copyright 2008 by George Johnson
Buffalo Thunder Casino and Resort. photos by George Johnson, copyright 2008
1. Retrofit Arithmetic (and Rainbarrel Economics)
2. The San Juan-Chama Shell Game
3. The Case of the Disappearing Aquifer
4. The Creative Hydrology of Suerte del Sur
5. The City, the County, and a Water Tax Revolt
6. Water Numerology at City Hall
(Our story thus far)
7. The Woman at Otowi Gauge
8. "Forget it, Jake. It's Chinatown."
9. The Las Campanas Connection
(Our story continues)
10. The Engineering Solution
August 24, 2008
54. Buffalo Thunder
Driving last Sunday past Camel Rock, on my way to the new Buffalo Thunder resort and casino, I thought about an evening I spent in 1992 playing bingo at Tesuque Pueblo. I was just starting to write Fire in the Mind, and a visit to Tesuque's bingo hall seemed like a perfect way to introduce one of the book's themes: the tension in life between randomness and order. Sitting on folding chairs inside a corrugated-steel building, where Camel Rock Casino now stands, we marked our cards as the emcee called out numbers. I left a little poorer but with some good material for the book.
This was before the state of New Mexico agreed, under the Federal Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, to allow tribes to run full-scale gambling operations. Some, like Pojoaque, were doing so anyway, and the pueblo's governor, Jake Villarreal, threatened to open a nuclear waste dump if the state tried to interfere with his casino plans.
Ultimately New Mexico caved and gambling became legal. That, for better or for worse, is how Indian sovereignty is supposed to work: it is granted legislatively by the United States Congress and is subject to regulation. Now there are six casinos between Santa Fe and Velarde. With the opening of Buffalo Thunder, three of them are owned by Pojoaque Pueblo.
As I pulled into the parking lot, geysers of water were erupting from the putting greens. Between the casino and the highway was a large, scooped-out depression -- a settling pond for runoff or a future lake. In an interview with the Reporter, John "Duff" Taylor, who came from Nevada to run gambling at Buffalo Thunder, recently compared the place to the Bellagio, one of the most grandiose casinos on the Las Vegas Strip.
I was in Las Vegas last summer to write about a symposium called Magic and Consciousness at a hotel across from Caesar's Palace. Between sessions I wandered through the Bellagio and my favorite, the Venetian, where gondoliers navigate an indoor Grand Canal, winding their way to an air-conditioned Piazza San Marco.
For all the water and energy it is consuming, Buffalo Thunder is not even close. From the outside it looks more than anything like a Scottsdale golf resort, a place where you might see John McCain. Downstairs, off the main entrance, is one more dark, crowded, clanging casino, already acquiring the ineradicable odor of spilt beer and smoke. It was not yet noon and gamblers, a disproportionate number of them with walkers, electric scooters, or wheelchairs, were already clinging to the slot machines and roulette tables. I doubt that many of them made it upstairs, where a spacious promenade, lined with a veneered imitation of Anasazi stonework, led past high-end shops, restaurants, and galleries to the hotel lobby. There was no one in the jacuzzi or the swimming pool.
When I was growing up in Albuquerque, the Indians were the good guys. I believed it when I read that they had a special relation to the sky, the water, and the land. I remember the magic of a Christmas Eve at Acoma when the road to the mesa top was lined with luminarias (north of La Bajada they are called farolitos) and a bonfire burned in front of the church. One cold November night during college, I stood with some friends at Zuni, transfixed by the Mudheads of Shalako. It was thrilling to think of a better world hidden within the corrupt corporate culture of America. Privately I hoped for a second Pueblo Revolt.
I know good things have come from Indian self-determination. But as I headed back down the Strip toward Santa Fe, I was met with another of the abuses: the enormous cellphone towers built on a patch of Nambe Pueblo trust land to circumvent county height regulations. Last I heard the pueblo had scaled back plans for its own space-age theme casino with an indoor amusement park. Maybe the market is finally becoming saturated.
Before going home, I turned into the Tesuque Flea Market, thinking it would be fun to take pictures. But I was stopped by the sign. "No Cameras. No Sketching."
Why? I can understand the rationale for suspending First Amendment rights at ceremonial dances. The rituals are considered sacred, and as spectators we are guests on the land. But the flea market?
A secrecy that arose four centuries ago to shield tribal religious beliefs from the Franciscan overseers has become pandemic. Nobody questions this. Some $40 million of public money was spent to build the new campus at the Santa Fe Indian School. But neither the school nor its administrator, the All Indian Pueblo Council, is held accountable for laying waste to historically protected buildings, which were also constructed with federal funds. The New Mexican would rather opinionate about downtown parking, while Zane Fischer in the Reporter suggests that it is disrespectful to insist that the tribes obey the same federal laws that bind us all.
We have heard nothing from Governor Richardson, Senators Bingamen or Domenici, or Congressman Udall. This is, after all, an election year. From the perspective of the pueblo leaders, the timing of the destruction was pitch perfect.
August 26, 2008
There is something poignant about Dave Maass of the Reporter aspiring to be Norman Mailer at Chicago '68 as he blogs from the Democratic National Convention in Denver. The closest thing he has found so far to a riot has been a blocked-off street where police were quietly arresting protesters engaging in civil disobedience. "Something very strange going on," he muses and, video camera in hand, slides behind a curtain in a hotel ballroom to watch from the window. "Sure looked like we were living in a police state," he later wrote. "But then again, everyone seemed quite calm and safe on the ground."
The real action, it turns out, was happening one street over where officers used pepper spray to subdue a crowd near Civic Center Park. The Rocky Mountain News covered the story while Mr. Maass went off to Governor Richardson's poolside party.
Meanwhile David Alire Garcia, who recently left the Reporter to help start the New Mexico Independent (an effort we'll be writing more about soon), has been filing point-and-shoot reports about the New Mexico delegation. On the day before the convention, he attended a "blogger training" session at the Colorado Media Matters office (we're not told what that is) where one of the speakers argues "that online journalists are on the ground floor of a new model of journalism that will eventually be the norm. And soon."
God, I hope not. These uncogitated, you-are-here snippets pale beside the craftsmanship of a real pro like the New Mexican's Steve Terrell. Be sure to read his piece in this morning's paper: "New Mexico delegates schmooze and booze at convention." Mr. Terrell is also having fun blogging, but when he's done he goes back to his hotel room to do the real work.
One week ago Donald Sutherland, the Federal Preservation Officer at the BIA's national headquarters in Virginia, told me via email that his office has no records pertaining to the transfer of the Santa Fe Indian School campus into a trust controlled by the All Indian Pueblo Council. He referred me to Bruce Harrill, the Regional Archeologist for the BIA's office in Albuquerque. By the end of the week, an email I sent Mr. Harill had not been answered so I faxed and then mailed a certified letter to the regional director, Larry Morrin:
August 22, 2008 Dear Mr. Morrin: I am writing to ask your office whether, under Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act, protections were put into place on the historic buildings at the Santa Fe Indian School before they were transferred through a trust to the All Indian Pueblo Council. I also request copies of the relevant documents -- deeds, covenants, etc. -- turning over responsibility for the property to the trust. Many thanks in advance. I look forward to hearing from you. Sincerely yours, George Johnson
If this doesn't work I guess I'll have to file a Freedom of Information Act request.
Postscript
I received an email from Dave Maass of the Reporter offering some context for the video he posted last night about the police nonaction in downtown Denver. The scene was the aftermath, he explained, of the bigger melee covered by the Denver press.
I had missed the earlier action because I was covering Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama's addresses at the Pepsi Center. I left to attend the Richardson party because a) I'm a NM journalist and I'm supposed to be covering NM stuff and b) I'd gotten all I could at the scene. I posted that video at 4:30 am, well before newspapers hit the stands and well before I could've put all the pieces together. And after posting it, I had to be up up at 6:30 am to make the New Mexico delegate breakfast. Surely, you can cut some slack to a solitary, low-budget journalist covering both the protests and the politics when the Rocky Mountain News has a team to cover both.
Good point. Mr. Maass has been doing fine work for the Reporter, and I look forward to what he writes, on paper, about his Denver exploits.
Coming next: Santa Fe's long-range water plan.
A Special Report: The Mysterious Destruction of the Santa Fe Indian School
The Tom Ford Webcam (stolen July 7, 2008, back online July 17)
The Andrew and Sydney Davis Webcam
Who Owns the Plaza? (this may take a minute or so to load)
A Stroll Along Shirley Maclaine Boulvevard
The Santa Fe Review
In Patagonia
More links:
See the current flow of the Santa Fe River above McClure Reservoir with the USGS automated gauge.
The Otowi gauge shows the flow of the Rio Grande north of Santa Fe.
Santa Fe water information, a collection of documents and links
