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A superb and thorough opinion by Richard Moe appeared in the New York Times, slightly summarized here:
In northwestern New Mexico's high desert lie the threatened ruins of Chaco Canyon containing the remnants of kivas, ancient roads and sacred places built a millennium ago by indigenous people proficient in architecture, agriculture, astronomy and the arts. This is at risk from the Trump administration in allowing oil-and-gas drilling.In the early 20th century, when archaeologists became alarmed by the plunder and damage to some of these accessible and fragile sites, Chaco Canyon was the catalyst for Congress's protection by authorizing the president to declare them national monuments. Theodore Roosevelt signed the Antiquities Act in 1906, and in 1907 he invoked it to declare Chaco one of the first national monuments deserving the protection of the United States government.
Chetro Ketl, another of the large structures known as great houses that were built by indigenous inhabitants of Chaco Canyon. The surrounding area is the domain of the Bureau of Land Management and the Bureau of Indian Affairs whose missions do not emphasize protecting historically significant sites. The 2 agencies previously agreed to defer all new drilling leases within a 10-mile radius of Chaco until consultations could be completed with affected communities and tribes. The B.L.M. district manager says the bureau plans to lease 26 parcels of land in the area.
The governors of northern New Mexico's pueblos and the Navajo Nation, with their ancestral sacred ties to Chaco, called for a moratorium on all drilling in the area until the consultations have been completed.
Once drilling begins, with no restrictions on the use of fracking under the existing management plan, the site will come to a bad ending. (More than 400 fracking wells have been approved in the region.) The closer the drilling gets to Chaco, the more it destroys the context of the site and its sacred places and spiritual connection.
Concentrated fracking, when coupled with the injection of salt water into disposal wells, can lead over time to multiple earthquakes - phenomena that, combined with the impact of heavy trucks, would almost certainly be more than these fragile structures could withstand. One need only look at the pockmarked face of neighboring Oklahoma around Cushing, where officials worry that earthquakes caused by this process seriously threaten a large oil-tank farm. But unlike tank farms, which have limited life spans, Chaco Canyon was intended to last forever.
The National Congress of American Indians issued a strong appeal for an moratorium on leasing and drilling until the BLM "initiate and complete an ethnographic study of the cultural landscapes of the Greater Chaco Region." Because of ties of history, ancestry and geography, it has a special meaning to the native peoples who view it as sacrosanct.
Chaco Canyon was constructed over a period of 300 years by a highly developed civilization that had celestial knowledge that has been lost to us. We can only hope that these mysteries remain in the Greater Chaco Region waiting to be revealed, if this special place is not further disturbed.
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Native Activists Halt New Drilling Near New Mexico's Chaco Canyon
IN ITS HEYDAY--roughly the 11th century--Chaco was the apogee of civilization in what is now the United States. Until the 19th century, its 15 major buildings were the largest in North America. Pueblo Bonito, the biggest, has as many as 800 rooms and more than 30 kivas, perfectly cylindrical sunken rooms marked by holes in the floor called sipapus, symbolic reminders of the opening to the Third World below, from which Pueblo and Navajo people believe their ancestors emerged. The largest kiva at Chaco is at Casa Rinconada, on the far side of the canyon from Pueblo Bonito; in midsummer, the rising sun will shine in a window, neatly illuminating a niche in the opposite wall.....Then came Trump, who is apparently deaf to native concerns. He chose a ceremony honoring the few remaining Navajo code talkers from World War II to once again call Massachusetts senator Elizabeth Warren "Pocahontas." He drastically shrank the Bears Ears National Monument in the face of near-unified tribal resistance. And pursuant to Trump's policy of "energy dominance," the Farmington BLM office readied a lease sale for March 2018 of nearly 4,500 acres in the greater Chaco area, including sites only 10 miles from the historic ruins.
The response was overwhelming--but not in the way Trump and the BLM envisioned. The proposed sale drew hundreds of calls for a moratorium on fracking and horizontal drilling in the greater Chaco region--"the most appeals ever received around an oil-and-gas lease sale in New Mexico," according to Sobel. Representative Lente got the state legislature to ask the BLM not to issue further leases in the Chaco area until a new resource-management plan was in place. The National Congress of American Indians added its voice. And in a strong show of unity (their peoples have a somewhat prickly history), Navajo Nation president Russell Begaye and the All Pueblo Council of Governors joined the call, along with New Mexico's entire congressional delegation.
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