Tribal leaders from the Pueblo of Ohkay Owingeh say that a new co-stewardship agreement between the tribe, the U.S. Forest Service and The Bureau of Land Management will give them a "seat at the table" when it comes to protecting sacred and ancestral sites.
"These places are important to us as beings," said First Lt. Governor Howie Aguino. "They provide some of the things we need to go on in existence."
He said he believes a Memorandum of Understanding signed on Dec. 4 will give the tribe more of a say in deciding what happens on USFS and BLM land that is sacred to the tribe, where they pray or gather items used in traditional practices.
"It allows us to have some sort of input into where we'd like to see protection, instead of sitting back and seeing things disrupted," he said.
The agreement is one among at least 20 that have been signed nationwide since Secretary of the Interior Deb Haaland and Agriculture Secretary Thomas Vilsack signed an order in 2021 designed to ensure agencies manage federal lands and waters in a way that protects the rights of Native communities.
In a recent interview with New Mexico PBS, Haaland said that since then, 20 tribes have entered into co-stewardship agreements of public lands.
The National Bison Range in Montana is now managed by the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes, and the Nez Perce Tribe is managing fish production at a hatchery in Idaho. She said 60 more such agreements are in the works.
This process began when Ohkay Owingeh Governor Larry Phillips wrote to the supervisors of the Carson and Santa Fe National Forests, and the Taos BLM field office, said Ruben Montes, the tribal relations program manager for the Santa Fe and Cibola National Forests.
The letter came after the secretarial order, and a tribal summit at the White House in 2021 in which, "one of the things they were clamoring for was more co-stewardship opportunities, which essentially gives tribes an equal say in the decision-making process, not as an afterthought but as a forethought," said Montes
An example of a tribe being involved from the outset on decision-making, he said, might be a re-seeding program in which Native communities were consulted on appropriate Native plants to plant on ancestral lands.
He said that the Forest Service is overstretched, and that there is a growing acknowledgement that working with partners is essential.
"Especially those that have a vested interest, and who has a more vested interest in this particular area of management of cultural sites than these tribes?"
Eventually, Montes said, this MOU would have maps attached to it, broadly showing the areas of cultural significance to Ohkay Owingeh, without specifically identifying locations, because that information is kept within the tribe.
He called this agreement one of the highlights of a job he has been doing for about a decade.
"I think there's a lot of inherent skepticism any time a federal agency partners with a tribal government," he said, "in light of the many centuries of broken treaties and broken promises.
"But it's really gratifying to me as a tribal relations specialist to see that tribes still honor a document that has a signature on it."
He thinks other co-stewardship agreements are set to follow around the state.
