New Mexicans protest outside BLM office over proposal to undo Chaco Canyon mining protections

A crowd of about 100 gathered outside the Bureau of Land Management’s Santa Fe office Wednesday afternoon to protest the federal agency’s proposal to eliminate or shrink a 10-mile ban on mining operations around Chaco Culture National Historical Park.

Wednesday marked the final day for the public to weigh in on the controversial proposal, which Indigenous leaders and New Mexico’s Democratic federal delegation have sharply criticized.

As protesters filed into the BLM’s Santa Fe parking lot, holding signs with inscriptions like, “How can you put a price on sacred land?” and, “Hands off Chaco,” organizers directed them to a table where they could fill out cards with a message to the agency expressing their opposition to the proposal.

Before the protest began in earnest, Allison Sandoval, a New Mexico-based BLM spokesperson, requested to speak into the protesters’ megaphone. She instructed the crowd to give her their handwritten comments and said she’d pass them along to the proper BLM officials.

Indigenous residents from across New Mexico took turns speaking into a megaphone and leading the crowd in chants of, “Protect sacred sites.” Chaco is a culturally and spiritually significant site to many Native populations across the Southwest and is believed to have been an economic hub of the San Juan Basin in the Four Corners region about 1,000 years ago.

The proposal to erase a Biden-era prohibition on mining within 10 miles of the site is “not just bad policy,” Marissa Naranjo, the deputy director of Sovereign Energy and a member of Santa Clara Pueblo, told the crowd. “That’s a slow form of erasure and cultural genocide.”

Albuquerque resident Barney McCulloch told Source NM he drove up to Santa Fe Wednesday to voice his support for the 10-mile buffer zone around Chaco.

“I just think it would be terrible if they went back on this deal they made,” he said. “There has to be some other place” for mining operations, he added.

As another opponent to the proposal walked through the crowd to speak from the megaphone, three protesters unfurled a banner that read: “Protect Greater Chaco from Extractive Colonialism.”

Julia Bernal, executive director of the advocacy organization Pueblo Action Alliance, told the crowd that the strong turnout of Indigenous New Mexicans Wednesday was proof that “we are still here and we’re not going anywhere.”

“We refuse to be part of a trade-off economy,” she said.

While Bernal and the crowd demonstrated outside the BLM office, they gained a powerful ally. New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez announced he had formally filed a comment opposing the proposal.

“Chaco Canyon is one of New Mexico’s greatest cultural and historical treasures,” Torrez said in a statement. “The federal government cannot dismantle longstanding protections through a rushed process that sidelines Tribal Nations, ignores the public and fails to honestly assess the consequences.”

Indigenous leaders from the greater Chaco region traveled to Washington, D.C., on Wednesday to speak against the proposal, particularly the fact that the federal government allowed just two weeks for public input on a proposal that could undo years of work.

“The federal government’s rushed process directly undermines Tribal sovereignty and the government’s fiduciary duty towards allottees and all Indigenous peoples,” Mario Atencio, who is Diné, said in a statement. “Despite federal law requiring meaningful consultation with Tribes, the BLM did not conduct outreach to Tribal communities and limited federal notices to English, barring non-English speakers from engaging with information about the consequential impacts of this proposal. This is illegal and disgraceful.”