The Valles Caldera National Preserve is a ninety-thousand-acre experiment in democracy and self-governance. This beautiful and complicated high-country landscape has deep intrinsic value of its wildlife, plants and waters. When people first see the Valle Grande, they are surprised by its immensity, its expanse, its proportions. Humans are always visitors at the Caldera, given its harsh climate, its winter snows and summer lightning storms.
The Caldera gives us a rare opportunity to really protect a large area of high country in the Southern Rockies. Most high-country public lands are heavily overgrazed by cattle. Cattle grazing eliminates hundreds of plant species, ruins stream structure, pollutes streams, and overall ruins habitat for most wildlife in the high country. Here we can restore a big, beautiful piece of land so it can provide a rare refuge for native plants and animals.
For centuries, this collapsed volcano was used by Pueblo people from many of the villages that surround it on all sides for hunting, obsidian gathering, and ceremony and recreation. Then Spanish colonists came in 1598 and claimed it for Spain, a distant country with a distant monarchy. Then Mexico ruled the region briefly from 1821 to 1848. Both Spain and Mexico granted land in the region to their citizens who chose to live in New Mexico. When the United States took New Mexico in the War with Mexico, what is now the Valles Caldera became American an American land grant to a Hispano family from near Las Vegas, NM. Over time, American courts ended the Baca land grant that included the Valles Caldera after a complicated struggle among various owners and corrupt lawyers. Then, beginning at the turn of the century, a series of private landowners abused the Caldera with overgrazing and clear-cut logging that devastated the grasslands and forests of the Caldera.
In 2000, the final private owner, the Dunnigan family willingly sold the ranch to the American people through a purchase authorized by Congress and signed off on by the President of the United States. That legislation was revised in 2014 through the same legislative process. Today the area is managed by the National Park Service, America’s premiere land management agency that sets an example for protective and accessible land management for similar agencies all around the world.
New Mexico is a complicated place given the deep human history. It is not like Montana or Idaho where Indigenous people fought over territories for centuries and then had their lands stolen by the US Military. New Mexico was quite different, and our view of land ownership here must be different too.
In the big picture, the Valles Caldera sits among a landscape crowded with the artifacts of past Pueblo settlement. To the east, the Pajarito Plateau has many old Pueblo villages in ruins on the mesas and canyons. To the north Tsi Ping, a large Tewa village is perched on a mesa on the rim of the Caldera. To the west, ancient Jemez and Zia villages and field house ruins are scattered densely on Santa Fe National Forest lands. We can see clearly that various Pueblo communities lived in the Jemez Mountains around the Valles Caldera. They live near the Caldera today. Obviously, they all visited and used the Valles Caldera.
The National Park Service acknowledges that Indian people from as far away as Oklahoma have ties to the Valles Caldera. Clearly many different Indian communities have deep and legitimate interests in the Caldera and their views must be considered as management goes forward. The Park Service is committed to working directly with them. At the same time, the Organic Act of the NPS gives direction to all park managers to preserve and protect park resources and provide access for all Americans.
Jemez Pueblo has tried to convince that courts that they have an exclusive history and interest in the Caldera and that they should have exclusive ownership of the land. They started to ask the courts for title to the 90,000 acres after it was given to the Park Service to manage in 2014. After years of litigation, the federal court rejected the idea that they were the sole users of the land before 1890 and instead gave them a partial interest in the southwest corner of the Preserve, at Banco Bonito. They will co-manage this area with the National Park Service who will retain title on behalf of all Americans.
Santa Clara Pueblo engaged with Congress in 1999 and bought, with help from nonprofit organizations, the portion of the Baca Ranch that encompasses the upper watershed of Santa Clara Creek. Jemez Pueblo made no such move at this key moment.
It is interesting that Jemez Pueblo is so focused on the Valles Caldera. In the 2014 legislation that transferred the Caldera to the NPS, Jemez Pueblo specifically got special consideration for their use of hundreds of acres at the top of Redondo Mountain and the tops of other volcanic cones in the Preserve. They also got special consideration to ask for permits to do things like kill eagles (which they did in 2023), camp where and when the public cannot, and drive places the public cannot. No other Pueblo has these specific rights.
And tribal members can visit the Preserve just like any American can year round.
Notably, the national forest lands to the west of the Valles Caldera are filled with ruins of Jemez villages. Some were occupied up until the 1700s and were refuges for the Jemez people when the Spanish were waging war on their community after the Pueblo Revolt in 1680 and the reconquest in 1692. Yet today, the Pueblo lays no claim to these public lands on the Santa Fe National Forest despite their clear ties to the Jemez People.
In 2022, I helped lite two prescribed fires in the Banco Bonito area that improved the wildlife habitat and reduced fuels for a future wildfire. I walked over a significant portion of Banco Bonito and never saw field house ruins or other archaeological sites. In fact, our burning crews were briefed by park archaeologists every morning about what historic or prehistoric resources we should be aware of so we could help protect them. Never did they mention Puebloan artifacts.
Yet just outside the NPS boundary such artifacts are very common and the Jemez people used that area heavily, probably up until the time of the Spanish. Yet they make no claim to the thousands of acres their ancestors lived on every day for hundreds of years.
Why is this? Why are they so focused on owning the Valles Caldera National Preserve but no other public lands in the Jemez Mountains? Why did they begin their quest to own this land once it became public, and not before?
Meanwhile some of the ranchers who run cattle on the north side of the caldera, outside of the Preserve have also said that they consider the Preserve to be their lands because these were former land grant lands, even if those individuals are not heirs to that land particular land grant. They have said they should be able to graze their cattle there because of the history of Spanish land ownership in the area. This claim bears none of the weight of the Pueblo claims but it shows how history bears on New Mexico public lands in ways it does not in other Western states.
Ultimately, the fact that the National Park Service manages the Valles Caldera for all Americans makes sense, given the number of people who have a sense of ownership. Public lands are owned by all Americans and accessible to all Americans including Tribal members, descendants of Spanish colonizers, longtime residents or people who are visiting New Mexico for the first time ever.
For decades, the Baca Ranch was closed to the public. People could look in from over the fences but could face unpleasant situations if they trespassed and were caught by “cowboys” who worked for the private owners. To this day, many New Mexicans still can’t fathom that this land is open to them, and they can walk down from the highway to the Jemez River and do so completely legally. Let’s keep it that way.
Let’s continue to improve conversations between various cultures and the National Park Service.
