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By Susan Montoya Bryan
Zia Pueblo, New Mexico (AP) 6-09

After years of drought and livestock grazing, a spring sacred to an American Indian tribe in north-central New Mexico has dried up, and now the concern is that erosion, climate change and the region’s growing demand for water will keep the spring from recovering.

So Zia Pueblo, a restoration ecologist and a team of volunteers are doing some heavy lifting to get the spring flowing again.

What’s happening on the land south of the pueblo is also happening in other parts of the world as rivers run dry and groundwater supplies begin to dwindle. Alan Hamilton, conservation director of the New Mexico Wildlife Federation, said people – regardless of their cultural differences – need to work together to find solutions.

“I really think we’re at a place, a crossroads, a threshold where we have to start living differently and more responsibly,” said Hamilton, who helped organize the restoration project at Zia. “We have to figure out a way of being more attentive to things and to be able to respond to things before the trauma becomes insurmountable.”

The trauma in this case was the drying of the spring, where generations of Zia tribal members would make pilgrimages each year during the summer solstice to draw water. The water from this spring and others would then be taken back to the pueblo, which sits at the foot of the Jemez Mountains.

“That water is used as a seed that they plant so that we can have days like today,” Pino said as the rain continued to fall.

“Everything that we do within our lives in the pueblo has to do with realizing that we don’t have much water,” he said, pointing to traditions such as drawing water from the springs and celebrating feast days.

While different communities are responding to pressures on natural resources in different ways, Pino said society as a whole needs to realize that it cannot continue to exploit what nature has provided if it wants to ensure a good quality of life for future generations.

“We should accept the fact that we are part of Mother Earth and that we don’t own it,” he said. “It’s really ownership that is a foreign concept to tribes. ... In the past, everything was shared by the people, the animals, the birds, the insects, the plants, all of that.”

The volunteers seemed to forget about the rain and mud as they worked until Pino pointed out one of the rock dams was already doing its job. A small pool of water was forming behind the rocks.

“If you try to assist nature, you can make things happen,” he said.

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