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| Ojito |
April 25, 2006 |
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 Dear Friends,
We drove ten miles from the turn-off of Route 550 near San Ysidro to the spot we all planned to meet. Don King was the first to raise his voice and greet me in the parking lot. His voice is a dead ringer for his brother, former Governor Bruce King. As I remember it, the King brothers, Don, Sam and Bruce were the first ones to talk to me about the Ojito.
Several years ago now, Bruce unfurled a map of the area near Zia Pueblo where he and his brothers ranched on my office coffee table in Washington. He told me that Zia Pueblo would be coming to see me and that everybody had been working together on some land swaps and so forth and, as ranchers, they wanted to let me know that they thought it would be okay. The Zia people were good stewards of the land and I should take a look at the whole package and give it some consideration.
While we are from different parties, I have always liked the Kings. There`s a hard, dry no-nonsense directness about them. They`re honest men who work hard.
Not too long after that I met with Peter Pino, long time tribal administrator and then Governor of Zia Pueblo. Getting to know him and his family has been a real joy. Zia Pueblo is divided into two pieces and this land swap would give them the rights to buy some BLM land so that their Pueblo would once again be whole. In return, they would protect the land from development and maintain public access to it.
 The Ojito had been designated as a Wilderness Study Area many years ago. In the early 1990s, Manuel Lujan as Secretary of the Interior recommended 11,000 acres of it be formally designated as wilderness under the 1964 Wilderness Act, and the wilderness coalition folks were eager to get that done.
All these land transfers and designations would take an act of Congress, and a lot of local cooperation. So in the last Congress, Tom Udall and I introduced the Ojito Wilderness Act. Senator Bingaman and Senator Domenici sponsored the companion bill in the Senate.
The BLM, the State Land Commission, Sandoval County, PNM, the Pueblo, the Cattlegrowers, the BIA and the Wilderness Coalition were all involved. Gradually, with a lot of good faith, problems got worked out and we got the bill passed and signed into law. It`s the first wilderness area in New Mexico in 18 years.
On Friday, we went out to celebrate. The ranchers were there and the Pueblo and the Wilderness folks and the BLM and the four of us from Congress who had worked on the bill.
It was a nice celebration on a beautiful spring afternoon. For me, the most special moments were the quiet, sincere words of thanks from the members of Zia Pueblo, particularly the elders who had grown up with stories of this land when it was theirs. The smiles of those who had worked hard to find the common ground -- Dave Mielke who represents the Pueblo, Martin Heinrich, Jim Scarantino and Steve Capra who worked with the Wilderness folks -- were pretty nice too.
And then the Zia sang a song and gave each of us a rattle painted by one of their tribal members, Robert Aragon. The first verse the tribal leaders sang and kept the rhythm. The second verse we joined hands with them as they sang. And the third verse we kept the rhythm while they sang.
Don King had a little trouble keeping the rhythm on his own. But he says he`s a cowboy, not a musician.
Good to be home,
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