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.
1999 Fall
Spirituality and the Native Earth
1999 Fall | Verna Williamson
Verna Williamson, Isleta Pueblo tribe's former and first woman Governor, speaks about how a small New Mexico tribe flabbergasted the Environmental Protection Agency by demanding freedom of religion through water-quality standards high enough for its religious ceremonies.
Redwoods: Reminders of Place
1999 Fall | Carl Ross North America has been blessed with one of the richest and most varied forest ecosystems the world has ever known. Certainly, no forests surpass the beauty of the hardwood groves of the Smoky Mountains or the moss-draped evergreen forests of our Olympic peninsula. Of all species on earth, redwoods are indisputably the champions. Among the oldest trees, living more than two thousand years, and absolutely the tallest, growing to nearly four hundred feet in height, a single towering redwood is one of the largest plants or animals ever to exist--larger than the blue whale, larger even than the brontosaurus.
Millions of years ago, when the climate was moist and warm, redwood forests covered more than half of what is now the United States. Following subsequent ice ages, most redwood forests were replaced by prairies and hardwood and evergreen forests. Fortunately, the redwoods were still able to grow along a five hundred mile stretch of the west coast, from the San Francisco Bay to the mouth of the Rogue River in Southern Oregon. For the last ten thousand years, the California redwood forests flourished in harmony with the hunter-gatherer cultures of Native Americans living amidst them.
Permaculture America Latino
1999 Fall | Suzy Loeffler I sit with the old Shipibo Medicine man on the raised, wooden floor of his open- walled home. A palm thatched roof shades us from the tropical sun. He looks beyond me with gray, sightless eyes as he tells stories of how his people once lived. With decrepit fingers he draws pictures in the air of pathways through dense forests where the Shipibo hunted wild pigs and gathered food, herbs, and medicines. His stories describe the Peruvian Amazon that existed before the roads, when the forest averaged about 135 tree species per square mile. The diversity of plants was even greater. Amphibians, insects, and the more elusive mammals lived in a system of coexistence so elaborate it is difficult for me to imagine. The old man explains that the Shipibo were a part of the forest and the river ecosystem for thousands of years, and they needed nothing more.
Laughter and voices reach us from the river, where most of the village has gathered to escape the oppressive midday heat. I notice the tools and seeds abandoned on the outskirts of the women's garden. Next door, a man continues his work in the plant nursery, where tiny seedlings are protected by the shade of a thatched roof. There is a boy in the pond outside the nursery, fishing from a traditional Amazonian dugout canoe. He lunges from the canoe into the brown water with a thin spear. The pond where he practices, the nursery, and the garden are part of the village's Permaculture project.
Natives
1999 Fall | David James Duncan Author's note: I've kept the diction of this essay casual to remind readers that it was originally a talk--given on a sternwheel riverboat moored on the Willamette River, to an Oregon flyfisher's club on their 25th anniversary, while the salmon in the current beneath us were fighting for their political lives. Due to the salmon's desperate plight, this talk featured an equally desperate artistic act: my acapella singing debut. The flyfishers joined in. We rocked the river. I trust the salmon heard.
I'd like to think aloud about a single English word: the word "native." If this sounds to some like thin entertainment, let me lay that worry to rest: I am thin entertainment. I'm native entertainment, though. Maybe that's the trouble: my native land is the Columbia River Basin. Looking at my Basin's native salmon count, native big game and bird counts, native tree counts, Native American count, I see a thin native world fast growing thinner. That's why I want to think about this word now: if I wait much longer, native could become a verb meaning "to vanish."
Mockingbird: The Gift of Birdsong
1999 Fall | David Graves It is late summer in the city of San Francisco and I miss the mockingbird's welcome song of last spring. I did see the bird briefly this afternoon while I came in through my cottage garden, but it quickly flew off silently. It's the silence I'm concerned about. Every springtime I am relieved to hear again the melodic chatter of the courting song that so characterizes the presence of that handsome bird of grey, white, and black plumage. The Northern Mockingbird is scientifically named Mimus polyglottos, from the family Mimidae, often called "mimic thrushes," a family which includes thrashers, catbirds, and mockingbirds. Worldwide there exist 35 species of these birds, all in the New World.
It has been 37 years since the publication of Rachel Carson's Silent Spring. The alert was sounded, some progress made in protecting bird populations from the effects of pesticides, particularly in bringing back from the brink of extinction birds like the peregrine falcon and brown pelican. Yet, where I live, in the Outer Mission district, San Francisco, a paved over, hardened urban neighborhood, the bird habitat of trees, both lining the streets and growing in back yards, is a rarity. My only relief against the deadening landscape is a five-minute walk to a 318-acre urban park, McLaren Park, still largely undeveloped for human recreation in a section of the peninsula swept by scathing, fog-laden winds from the Pacific. There, red-shouldered hawks still screech in mid-air while performing aerodynamic displays of agility; ravens croak while soaring black-figured against leaden skies; and white-crowned sparrows flit about about in dense coyote brush, trilling to each other in their characteristic, melodic song.
