Laguna pueblo

By far, the most visited pueblo among New Mexico's several is the Laguna pueblo, most visited simply because you can't miss it.  Ever since the railroad came in 1888, the Laguna people, in contrast to their pueblo brothers and sisters in Hopi, Zuni, or Acoma communities, have lived in a fishbowl.  Passenger trains dragged thousands of rubber-neckers past the pueblo years ago--the railroad is gone now; but today I-40 runs right past it, as transcontinental as any railroad ever was.  If you travel west from Albuquerque, unless you take blue highways, you can't miss Laguna pueblo.

Apparently it is the most progressive of the pueblos, at least that's the way it's heralded--and likely with good reason.  Its proximity to thousands of visitors every day means it hasn't been hidden away for more than century.  When that many people simply ride by, it's hard to maintain a fortress, one way or another.

Then again, the discovery of uranium on the reservation created jobs that changed life for the Laguna people by giving them skills in other areas than agriculture, the skills which got them by for hundreds of years (most people date the pueblo itself at 1699--although the people themselves have been around for centuries' longer).  The mine brought in jobs, new and useful skills, and of course, money; nothing changes the face of things like good old coat of green.

So when people say the Lagunas are the most progressive, they're not wrong.  But progress isn't always a blessing, and change isn't always beneficent.  Faced with the decided diminishment of their traditional culture,the people decided to make a deliberate attempt to reinvest in the old ways a quarter century ago or so, with the reintroduction of pottery-making.  Nice. But I'll put my money on greenbacks, for better or for worse.

The words progressive and traditional are--to some Native Americans--fighting words.  It's tough to be both.  So you decide to make pottery and return to the old ways--okay, but if your kids are watching tv at the same time, good luck.

Leslie Marmon Silko, one of America's most heralded Native American writers, is a Laguna.  Perhaps her most famous work is a short story titled "Yellow Woman," in her book Storyteller.  It's an odd story--half passionate love story, half ancient Laguna myth.  But then, as Ms. Silko explains, to pueblo people like the Lagunas, to people trenchantly devoted to a single space, after hundreds of years, every last stone in the neighborhood has a story, every last marker on the path of life itself.  To a people who are as righteously committed to their own blessed acre, everything has meaning--and meaning derives from stories, the oral tradition.

No wonder it's impossible for the tens of thousands of white folks who stream by everyday on I-40 to understand a people who would really want to live there.  All of  us progressives are, as we fly by, on our way to somewhere else.

The price of uranium dropped in the eighties, I believe, making that huge mine up the road from the Laguna pueblo, a ghost town itself. If you ask a bunch of Lagunas today, they'd be more than happy to tell you that the people suffered immensely from their exposure to hazardous materials in that mining effort--in fact, they banned it.

But it changed them.  Those who want to bring jobs of Native reservations today may well have sparklingly wonderful motives.  Lots  of reservations are places where success may well be measured simply by sustaining a life without significant horrors in the midst of what some would call an otherwise desolate world.

But life itself is always fragile, or so it seems, requiring a delicate balance between holding on to something that gives meaning and spirit and strength, and becoming something else because as everyone knows, in this world of ours nothing ever, ever stays the same.

Balance--one of the central doctrines of Navajo religion.  As the Apostle Paul would say, "Everything in moderation."

But Lord knows it ain't easy.