Two historic decisions regarding tribal land around Sandoval County have happened this year, and U.S. Rep. Melanie Stansbury, along with U.S. Sen. Martin Heinrich, worked and advocated for both of those decisions as well as future plans to repatriate tribal lands.
In June, Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland officially withdrew more than 4,000 acres of land near Placitas from mineral leasing, including gravel mining. The area included the Buffalo Tract and the Crest of Montezuma, following decades of advocacy work and community organizing.
“Part of why preserving that land is important is it’s an important wildlife quarter. If you’ve ever gone hiking and Placitas through the front of the mountains there, you know, that’s where you get a lot of animals coming down the mountain, trying to get down to the river,” said Stansbury.
Stansbury said preserving those lands from gravel mining by multinational gravel companies isn’t just about preserving the ecosystem and public health, but really about preserving our cultural heritage and the cultural patrimony of the pueblos.
Also in June, the Pueblo of Santa Ana officially reacquired 60,000 acres of ancestral land. The land was bought back from former Gov. Bruce King’s family.
“It’s the historic pathway that the Pueblo people who live in that area there, have traditional stories of how they came to their current villages that are tied to that place,” she said. “In a similar vein, right now, my office is working very closely with San Felipe Pueblo.”
The village of San Felipe is actually in U.S. Rep. Teresa Leger Fernandez’s office. But Stansbury says there are significant lands that fall within her district as well, including a number of pieces of land that are currently managed by the Bureau of Land Management and that are heavily used for recreation. She says the pueblo is seeking to have those lands repatriated back to them because there’s a lot of property damage and also folks are going out there and disturbing religious sites.
“For those who do go on to our public lands, please be conscious that these are sacred and historic sites of our pueblos and the first peoples of this land and do not disturb a cultural artifact that you find out there because it may be an active use,” she said.
She said her office is working with the BLM and the pueblo to get that land returned legislatively to the tribe, although there is no specific timeline for when that might happen.