Tenacious Taosenos: the Perils and Paradox of Paradise

Here in remote Taos Valley, the Taosenos are entering a fourth year of drought (whose counting?). The drought threatens the local agricultural and acequia culture, a culture historically limited by the thin topsoil of the high desert and short growing season, a decidedly obvious lack of natural resources in comparison to the more verdant riverine areas only forty miles south. Even as the indigenous, historic, and transient cultures have frequently resorted to both organized and unorganized principles of prayer, and not unlike the radical evangelicals, who believe the Mid East conflagration might lead to the “rapture,” so the local hopeful have called for a Global Climate Convergence Conference.

Just as desperate empiricists during dry years call on Taos Pueblo to perform rain or snow dances, so today’s hopeful ones call on the Great Spirit to soften the hearts of the selfish elites or better yet, cast out the devils—the frackers—that benumb them. Even the wealthy ones have grandchildren, who will suffer from fouled drinking water or miss the joy of catch and release due to the diminished number of trout in the Rio Grande. The people of the valley are caught between the upstream mining industry that pollutes and the burgeoning downstream population that demands the once and future clean and cool water born high up in the mountains.

Yet here in “The Paradox of Paradise,” the attitude of survival, prompted by tenacity and leavened by laughter, overcomes tragedy. Historically, the natives of Taos Pueblo survived the Anasazi diaspora, due to their separate and transcendent emanation from Blue Lake and longtime residence along the fertile Rio Pueblo. Taos Pueblo residents continue not necessarily to thrive but to live.

From a few families, due as much to adaptation, see slave trade and miscegenation among the natives, the Hispanic occupiers of the 16th and 17th Centuries multiplied and survived. Despite revolting from time to time against the Spanish imperialists or slaughtering the Americano’s first duly appointed Governor, i.e. Mr. Bent, both the Native Americans and Hispanic Nativos have endured. Even as their most famous 19th Century second homer, Kit Carson, brought nationwide attention to the tiny village, so the villages of the valley capitalized on the famed rendezvous of mountain men in emulation of Taos Pueblo’s tradition as gathering place for Western and Midwestern Indian tribes.

So the 20th Century Broken Wheel gang arrived with their easels and paint pots, even as the serial killer and land grabber Arthur Manby set a new standard for swindling and skullduggery, not to mention setting a bad example for a local banker. Then came Mabel Dodge Luhan and the Moderns, complementing the Taos Society of Artists and their descendants, while stimulating the never-ending feud between realists and abstract artists.

Just past mid 20th Century, the extraordinary age of Dennis Hopper and the Hippies began, an age of conflicting values, love and peace, kidnapping and shooting, even as Taos Pueblo celebrated the extraordinary return of Blue Lake, a triumph of local politics, which pitted do-gooders, social engineers, and the indigenous natives against both local naysayers and supporters of the ABM treaty in Washington D.C. Hence, indigenous Taosenos turned Richard Nixon into a symbol of righteous justice at home if not abroad in Southeast Asia.

But the Taosenos were not finished with reclaiming their due from the nation and once again Congress pledged support for the people of the valley, some $150 million to buy off the feuding parties in a water rights dispute, circa 2006. Course we’re well aware of the Broadband boogie woogie be-bop bringing high octane telecommunications i.e. a $60 million dollar project for our 32,000 folks in Taos County and 29,000 metered members of the KCEC Coop, courtesy the President’s ARRA federal funds, grants and loans directed at us for the sake of the spy masters and other entertainers.

Then Interior Secretary Ken Salazar of Manassa, Colorado, who lives not a stone’s throw from the Rio Grande, signed off on 220 thousand acres to preserve and protect the sage and pinon, semi-arid confines of desert, home to ancient flora and fauna in northern Taos County only months ago.  So now come the flotsam and jetsam of alternative lifers, with and without trust funds, who trundle back and forth across the bridge between time-warped versions of the 19th and 21st Centuries and who enjoy the pristine countryside or take time out to enjoy the Rio Grande Del Norte Monument visitor’s center at the hyper modern Quonset hut aka High Mesa Brewery. These pilgrims pass by on Highway 64 over the magnificent bridge and terminus for despair from shack and shed, from earthship and Hogan, from school bus and jerry-rigged dwelling place to the pub while passing by the detritus at a modern landfill and the sunbaked tarmac at a local airport.

Again the Feds in the form of the FAA have funded Taosenos and their flyby visitors with another cross-cultural source of tension via a grant of some $24 million. The latest subsidy from the federal government for the bourgeois (Not Jean Louis!) will help, they say, the Taos tourist industry—perhaps another rendezvous? And the local gente squeal not as one but as many, while “biting the hand” that feeds the ego and the appetite.

Even as the peacemakers have come to Town and County, exhausted by internecine battling, so the utopian futurists and sentimentalists of yore express themselves in tried and true Taos fashion: “If we can’t fight with each other, we’ll fight the feds and vice versa.” Where you see a windmill or a tarmac, Don Quixote sees a Giant Osprey or a runway designed to house Obama’s killer drones.

But as Sancho Panza said, “Because I know you I don’t listen.” So we pray to dandelions between the sagebrush and the sunsets and say to ourselves: “T’was always thus.” If Moses were talking to God today, he might refer to Taosenos, not as the chosen but as “a stiff-necked people.”