I'm from Isleta Pueblo, which is located about thirteen miles south of Albuquerque. Our reservation abuts the City of Albuquerque south. We've been there for a long, long time. I imagine there are anthropologists out there that can give us some dates, which we don't agree with, but we've been here for a very long time. Back in the 1500's we started seeing changes coming our way and those have continued, many times in a bad way for us. The population of my community is about 12,000. We have about 4,000 tribal members and then we have probably about 6,000 to 8,000 people who live on the reservation. Our reservation is about 250,000 square acres and that land is comprised of a river valley which is where the Rio Grande runs.
The Rio Grande runs right through our reservation, right down the middle of it. The topography of our land is such that the village, the pueblo itself, is right in the valley. Albuquerque being upstream from us, we get everything that comes out of the City of Albuquerque, including bad air and bad water and, a lot of times, bad people. So we are dealing with that in our community at Isleta.
The Pueblo people are a very traditional people. We consider ourselves to be some of the more traditional of the tribes in the nation. There are about 400 or 500 tribes in the United States and there are 19 Pueblos in New Mexico, starting with Taos Pueblo at the north and ending at the southern portion of Pueblo land which is Isleta Pueblo.
Also adjacent to the reservation, right on our north boundary are Sandia National Laboratories and Kirtland Air Force Base. Sandia National Laboratories, as some of you may know, has been involved over the years with different kinds of experimentation and development of weapons using radioactive materials. In 1989-90, the Sandia National Laboratories people approached the City of Albuquerque Council requesting them to amend their wastewater quality standards to allow for more low-level radioactive waste to enter the Rio Grande River.
Being that we're two inches from the Albuquerque line, that water is going to be immediately entering our reservation. Besides that, which we felt was a very serious situation, we're dealing with all the wastewater that comes out of the waste treatment facility plant in Albuquerque, located six miles north of our reservation. This facility dumps right into the river, which comes immediately on to the reservation. Our community is a farming community. Our people have made their living for many centuries by farming and so we are looking at the effects of that water coming into the river, into our irrigation canals, into our ditches and eventually watering our food, and eventually getting into the food chain.
So we started having water fairs trying to bring the level of awareness up in our community because we needed support to confront the City of Albuquerque, which is a city that's not used to being confronted by a little tribe. In fact, I think we awakened them to the fact that there was a tribe that lives right down the road from them.
Our plan and our goal was to establish water quality standards for the Pueblo of Isleta that would exceed, certainly not only the city's water quality standards but the state's and everyone else's for that matter. We were able to get that opportunity when there were some amendments made to the Clean Water Act which gave the tribes the right to establish water quality standards on their reservations.
We pursued that process working very closely with the Environmental Protection Agency out of Region 6. They gave the Pueblo of Isleta money to do some model projects and we eventually worked our way to establishing water quality standards for our community. Our water quality standards are drinking water standards and everybody in Albuquerque's hair stood up because they thought we were out of our minds to establish a water quality standard that was so strict. It was very strategic certainly on our part. Why start any lower than that? They're going to try to pound us down anyway so we figured we might as well start at the highest quality of level that we could.
Many of the local governments north of us gave us support through resolutions and letters, which we used as we sat and talked with the City of Albuquerque and also with the EPA. It took us 18 months to get William Riley to come to Isleta Pueblo and visit us. We made him take a swim. He finally realized that we were right, we do need to clean up the Rio Grande. He sent a team of people in their white suits to Isleta a few weeks later and they did a soil testing and water testing. We were real happy about that, but it was interesting that we had to go through so much trouble, and it took us a long time to be able to get the man down there.
The interesting part of our fight with the City of Albuquerque is that not only are we asserting that the water quality is detrimental to the health and environment of our people and our community, we're also bringing forth the issue of religious freedom. At the end of each summer we complete a month-long ceremony in Isleta Pueblo, which is a combination of the solstice ceremony, leading us into fall and winter, and a harvest ceremony. This particular ceremony lasts for a month and culminates with dancing, cleansing and bathing in the river and ingesting river water. We have a number of other very sacred ceremonies that also require ingestion of that water or to immerse in it. For the last ten or fifteen years our religious elders have been very concerned that the water is too dangerous to drink. Now, we've learned low-level radioactive waste is going into the river water from the reference labs and the hospitals and also from Sandia Labs, and that it's very unsafe to even go into the water.
It's a perspective that hasn't been brought forth before. I think that EPA officials that were at the table with us that day were just flabbergasted. What are you talking about, religious freedom? This is a new idea. We've never heard of it. What are you talking about? What we're saying is if we can't drink the water we cannot complete our ceremonies because the water is not clean. If we can't drink it because of all the toxins in it, then our religious freedom is being impinged upon. We cannot complete our ceremonies the way we should. And that is a very serious situation for Indian people.
The environmental issue is a very spiritual one and I think it takes the understanding and recognition that water and all natural resources are really spirits. Indian people recognize that and so when those spirits are wounded or soiled, if you will, then it's very much of a degradation of that particular spirit. And we're all paying for it. So it's very important that we recognize the power of these spirits. We have no control over them. They are very powerful and if we're not real careful how we treat them, we may be seeing some very serious end to us, because the spirits can only put up with so much. They are very real. I think after a long time of being underground with our religion and many of our sacred beliefs, I think Pueblo people are finally beginning to become a little bit more open about it. We are beginning to share it a little bit more, because we're finding that it's very important that the world recognizes the spirituality of it all.
Excerpted from a talk given at the 1998 Bioneers Conference in San Francisco. For information about the annual Bioneers Conference contact the Collective Heritage Institute toll-free at 1-877-BIONEER; website: www.bioneers.org.
�1999 Talking Leaves
Summer/Fall 1999
Volume 9, Number 2
A Sense of Place
We welcome your letters!
For a sample copy of the Summer/Fall 1999 issue, "A Sense of Place," send $6 to
