"On Sept. 17 and 18, Taos Pueblo will commemorate the 40th anniversary of the United States government’s “return” of the sacred Blue Lake to the Taos people, in December 1970.

The event being celebrated was the result of Congress and U.S. President Richard M. Nixon reversing a 1906 act of Congress, by which the United States established the Carson National Forest and thereby purported to “hand” the beautiful region of the Blue Lake (Ba Whyea) over to the U.S. National Forest Service.

As notable as the Taos commemoration will be, it is important to remain mindful that the 1906 congressional legislation did not physically move the sacred Blue Lake even one inch. The lake remained where it had always been. Yet, with paper, ink, words, and the stroke of a pen by President Teddy Roosevelt, the United States government succeeded in constructing a new conception of the “reality” of the relationship between the Taos people and the sacred Blue Lake.

By its legislation, the United States government gave itself permission to cut the Taos people off from their sacred Blue Lake in the area of the headwaters of the Rio Pueblo River, and to prevent the Taos people from being able to carry out, unhindered, their spiritual responsibility to the pure waters of that sacred place, the birth place of the Taos people.

The 1906 legislation constructed a powerful and seemingly irrefutable perception that the sacred Blue Lake had been “taken away from” the Taos Pueblo. Although the sacred Blue Lake never physically moved one iota, it was metaphorically characterized as having “moved” from one “place-of-possession” (the possession of the Taos people) to another (the National Forest Service)."

Get the Story:
Steven Newcomb: Despite law, sacred Blue Lake remained all along (Indian Country Today 9/15)

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