Our Lands Are a Gift and Our Stewardship Can Help Protect It
By Dr. Eric Romero, HCLC member from New Mexico and faculty member at the New Mexico Highlands University in the Department of Language and Culture.
I'm from a small rural community on the outskirts of Walsenburg, Colorado. It is at the north end of the Cucharas River, about 200 feet away from the acequia of Los Vigiles near the foothills of the Sangre de Cristo. The area skirts the Wahatoya mountains, and two majestic 13,000-foot elevation peaks.
I grew up with 50 miles of juniper, cedar, and piñon forest as a backyard. My family had different levels of interacting with the landscape: hunting, fishing, play, recreation, use of medicinal herbs, gardening, and various other activities.
The history of this area is of a land-based economy, a land-based culture, and a land-based ideology of how we work with our natural environment rather than try to dominate it.
Many of us consider the area of Southern Colorado, where I am from, as northern New Mexico or even northern Mexico if we acknowledge the history of this region. Most importantly, we recognize this territory as a Native American land, the home of the original stewards, including the Apache, Comanche, Kiowa, and Ute peoples that have lived in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico for an eternity.
With the Spanish colonization, practices and ideas on land changed and mixed up with Native American behaviors. During this period, the land grant (encomienda) system was established, which gave colonizers the legal right to demand labor from Indigenous peoples, which was very difficult for Native American communities.
But the land grants created working relationships between communities in their landscape. The concept of “repartimiento”(sharing and cooperation) incorporated European practices on land ownership and Native American practices on land ownership and land stewardship.
The history of the Southwest is the history of common lands developed from the Spanish and Mexican systems combined with Native American ideologies and practices.
We recognize that our common lands are a gift. We have a relationship with stewardship and responsibility rather than ownership of the landscape around us.
These public lands, or shared lands were to be held in common by a larger population and monitored and managed to the degree that they were available to all. It is a design for equity in natural resource sharing. A socialist system, in essence, that ensures that all members of a community have equity in access.
When the United States government came into place and occupied these lands, there was a sense of loss. Within 30 years, 80% of the land grants were lost to chicanery and different forms of land appropriation.
Communities that have lived off the mountains and the landscape for hundreds of years, if not millennia, were suddenly disrupted and taken out of the management practices of these lands that they've lived with and survived upon for the longest time.
Even today, there's still this sense of cultural and social memory among the people here in New Mexico and Colorado who feel that we lost our lands appropriated from us by the government or unscrupulous land speculators.
So now, we want to access, not just in the sense of having access. We want to be part of a management practice that allows for traditional use patterns on public and common lands. That's what we had in place for hundreds of years until the disruptions of a new government.
Hopefully, management and communication practices are now being reassessed.
I currently live in Las Vegas, New Mexico, one of the impacted areas by the Calf Canyon/Hermit’s Peak Fire, the largest and most devastating wildfire in the history of New Mexico.
It's very much identified and suggested that the cause of this wildfire was because there was no communication with local communities in managing the landscape. If there had been management practices in alignment with historical and cultural heritage considerations of traditional land use, perhaps, this fire would have been smaller and not taken away half of a mountain for us.
Part of my personhood and my identity is being part of a landscape, and this is a common sentiment among the people of this region.
This is a heritage component of our identity in the Southwest, particularly in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico. We recognize the animals of the mountain as an extended family. There's a spiritual bonding with the landscape, and to be separated from it, it's a loss of a limb, a loss of personality, and a loss of character.
Therefore, there is a need for us, as Raza, as Mestizos, or as mixed-blood peoples, to come together and bring forward this juxtaposition of cultural ideas and ideologies of practices. It is vital to let our perspective on conservation and land use practices be known.
We want to protect these lands, but we also want to monitor and be careful about human management, particularly when it gets to areas of natural resource exploitation in appropriations, because there has to be a discussion as to how it impacts local communities, local heritage, and personal identity issues.
As a member of HECHO's Hispanic Conservation Leadership Council, I hope to be part of the orchestration of voices that let entities and decision-makers know that there's a deeper meaning to conservation practice as it incorporates not only traditional use but the idea of understanding cultural identity and spirituality that's anchored in the land.