New Mexico Mercury

New Mexico Supreme Court: Judicial Respect and Dismissal

In two rulings recently the New Mexico Supreme Court reflected the deep-seated respect for diversity that the cultural traditions of our state treasure and nurture. Its rulings on marriage equality and on preserving the sacred nature of Mount Taylor reinforce the spirit of toleration and acceptance that have always been at the heart of New Mexico’s better nature.

A third decision, on the other hand, not to hear a suit against the Albuquerque Drinking Water Project, left many environmentalists and farmers in rural areas south of the city feeling frustrated and brushed aside.

These rulings show what a powerful force the state Supreme Court actually can be and how important it is to pay attention to the election, reelection, and appointment of justices.

The Court has five justices. Each is elected to a first 8-year term in statewide partisan elections.  If a justice doesn’t serve a full term, a bipartisan judicial nominating commission solicits candidates, vets them, then submits a list to the governor to choose from to make an interim appointment within 30 days. If a justice decides to run for a first full term or a second term, a statewide nonpartisan retention election must be held that requires a 57% majority for the judge to be retained.

Every two years, by majority vote, the Supreme Court chooses its own Chief Justice from those serving an elected term. The Chief Justice has extraordinary powers, including being able to make an appointment to the Supreme Court from the vetted list given to the governor if the governor fails to do so in 30 days.

I wonder how many voters are up to speed on candidates for the state Supreme Court or even really understand the power of the office.

The legalization of same sex marriage, a human right the New Mexico Mercury has strongly advocated, was brought into being by the State Supreme Court in a unanimous vote last December.  I’m sure many inattentive voters didn’t see it coming. And I’m equally sure that many voters who think they follow politics closely were surprised, and perhaps delighted, by the ruling.  Justice Edward L. Chavez, in writing the court’s decision, affirmed the unconstitutionality of  marriage inequality.

“We hold that the State of New Mexico is constitutionally required to allow same-gender couples to marry and must extend to them the rights, protections, and responsibilities that derive from civil marriage under New Mexico law.”

In other words, the N.M. Supreme Court ruled that it was unconstitutional and illegal to use gender and sexual discrimination to deprive human beings of their civil and social rights, merely because they don’t conform to majority mainstream expectations.

When it comes to Mount Taylor the Court upheld, in another unanimous ruling, one of the most important decisions ever to be made by an appointed board in state government.  The New Mexico Cultural Properties Review Committee in 2009 designated more than 400,000 acres on and around Mount Taylor northeast of Grants as a “Traditional Cultural Property.”  This followed the U.S. Forest Service’s designation a year earlier of Mount Taylor to be listed on the National Register of Historic Places.

Both designations allowed for the protection of sacred sites and archaeological and historic areas from mining operations and other acts considered to be desecrations by Laguna, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi pueblos and many others, as well as to the Navajo Nation, all of which sought the ruling. The New Mexico Mercury strongly supports their view.

Mining companies and others opposed the tribes. Public meetings in Grants became arenas of racial taunting and terrible hate speech, sometimes coming to the edge of physical violence. Heirs to land grants on the mountain were particularly troubled. The Supreme Court’s ruling, however, exempts a major land grant from the Traditional Cultural Property (TCP) designation.

The Court upheld the right of Pueblos and Navajos to be informed of plans for mining excavation, road building, dumping and other acts associated with mining and development.  The TCP doesn’t stop development, but it gives tribes the opportunity to be a part of the planning process. As it was explained to me, religious sites are often nearly invisible to non-native people. Mount Taylor has been the home of religious worship for well over a thousand years and is so to this day. No mining company from Canada or Japan, and certainly no developer, would have the faintest clue where religious and historic sites on the mountain might be.  The TCP allows the tribes at least a fair chance at protecting what’s priceless and holy in their eyes.

When the New Mexico Supreme Court refused to hear a suit brought against the Albuquerque Bernalillo County Drinking Water Project it displayed its enormous power once again. This time it was to the grave distress of environmentalists and small farmers in the rural landscape south of the city.

We don’t know what the Court was thinking. A refusal to hear a case does not require an explanation. But its non-action privileged a big city over agriculturalists who depend on the flow of the river. It was another defeat for non-city dwellers in the growing conflict between urban and rural New Mexico over water.

The suit against the city and county was brought by Amigos Bravos among other groups who were concerned that using river water to drink would lower the flow of the river and damage its ecosystem and deliver less water to farmers downstream. Albuquerque began diverting river water into its drinking water system in 2008. Previously, the city and county relied exclusively on a dwindling supply of underground water.

Amigos Bravos makes no bones about its position, one with which I generally agree. The Drinking Water Project is “a short-term and short-sighted solution to the city’s water problem. By its own models, use of diverted water will stop aquifer drawdown for only one generation, but dealing with the problem then will be complicated by the much larger size of the city’s population and water needs.”

Amigos Bravos feels that what is at stake is the “viability of 16 miles of the Rio Grande that is being dewatered through the heart of the city, and the livelihood of farmers downstream who in the past have depended on the availability of San Juan-Chama water.”

Amigos Bravos calls the Drinking Water Project a “convoluted Rube Goldberg-ianesc management plan.” It continues, “the City diverts 45,000 acre-feet of ‘native’ Rio Grande water along with an equal amount of San-Juan Chama water – and then replaces up to 45,000 acre feet of river water diverted at the northern edge of the city with treated city wastewater discharged near the southern end of the  city” thereby “dewatering” the river and the bosque in between.

While the boomer Albuquerque Journal evidenced a certain editorial delight in the Court’s refusal to hear the case, saying it told the critics of the Drinking Water Project “to dry up,” it would have served the city’s future better had a full discussion of the issues before the Court been aired in public. Water is the single most significant issue in the city’s future. Anything that stimulates discussion moves us, however slowly, in a more serious direction rather than a dismissive or flippant one. And with Texas making a move on Rio Grande waters, who knows what’s really in store in the years ahead.

Roland F. Dickey –1914 – 2000

Roland Dickey, a wise guide and trusted friend I used to call Tio, served as the editor of the University of New Mexico Press and the highly regarded New Mexico Quarterly from l956 to l966. He is the author of an iconic study entitled New Mexico Village Arts first published in l949. And he was without doubt the most rewarding correspondent any of his friends had ever encountered. Each one of his typed letters was a work of high humor and imagination.  When they arrived in the mail you’d set aside an afternoon, if you could, just to savor them.  Roland did so much and was so good to so many people that his presence in New Mexico has never really left, even though he retired to Northern California in the l990s.

As I read over his writings and try to collect my memories of this gentle, self-depreciating person whose psyche and ethics were rooted in kindness and appreciation of the gifts of others, I find myself thinking that Roland’s life represents, for me now, a world of downhome civility, of cordial perfectionism, a world of slow time and understated wisdom, a world in which nothing was really rushed compared to our own mad pace today. Roland was the master of riding the wave of time so it allowed him to do things right, to digest and mull and consider. Consideration, as I see it now, was the leitmotif of his particular genius for life.

Roland lived through the major transitions of the last century. He bemoaned the telephone as a necessary if rude interruption. He liked computers but saw them as wonderful typewriters that allowed him to correct his mistakes without a glue pot or a pair of scissors. As the world moved past him, even in his days in France during WWII, Roland collected the life around him, keeping elaborate notes organized by an even more elaborate system of color coded pieces of paper of various sizes with distinct meanings on everything from clocks, type faces, windmills, tools, music boxes, and Christmas, to cats, stones, civil rights, folk art, literature, world government and international justice. I’ve never met another person who was so steeped in the details of what it meant to live a life in the twentieth century -- in New Mexico and other rural far away places. Little escaped his curiosity. And very little could erode his welcoming joy of the day-to-day reality of living a loving life.

In his preface to New Mexico Village Arts, Roland wrote “A sympathetic study of objects and actions common to the daily lives of a people fosters understanding of their spirit and culture. We learn thus their likeness to ourselves and to all the inhabitants of the earth who eat, build shelters, and deck their bodies. At the same time, the marks which distinguish them as a group rise in sharp relief. We are led to inquire what human and environmental factors underlie these differences, and what events impel a people to evolve a trastero rather than some other form of cabinet, or to gain religious comfort from a santo rather than an ikon or a kachina.

“The commonest everyday item – a chair, a knife, a coat – invites us to speculate on the long ingenuity of man. The wooden box must have known a long evolution of experiment and logic seeking maximum storage space and portability in a unit which by its inherent geometric structure had strength. And if, as some think, the chest began as a hollow log, or, as others believe, it was once a wicker cage covered in hide – who then was clever enough to reproduce this form in slabs of wood, and what man made the transition from thong-bound sticks to mortise and tenon or tongue and groove? Mankind’s uncelebrated heroes first compounded glue, had insight to the myriad forms of the hinge, perfected the auger, painstakingly wrought levers into a lock.”

Such was the way Roland’s mind worked. Little escaped his fascination. Once he wrote a piece about telephones for Century Magazine in the early 1980s. He had accumulated numerous anecdotes and pieces of information about phones for decades and stored them in a file for when he had time to write. It took him until his early 70s. And then a torrent of wonderful pieces started to come.  Of phones he wrote, “Ambrose Bierce called the telephone ‘an invention of the devil,’ and Robert Lynd referred to it as the “greatest nuisance among conveniences, the great convenience among nuisances.’ Salvador Dali is said to have thought of the telephone as an instrument of destruction because Chamberlain’s negotiations with Hitler hastened World War II. Dali painted a somber Spanish landscape – a tawny plain with mountainous crags rising in the distance. In the foreground is a luminous fish beside a platter on which a telephone lies helpless on its back.”

Of wind in a parched land, Roland commented that “Not everything the wind brought was unpleasant. Like a rich relative, the rains didn’t come often enough, but were very welcome. Temporary lakes collected in eroded hollows and toads chorused deliriously. ‘Buffalo beans’ came into bloom and produced hard little fruits that country kids gathered and threw at each other in school – an annual ritual reserved for piñon shells in other parts of New Mexico.

“The first rain in a dry land!” writes Jassamyn West. “It smells better than lilies in July, or the ocean, or the wind in sun-washed pines, or the irrigated patch of alfalfa you reach after a long haul through dry hills. It is hard to smell that sweetness and believe in death.”

In a piece called “Chronicles of Neglected Time: Five Smooth Stones,” Roland wrote for Century that his “passion for stones, like all loves, is mainly subjective. Each garnered garnet is an aesthetic experience in itself, tactile and sculptural.  I believe that when David, enroute to his encounter with Goliath, ‘chose him five smooth stones out of the brook,’ he wasn’t thinking of wind resistance, but as a shepherd, a ground-scrutinizer, he wanted his slingstones to look and feel right.

“In my congeries of pebbles, each of them is preserved ‘like flies in amber,’ an adventure in person, place or time. Stones are like people, ‘in appearance as in heart,’ observes the Japanese hero of O.A. Bushnell’s ‘The Stone of Kannon.’ ‘Some were beautiful, most were plain, a few were actually ugly.” Roland confessed that “I still harbor smooth stones against my private Goliath, although I feel sometimes like King Sisyphus, eternally pushing a rock up a hill in Hell. But Ecclesiastes and my wife remind me that there is ‘A time to cast away stones, and a time to gather stones together.’”

I can still see Roland with his scissors and notebooks and sheets of colored paper collecting quotations from his endless reading and browsing, still arranging rocks and admiring the works of chance and other miracles on the material of earth, still true to his experience and his upbringing in Clovis, New Mexico, but ever hungry for new worlds and new insights.

I’m sure the many hundreds of writers Roland nurtured over the decades have their own afterimages of his boundless curiosity which when it encountered other human beings never saw them as objects like stones, but tended instead to morph from an intense interest into an empowering generosity that never failed to feed back to his friends the strengthening esteem in which he held them.  

I Fought a Good Fight – The Lipan Apache

Award winning and longtime New Mexico journalist and historian, Sherry Robinson, has written an engaging , admirably detailed, yet fast moving, history of the Lipan Apaches of eastern New Mexico, Texas,  Oklahoma, and Mexico. Robinson is a marvelous storyteller. Her book I Fought a Good Fight – A History of the Lipan Apaches, published last year by the University of North Texas Press, takes the reader into a violent, turbulent world in which the Lipan Apaches were, like other native Americans, struggling for survival over many decades and briefly, now and then, prevailing against indigenous enemies and colonial expansion into their territories.

Frequent enemies of the dominant Comanches, often friends of Pueblos and Plains tribes, off-and-on allies of Texas as it pulled itself away from Mexico, the Lipan Apaches are shown by Robinson in the fullness of their contradictions and paradoxes.  Willing to create alliances and trade agreements, acting as scouts, horse warriors and farmers, the Lipan were versatile and formidable.

After the Civil War, and with the United States increasingly hungry for Mexican Territory, the Lipans found themselves caught in the politics of westward expansion. “Despite frightful losses to war and disease the Lipans never surrendered,” wrote Robinson, “they simply melted away infiltrating reservations in New Mexico and Oklahoma where they had relatives, drifting, family by family, back into places they lived in Texas, or taking root in Mexican villages.”

Her book, Robinson writes in the introduction, “is neither a chronicle of empire building nor a sad tale of victimization. The Lipan’s wealth and territory expanded and contracted. In better times, when trade was good and their enemies in retreat, they might claim all the best country among many watersheds; in drought and famine, stricken by disease, or overwhelmed by their enemies, they retreated to safe havens or camps of allies.”

Robinson describes the Lipans as “guerilla fighters” who “lacked the numbers and the might of the Comanches or the military.”  They were also “guerilla traders and guerilla hunters, finding chinks in the Comanche barrier and niches in frontier markets.” In just a very few sentences Robinson transforms what to many of us are an obscure people in a time of confusing struggles into a fascinating and forceful people who deftly survived overwhelming shifts in power dynamics over centuries of conflict and who, in her words, “never gave up.”

Anyone who is interested in frontier history will be fascinated by Robinson’s account. Not only does she provide readers with descriptions of rip-roaring battles and the subtleties of trade and alliances, she gives us a glimpse of the Lipan’s cultural personality with careful portraits of Lipan leaders such as Chief Cuelgas de Castro, Picax-ande Ins-tinsle (Strong Arm), Magoosh, John Flacco, and a major source for early ethnographers into Lipan life and times, Percy Big Mouth. The great granddaughter of Chief Magoosh, Meredith Magoosh Begay, died in 2006.  A year before she died, she told Robinson that “The whole state of Texas is the Lipan Nation. We had a lot of people then. The army kept killing them. Disease kept killing them.”

And struggles with other tribes didn’t help either. Robinson tells the story of a fight, one of many, between Kickapoos and outnumbered Lipans in 1868. Midway in the tale Kickapoos found a Lipan camp at sunset with men playing a game of hoop and pole. “A Lipan sitting against a tree watching the same saw movement from the corner of his eye. Turning his head slowly, he saw a Kickapoo’s feathers. … The man sitting against the tree called out a warning, threw his blanket aside and reached for his weapons. Before most of the Lipans could pick up their weapons the Kickapoos were running amongst them. Just two Lipans were armed, one with a rifle and the other with bow and arrows. The rifle was only a single shot, and the man knew if he fired, they would get past him. He pointed it at the Kickapoos and held them off for a time, but a Kickapoo stabbed him from behind with a lance. He was still moving, so another Kickapoo hit him on the head and a third took his scalp. Still alive, he crawled away, pulled the lance from his body and used it as a cane. He made his way back to his people and later recovered. The other Lipan fought valiantly with bows and arrows but were overwhelmed and killed. The Kickapoos killed men, women and children. Later, when Lipans and Kickapoos were friends, a man in the original fight chided them: ‘What I did was what men do, but the way you people did not long ago, sneaking up on our camps and killing children who could do no harm – that is not the way men fight.’”

Though it’s perhaps clumsy to compare Native American autobiographies -- like Sun Chief: The Autobiography of a Hopi Indian by Don C. Talayesva, published in l942, or Left Handed, Son of Old Man Hat: A Navajo Autobiography by Left Handed, published in l938 -- Robinson’s history of the Lipan Apaches is every bit as engrossing as those indigenous classics. It’s because, I think, of her painstaking research, her travels to visit landscapes she writes about, her interviews, and the intimacy that her biographies within the text convey.  I Fought a Good Fight gives readers a new cultural landscape to explore, a world previously inaccessible and largely unknown. She’s done a great service to not only the Lipan but to those of us who wish to enrich our knowledge of Western history and experience.