although American national identity is outside the purvey of this paper, what is within the interests of this research is the slippage between what it meant to be American or New Mexican during the early twentieth century; the slippage that the Convenio and subsequent warrants deeds unintentionally though very effectively make apparent. Certainly, to understand this complex relationship is to think about space not as a mere vessel for New Mexicans or others to inhabit or possess and thus represent by way of legal documentation. No passive agent, space and the subsequent spatial practices that emerge are active in constituting subjectivity and forging identity. And as such, “we no longer mistake space for nature,” as Kelly Baum notes, continuing, “nor do we exempt it from the historical forces that shape societies, human beings, and modes of production.” Indeed, “space is a cultural artifact” and not a given, one “that is unfinished at that” (2011: 10). And so, space can be made and unmade. It can proscribe and prescribe movement, enact memory or nostalgia, bring people together while sharply separating both spaces and the bodies that traverse them. However, such power is always contingent upon history and in this case, not simply upon New Mexico’s rocky transition into statehood, but the skein of Spanish Colonial and Mexican regimes that came before.

We find that within the Convenio, both the Acequia, and the Camino Real are two key points with which Benito Montoya and Jose Dolores López chose to locate themselves and their piece of property, two signifiers mentioned by Rodriguez and two signifiers rooted within Spanish Colonial discourse that still held a high degree of value during this transitional stage. Brevity was highly valued within the Convenio. Four lines encompass the entire description of the parcel in question, the parcel that was situated between each man’s home. One geographic landmark, the Acequia (aqueduct) also capitalized in the document, is of special significance, originating in the initial petition for the settling of Truchas in the mid eighteenth century. Acequia. However, this is an aggrandizing denotation for such a modest irrigation system in New Mexico. Its place within the Convenio hints at its rich connotative value, one that overflows its signifier.⁸

The Convenio does not specify whether or not the acequia in question was the main water source, the acequia madre (mother ditch or primary ditch), as is the case in later documents. What is known is that like the aforementioned processions, the acequia functioned as a site of communitas. “Water” as Rodriguez points out, “is pervasive in folk Catholic religious symbolism and practice in northern New Mexico. It is the source of life and the medium of blessing and baptism.” She continues: “New Mexicans pay homage to the centrality of water and weave it into their community ties” (Rodriguez 2006).

Furthermore, social contracts inhere within these geographic and cultural markers. Repartimientos de agua, or the practice of partitioning water through irrigation systems that derived from Spanish colonial customary law, enact the collective power of water sharing through ditch associations or community maintenance organizations. These organizations operated on unspoken practice, in “word of law and day-to-day practical accommodation” for the community’s wellbeing (Rodriguez 2006). In this way, the community comes together in a common cause as the acequia functions to both “affirm and socialize members into a cooperative, subsistence institution intimately related to the land” (Rodriguez 2006). The maintenance of the ditch was a product of oral interactions between community members like the above-mentioned men. However it was not until the 1960s that the acequias became political subdivisions of the state of New Mexico (Rodriguez 2006).

In the description the acequia was located on the Westside of the parcel described, while on the south it was bounded by the Camino Real, por el sur el Camino Real. A quirky and even paradoxical addition to the Convenio, the Camino Real, is typically known as the “Royal Road,” or the “Inland Highway, ”penetrating the interior of the northernmost Spanish colonies. It commenced in Mexico City, wound its way up through Zacatecas and El Paso del Norte, to reach its final destination in Santa Fe, covering a total of nearly 1600 miles over ever-changing geography and climate. Functioning as a trade route, the “Royal Road” was also traversed by settlers and their Spanish officials into the northern frontier (Kessel 2008).

However, within the Convenio, the use of the Camino Real as a landmark is misleading. Rather than referring to the “Royal Road,” it refers to a much more modest road, and thus a much more modest traveler. It refers to the one public road that snakes eastward from Santa Cruz de la Canada (a community in the what is now known as the valley of Espanola). What do we make of this inclusion and the significance of Truchas’ own Camino Real (even capitalized within the original document) since the more geographically and culturally well-known Camino Real did not even reach the village of Truchas making its inclusion rather cryptic. I conjecture that the term was used on an earlier document, perhaps a petition for a land grant, and was then naturalized within a colloquial context to signify any road of significance. While it did not traverse the entirety of New Spain’s colonies, the Camino Real de Las Truchas, ventured into the interior of the village and not the interior of the northern frontier. Nonetheless, as the only public road (now known as State Road 76) it was akin the acequia, another life-source for the people of Truchas that connected the village to the valley below.

Up until now, I have characterized the Convenio as a Spanish Warranty deed. Paradoxically however, there is neither “grantor” nor “grantee,” the necessary legal jargon between a buyer and a seller of property that marks warranty deeds as such. Rather than describing the transference of property from one individual to another, what holds this agreement together is shared property. In light of this interesting twist, I consider it a kind of elusive proto-warranty deed. While it loosely follows the style of American warranty deeds, it also gestures toward other legal documents, including Spanish Colonial land grant contracts, both individual and communal alike. The Convenio then is one node within a much more protracted constellation of interests.

Established in 1754, the land grant of Truchas, Nuestra Señora del Rosario, San Fernando y Santiago del Rio de Las Truchas, is a communal grant or ejido, whereby groups of settler families or pobladores petitioned for parcels of land from the Spanish Crown (or later from the Mexican government) by way of the local governor (Gonzalez 2003). After the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 and the reconquest of the territory and its inhabitants by Don Diego De Vargas in 1692, it became apparent that a strategy of land settlement would be necessary to form buffer zones between marauding Indians and interior communities.⁹ At least this was the initial rationale for the establishment of ejidos along the frontier. However, this rationale is also bound to maintaining Spanish purity, or limpieza de sangre (blood purity), a notion that finds its origins in the Spanish conflicts with the moors, generations before.

As the first settled communities were established after the Pueblo revolt and subsequent reconquest, satellite communities began to branch out as needs exceeded resources within already-established ejidos.¹⁰ After cultivating the land and constructing an irrigation ditch or acequia in Truchas, eleven families from existing ejidos petitioned Governor Tomás Velez Cachupín for a tract of land, stating that the petitioners in “good faith built an acequia.” They continued, “…we ask that Your Excellency deign to grant us said site in the name of His Majesty.”¹¹ This petition resulted in Truchas’ settlement in April of 1754. Settling what was once considered terra incognita—the unknowable, yet-to-be conquered land—was a more mild, yet still effective form of colonial expansion on the Northern Frontier. Knowing, that is geographical knowledge, could only be arrived via possessing, especially possessing that which could be translated cartographically. Yet, according to Dennis Reinhartz, “Much of the interior [the southwest] nevertheless remained a great mystery on all European maps until the nineteenth century” (Reinhartz 1999: 142-43).¹²

However, we find that these eleven settlers knew the landscape they were petitioning or could at least describe it with proficiency. Within the petition we find descriptive language similar to what is in the Convenio, where geographic boundaries are relayed through place names, including Sierra del Oso (Bear Mountain), for example.¹³ Here, what was profoundly abstract to Europeans, the swaths of land comprising the Southwest, became known through agricultural expansion and animal husbandry, and by way of an experiential, albeit, colonial, relationship with the land by its settlers. In the words of noted spatial theorist Henri Lefebvre, “Inasmuch as abstract space tends towards homogeneity, towards the elimination of existing differences or peculiarities, a new space cannot be born (produced) unless it accentuates differences” (1992: 52). Thus the experiences of the initial settlers and their relationship between what were discursively regarded as their plundering Indian neighbors, one another, the governor, and the land—interpolated the lacunae of the aforementioned cartographic representations Reinhardt wrote about. These might be the differences that Lefebvre points toward, indeed the differences that bring abstraction into relief, or at least into the concrete.

Although these ejidos were based on communal land ownership, individual families were given allotments for cultivating their own vegetable gardens and orchards. Those allotments were naturalized into private property leaving the remaining parcel of the ejido as communal land shared amongst the families and handed down through the generations. The ejido proper could not be sold, and would be held in common for the entire community’s survival and well-being, for grazing animals, gathering of wood, and for hunting, fishing, threshing and fruit-gathering (Gonzalez 2003).

In many ways, the aforementioned methods of survival could be double-edged. To cultivate the land, was to make the land productive, not simply for the settlers but for the bureaucracies who considered settlement and productivity tools of power and domination, of stamping the land with presence. And yet we find an altogether different tenor within the Convenio hundreds of years later, one simply based on quotidian necessity. And while the notion of sharing, or at least communally maintaining an extensive piece of property, is plagued by years of conflict, it is sharing within and through conflict that forms the very core of the Convenio.

Towards the end of the document, Romero states, “in testimony we presently sign with our hands and our seals”.¹⁴ As each hand and seal made their respective imprints on the page, authority, diffuse and abstract otherwise, was made material, physical, palpable. Each movement, mark and utterance communicated and performed the fixity and intended immortality of not simply the document, but the active respect of the terms it set forth for the two men and their descendents. And yet we find that both the sellos (seals) and marcas (marks/signatures) tremble with ambivalence (Fig. 2). Although the sellos meant to authenticate the legality of the Convenio, that they are hand drawn, rather than standardized stamps, blurs their legibility as signifiers of authority and legitimacy. The marcas, or x’s that stand in for Benito Montoya and Jose Dolores López point first to their illiteracy—their inability to read, write or sign their own names—but second and perhaps more importantly to how each man performed the everyday.

For these men, the spoken word, the exchange of an utterance was key, for in their inability to read and write, neither could crystallize experience with pen and page. We can assume the Convenio was the result of dictation, of two men describing what they thought were most essential pieces of information regarding the land they both inhabited. And their words, by way of this dictation, became fixed through an intermediary. The blue, cursive letters written across ledger paper thus offer an incomplete representation of an entire narration, especially when looking from our vantage point more than one hundred years after the fact. Though such script can continually disseminate the information it wields and by virtue of its status as a thing, a material object that although yellow and aged, it still stands as a placeholder and now relic for a particular moment that has long passed. And what was said by those men could only be transcribed by another, their description of a particular place uttered only once. Because utterances unfold through time and across space when spoken, they blow away like dust never to be reconstituted in the same way again. If we think of these two men speaking, their words, we can imagine, converge between experience and ideology within a very specific and discrete dialogic event, one that although powerful was nonetheless ephemeral. Experientially loaded then, this event held within it both López’ and Montoya’s perambulation and corporeal interaction with property. The document seeps with this paradox. It carries the silent presence of the oral then only hinted at by the x’s, those fragile vessels that hold the identities of Benito Montoya and José Dolores López.

Within the intersection between trust and legality, the Convenio stands in as the formal act that retroactively gave credence to an oral understanding that was probably in existence between the two men and perhaps even their forefathers for many years. The Convenio was perhaps bound by trust above all else, based not only on what was said within the document but what was implied in its negative space, the knowledge that Benito Montoya and Jose Dolores López held about each other and the land they shared. This underlying current ebbing within the lines of the Convenio concerning shared property directly results from the land grant system in northern New Mexico. The complexities and ambivalences of northern New Mexican identity thus materialize within such a system and through the geographic specificities of place and its representation.

And despite such poles of coercion and dissent, religious and secular meaning alike was embodied within everyday gestures constituting Grange’s “where.” This rootedness between people and place and the tension between the hegemonic processes that created Truchas and its subsequent organic unfolding across multiple shifts in government apparatuses is indeed compelling.

And inasmuch as the Convenio functioned as discursive cartography, the landscape described within it was not simply a physical landscape, but a multiplicity of terrains, historical and religious to name a few. In the end like those testigos, or witnesses present at the making and signing of the Convenio, I add my own mark as a witness to the past, to history and to memory. To this document I contribute another page to this series of double pages between day and paper.

REFERENCES

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History 77(2): 292-324. www.jstor.org/stable/3744837

Grange, Joseph

1985 Place Body and Situation. In Dwelling Place and Environment. Edited by David

Seamon and Robert Mugerauer. Columbia University Press, New York.

Kessel, John

2008 Spaniards and the Kingdom of New Mexico. University of Oklahoma Press, Norman.

Lefebvre, Henri

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Padron, Ricardo

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University of Chicago Press, Chicago.

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Turchi. Translated by Elizabeth Bishop. Trinity University Press, San Antonio.

Phillips-Nieto, John

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University of New Mexico Press, Albuquerque.

Rodriguez, Sylvia

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1993 Mapping the Invisible Landscape. University of Iowa Press, Iowa City.

Salamon, Sonya

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by Harvey M. Jacobs. University of Wisconsin Press, Madison.

Schiller, Mark

The Las Truchas Grant: Nuestra Senora del Rosario y San Fernando y Santiago Grant,

The center for Land Grant Studies. Electronic document,

http://www.southwestbooks.org/LasTruchas.htm#24, accessed Nov. 2009.

Van Ness, John

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Chapter 6
Sacredness and Ski Resorts: Being Human and Being in Conflict
Adam Dunstan

Anthropology

The San Francisco Peaks, located near Flagstaff, Arizona, are held sacred by thirteen Native American groups in the American southwest. The mountain is not on tribal land, however – it is managed by the U.S. Forest Service as part of the Coconino National Forest. The federal government allows the operation of a private ski resort, Arizona Snowbowl, on the mountain. In 2005, the forest service approved an application by Arizona Snowbowl to develop an artificial snowmaking system. The artificial snow would be made from treated wastewater. Various Native American groups have attempted to halt the proposal, stating that it is a desecration of sacred land and a threat to religious freedoms. Lawsuits have been the most prominent means by which indigenous groups have attempted to bring an end to the snowmaking plan. In 2005, the Navajo Nation, along with several other groups (the Hopi Tribe, the White Mountain Apache Nation, the Yavapai-Apache Nation, the Havasupai Tribe and the Hualapai Tribe), sued the Forest Service on the grounds that the artificial snowmaking violated federal laws protecting Native American sacred land use on federal property as well as the federal government’s own environmental laws. The lawsuit went through several stages of judicial process but was eventually decided against the tribes by the Ninth Circuit Court of Appeals. In 2009 and 2010, lawsuits were filed by the Save the Peaks Coalition and others, suing the Forest Service on religious freedom grounds and for failing to consider health risks of human ingestion of the wastewater-originating snow (Holder 2011; Toensing 2012). In addition to lawsuits, a coalition of environmentalists and indigenous persons formed which held several demonstrations against snowmaking, and on the tribal government level, the Navajo Nation condemned the snowmaking proposal. Despite years of opposition by Native Americans, legal challenges to the use of artificial snow on the San Francisco Peaks have been dismissed. At the time of writing snowmaking are expected to being as early as the fall of 2012.

Although in protests, lawsuits, and tribal declarations, artificial snowmaking has been called “desecration” there is a surprising lack of research on the reasons that this would be so anthropologically, or to put it another way, what the symbolic (negative) significance of artificial snowmaking is from a Navajo perspective. What makes snowmaking desecration? Most of the research done on the San Francisco Peaks controversy focuses on different questions than this, and falls into one of three camps. The first, legal analyses, tend to analyze the legal ramifications of courtroom decisions regarding snowmaking, and the implications this has for protection of religious freedoms, particularly for Native Americans, in U.S. courts (for example, Cragun 2005, Kellen 2010, King 2010, Knapp 2009, Holder 2011, and Tsosie 2005). The second, policy analysis, has provided insights into ways that government sacred land policy is and could be shaped (Carpenter 2006, Schlosberg 2010). Finally some authors, such as Sefiha (2008) have researched how Native American protests to snowmaking have been represented in the media. While all of these threads of research provide significant insight into the snowmaking controversy, they leave essentially unanswered the reasons snowmaking is opposed in the first place. There has been a relative lack of work done on what cultural concerns different indigenous groups have with snowmaking. Glowacka, Washburn, and Richland (2009) who presents a Hopi view on snowmaking, are an exception.

I depart from previous authors by presenting an ethnographic study of key reasons that artificial snowmaking might be seen as desecration by many Navajo. My paper is rooted in ethnographic fieldwork done in 2010 on the Navajo Nation, focusing on my research in Leupp, AZ. I utilize the framework of Mary Douglas to argue that within the sacred land beliefs of many Navajo, snowmaking, which is inherently unnatural, is a type of matter out of place (and therefore polluting). Because of its polluting nature, many Navajo feel that artificial snow will cause harm to human beings, Deities, medicinal plants, holy animals, and the mountain itself. These fears account, at least in part, for the widespread opposition to snowmaking among Navajo Nation residents, actualized in such practices as protests, lawsuits, and government declarations.

During 2009 I did ethnographic research in Flagstaff, Leupp, and Tsaile, AZ, specifically focusing on individual perceptions of the San Francisco Peaks as well as snowmaking. The bulk of my research came from interviews with residents of Leupp, AZ, a Navajo Nation Community approximately 30 miles from the San Francisco Peaks, and I focus my paper mainly on this set of data. Also, during the time I interned at the Diné Policy Institute, a branch of Diné College. The employees of the Institute, which focuses on legal and cultural analyses of Navajo Nation policy, provided valuable guidance and direction into the case study I was working on.

This ethnographic paper is not meant to answer the question: “what do all people living on the Navajo Nation think about snowmaking” or even “all people living in Leupp”, given the scope and nature of my research. Instead, this paper will provide tentative suggestions into the underlying reasons that many Navajo oppose snowmaking. Although tentative, these conclusions fill a significant gap in the literature. This paper is intended to give voice to Navajo Nation residents that are neither politicians nor involved in lawsuits against the federal government, voices which has been largely absent in the academic literature up to this point which has mainly focused on courtroom analysis of Navajo statements.

I propose to fill this gap by looking at three closely related questions, each of which requires an ethnographic approach. Firstly, is opposition to snowmaking limited to Navajo involved in lawsuits and protests, or is it more widespread? In other words, how do “typical” Navajo feel about snowmaking? Secondly, among those Navajo opposed to snowmaking, is there any uniformity in discourse about the San Francisco Peaks? Finally, what do these individuals perceive as potential impacts of snowmaking, and how do these feed into broader objections to ski resort development on the San Francisco Peaks?

Navajo living in Leupp live quite literally within the shadow of this sacred mountain. Many feel a strong connection to the San Francisco Peaks, which is comparable, for some, to the relationship of a child towards a mother or grandmother. This relationship consists not only of emotional connection but also of a requirement to respect the mountain. The correct way to respect this sacred place was to “leave it alone”, or leave it in the state in which it was created and intended to be. Pinxten, Van Dooren, and Harvey (1983) write that Navajo believe nature (such as the holy mountains) was originally created in a good and beneficial way, and that human interference tends only to degrade that natural, beneficial order. From this perspective, a key part of respecting the San Francisco Peaks is to make sure it is not unduly interfered with by human beings. If it is to be used, it should be used in non-destructive ways. Thus, while some of my consultants felt that skiing was appropriate on a sacred mountain, they do not approve of explicitly exploitative uses of the mountain, and many felt that artificial snowmaking fell into this territory.

The first reason that artificial snowmaking would be seen as disrespectful or disruptive is very obvious. Although it has been treated and purified, many Navajo associate the wastewater that will be used to make the snow with human feces and urine. It is known as “dirty snow” and “poop snow”, while Snowbowl has received the moniker “Toilet Bowl”. It was not uncommon for me to be told “Snowmaking is like if I was to come and pee on your church.” Since Navajo culture tends to emphasize respect and reciprocity, snowmaking is indefensible, a violation of basic interpersonal respect: while they do not put wastes on the sacred places of non-Navajo, non-Navajo are now trying to put filth on theirs. In this way it is seen not only as disrespectful to the mountain itself, but to the Navajo people.

However, there is another reason that artificial snowmaking is disrespectful from the perspective of those who feel respect means leaving the mountain natural. Navajo claim that artificial snowmaking would disrupt, hurt, and even kill the life found in the San Francisco Peaks. By life I mean not only plants and animals, but deities and the mountain itself. There are several ways in which this damage might occur, from a Navajo perspective.

The sacred mountain is home to deities or powerful spirits (sometimes known as Holy People) which might leave as a result of snowmaking. Those I spoke to expressed to me that they go there to pray over their flocks and for whatever good thing they need. It is very much a place for the exercise of religion. However, snowmaking threatened this prayerful activity. One consultant told me that if snowmaking occurred, “everything will leave, the animals, the deities”. The reason, she explained, is that Navajo need to do prayers, and their associated offerings, in places that have been undisturbed. However, snowmaking and associated expansion of the ski resort would leave no place undisturbed. As such, prayers would no longer occur (in her opinion) and, without prayer, the deities would leave. This type of concern is a very real reason that artificial snowmaking is presented by some Navajo as a threat to religious freedoms – it essentially negates the ability to use a place of worship. The threat to use of the sacred mountain does not end there. Navajo also collect healing plants from the Peaks, plants they use when western medicine is ineffective. Some feel that the artificial snow would alter or contaminate the plants so as to make them unusable.

Snowmaking is also seen as a threat to the sacred mountain itself, which rather than being conceptualized simply as a physical object is seen as a living, breathing being which can feel pain or joy. Snowmaking and the construction of snowmaking machinery would be, in the words of those I spoke to, like “throwing chemicals on a person”, “injecting them with drugs” and “cutting into their side.” One medicine person said it would be like bathing one’s mother in filthy water.

Dook'o'oosliid’s wild animals are also in danger from artificial snowmaking, according to the Navajo. The mountain belongs to wildlife which live on it and with whom many feel a strong connection. Artificial snow would be made from wastewater and, when it melts, it would be avoided by animals, potentially driving them off, or it could directly harm them. The Navajo consider this a serious threat: “how are you going to be happy,” one man mused, “when your relations are dying off?”

Finally, many feel that snowmaking would present serious threats to human health if ingested. This is particularly true of children which it is likely would ingest artificial snow, whether or not there are signs telling them not to. Because it is made from wastewater, this is felt to be a serious health risk.

Artificial snowmaking is therefore seen as damaging the ritual space created by the San Francisco Peaks and as disruptive to medicinal plants, holy animals, and human health. It is desecration, not only because of the inherent disrespect of using snow made from human waste on a sacred mountain, but because it damages the sacred life of the mountain and its inhabitants. It is pollution in the most serious of ways.

The question remains, however, why is artificial snowmaking seen as pollution, and therefore desecration? The obvious first answer is because it is made from wastewater, but many Navajo have stated that they oppose snowmaking even if it is done without the use of reclaimed water. There logically must be another reason that artificial snowmaking is, from a Navajo perspective, seen as polluting and damaging to life itself. To answer this problem I turn to the pollution framework explained by Mary Douglas in her book Purity and Danger (Douglas 1988 [1966]).

Mary Douglas provides us with a model by which to understand why cultures attribute polluting powers to certain elements. Drawing on an enormous body of cross-cultural beliefs regarding pollution, she argues that there are common threads to pollution beliefs, betraying common human sentiments. She notes that pollution, which she often calls “dirt,” is “matter out of place.” It “implies two conditions, a set of ordered relations and a contravention of that order” (Douglas 1988 [1966]).

My interpretation of Douglas, which draws somewhat on her contemporaries Peter Berger and Thomas Luckmann (1971), is that human beings have mental maps by which they chart their way through reality, and they attempt to preserve the integrity of these maps by getting rid of, or at least condemning, those things which violate them. These mental maps are provided by the cultures individuals find themselves in (though certainly individuals modify the maps). Any human being faces a bewildering array of sensory data that must be properly categorized for successful day-to-day living, and these maps give individuals terms and concepts by which to categorize the world. Since the mental maps by which we categorize the world are often provided to us by religions, and certainly always by our culture, they often take on a sacred dimension.

The mental maps we have of the world may neatly categorize our reality, but there are inevitably instances of objects or people which do not fit “the map.” Douglas calls these “anomalies” or “contradictions” and explains that they are, culturally speaking, “matter out of place”, or as I might render it, matter without a place. Matter may be “out of place” in that it unnaturally combines two categories meant to be distinct (the classic example being forbidden animals in the Book of Leviticus) or because it does not fit into any category at all. Such anomalies present a threat to order – perhaps even the threat that our mental maps are wrong – and when human beings or human cultures are confronted with them, according to Douglas, we deal with them along a few predictable paths. One of those ways is to reject that the anomaly exists. One is to physically remove it from the picture. And another, the one that will interest us here, is to label the anomoly as “dirt” and to ascribe to it powerful polluting power (Douglas 1988 [1966]).

The data I collected doing ethnographic fieldwork in Arizona shows that many Navajo who oppose snowmaking and label it as desecration do so on the grounds that it will pollute the San Francisco Peaks and the life it contains. Using Douglas’ framework, if something is polluting, it is most likely matter out of place. In what ways is artificial snow “matter out of place”? From the perspective of my consultants, artificial snow is the “contradiction of an established order”, the established order, in this case, being the San Francisco Peaks, and the rest of the Navajo homeland, in their natural condition. In that pristine condition it is a place of prayer, a residence of Deities and sacred animals, a source of medicinal plants, and a living being. Its sacredness and its naturalness are inherently linked concepts, and to keep something respected as sacred is to keep it natural. Therefore, logically, anything unnatural would be contrary to that order.

Snowmaking is seen as inherently unnatural because is seen as an attempt to control the weather cycle. Consultants warned that we should “take what nature has given us” and follow its lead, rather than attempting to direct it by controlling the weather. As an unnatural process put on a natural, sacred place, artificial snow is matter out of place, and is therefore attributed powers of pollution and degradation to that sacred place. It would defile and disturb the holy space of the mountain, which helps explain why my consultant felt prayers could no longer take place there if snowmaking were to occur. The polluting of the sacred natural with the unnatural would cause a cascade of spiritual and physical effects, including unusable plants, dying animals, and departing deities. In the words of one consultant, “with anything manmade, there is going to be danger.”

This brings us full circle to the question of why artificial snowmaking is desecration. Desecration is anything that causes a loss of, or disrespect to, sacredness. From the perspective of those I spoke to in Leupp, AZ and elsewhere, to respect the sacredness of the mountain is to leave it unaltered, in its original, beneficial state. The polluting power of the unnatural artificial snow would cause the mountain to be altered, meaning that it is disrespectful of a sacred place, by definition desecration.

Mary Douglas’ theory of pollution provides a starting point to understanding underlying reasons Navajo have opposed snowmaking in lawsuits, protest, and tribal government pronouncements: snowmaking is seen as out of place with the natural order and therefore not only disrespectful, but polluting, of a place of worship upon which many Navajo depend.

At the time of writing, the use of artificial snowmaking on the San Francisco Peaks is scheduled to begin as early as the fall of 2012. It is still opposed by several individuals. Despite years of protest, the snowmaking proposal has so far been upheld. In this conflict we see reflected the common human condition of being in conflict for what we consider sacred.

Part of being human, I would suggest, is to hold certain things as sacred. As sense-making beings we attribute sacredness to certain parts of the world, or to the world itself, in what we perceive as its proper order. In doing so, we become vulnerable to the threat of pollution, in the sense that Mary Douglas meant it. Once we accept from our culture a view of a proper world it is almost inevitable that those from other cultural backgrounds will not believe in that same order, and will (in our view) abuse our world. This is clearly what is happening with artificial snowmaking, which Navajo see as desecration and others see as a business opportunity.

As human beings, by believing in order we put ourselves at risk of being threatened by the onslaught of reality. To be human is to be in conflict, even if only in our own heads, over whatever (or wherever) we term the sacred.

I would add, however, as a concluding remark, that although this type of conflict is perhaps inevitable since parties diverge on what is considered sacred, it need not be irreconcilable. Indeed, ethnographic methods are one of the many tools that could be used to lessen the degree of tension over sacred land management. By presenting vivid portrayals of the concerns of indigenous persons with how sacred lands are being used, particularly those under the control of state and federal governments, ethnography can play a role in bringing a humane dimension to land management. In the United States, there are laws and policies which require federal agencies to consider the ways their land management activities will impact sacred lands (for example, the American Indian Religious Freedom Act of 1979 and Executive Order 13007). Community-level research may be vital in outlining how tribal communities feel about the proper uses of these lands by the federal government. This type of data could potentially be used preventatively by the federal government, in consultation with the tribes, to make land use decisions which would respect traditional views on sacred lands and help federal agencies avoid lengthy battles with tribes that are costly not only in resources but in government-to-government relationships.

Such analyses are important because of the nature of our effects on the environment. My background is not only in social science but, as an undergraduate, in environmental science, has lead me to conclude that any consideration of environmental impacts – for example, the environmental impact statements regularly filed by the federal government prior to land use decisions – needs to consider in a meaningful way the impacts on human beings, including on sacred connections to the environment, or the impact analysis is not complete (for further treatment of this idea, see Dunstan 2012). While we should be proud of the quantitative methods by which we now accurately estimate the effects of land use on wildlife, soils, and air quality, these are not the only lenses, or even sufficient lenses on their own, through which to see our effects on the natural world. Ultimately, environmental impacts are not only impacts on animals and plants, atmosphere and climate, but impacts on human beings. As such, environmental impacts are not limited to what we can test in a lab. I do not know of a test which can measure the effects of snowmaking on the living soul of a mountain. We cannot put a number on what a wooded hill means to a life-long hunter, a forest to a boy scout, a church to a believer, or a mountain to a native tribe. However, there are qualitative ways in which these voices can be heard, if ethnography is done quickly, persuasively, and as part of environmental impact assessment.

It is vitally important for anthropology, which touts itself as the human science, to also be a humane science. In that light, we should consider what our role is and could be in aiding in the struggles of indigenous peoples to have their voices heard on the management of sacred lands. These types of conflicts will continue to vex the groups we work with so long as human people categorize the world and worry about its pollution; it would not be human of us, as researchers, to turn a blind eye.