New Mexico Pueblo Fights to Keep Its Ancestral Prize

Hidden from a trail atop New Mexico’s Sandia Mountains lies a half-buried boulder with a cross-shaped etching deep in its side.

The Sandia Pueblo Indians say the etching represents a boundary marker left by a Spanish lieutenant in 1748. It’s proof, they say, that they own 9,800 acres of the mountain on Albuquerque’s east side.

“This area contains almost every traditional site important to the pueblo,” says Malcom Montoya, lands director for Sandia Pueblo. “This land is ours.”

Mountain homeowners, however, worry that if a judge awards the pueblo its claim, they will lose title to 655 acres of private land holdings in the area.

“The lawsuit imposes a cloud over the titles of these properties,” says Thomas Bartman, a Washington, D.C.-based attorney representing the homeowners. He says the pueblo cannot legally choose which properties fall under its claim and exempt others.

“I’m in my 60s and my home is everything to me,” says homeowner Lynne Behnfield.

Behnfield, her neighbors and other people concerned about the fate of the mountain formed the Sandia Mountain Coalition to protect the public’s interest in the area. The group hired its own surveyor and archeologist to study the grant and land markings.

Behnfield says most of the pueblo’s boundary claims have turned out to be bogus.

“Our archeologist found that one of the supposed boundary markings was from a Boy Scout campsite; another could not even be found,” she says.

She also said homeowners are worried about New Mexico losing one of its most valuable assets--the 10,600-foot mountain itself.

“If the tribe was to win, the people who now enjoy the mountain would lose it,” she says.

The federal government has repeatedly denied the pueblo’s claim to the land, but a U.S. district judge has decided to hear a lawsuit the pueblo brought against the U.S. Department of the Interior.

Most of the land in question is administered by the U.S. Forest Service for public use. Besides homes, it includes many popular hiking trails and the privately owned Sandia Peak Tramway, a tourist attraction.

Montoya says the pueblo already has agreed to exclude private land holdings from its lawsuit.

“We’re not trying to take those away from anyone,” Montoya says. “We are most interested in preserving the traditional sites visited by the people of the pueblo.”

Officials of the 22,500-acre pueblo, which has a population of about 300, say they would continue to administer Sandia Mountain land as wilderness. But, Montoya says, the tribe would limit public use by charging fees at trail heads and picnic grounds.

The pueblo’s pledges haven’t stilled the critics.

Mark Mocho, a member of the Sandia Soaring Assn., says members of the group of about 80 hang gliders had been launching off a ridge at Cochiti Lake, north of Albuquerque, since the 1970s. In 1985, when Cochiti Pueblo won a lawsuit claiming the area, the pueblo told the hang gliders they were trespassing.

“Lawyers told us it would cost millions to fight this in court.” Mocho says. “If I had millions, I would have more than a hang glider.”

The group fears the same thing will happen in the Sandias.

“We fly off of the tramway site and hold competitions in that area,” Mocho says. “Now we could lose that too.”

The complicated dispute boils down to an interpretation of a handwritten land grant given to Sandia Pueblo in 1748 by the king of Spain.

A translation of the grant sets the pueblo’s boundaries on the west to the Rio Grande and “on the east to the sierra madre called Sandia.”

The tribe interprets that to mean the highest ridge on the mountain, since marked in stone.

But the federal government contends “sierra madre” means the top of the first foothill, the current boundary, says Jim Snow, deputy assistant general for the U.S. Department of Agriculture, under which the Forest Service falls.

In the 1850s, after the United States took control of New Mexico under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the U.S. government sent its own surveyor to interpret the grant. That surveyor placed the boundary at the western foothill of the mountain.

Montoya says the surveyor made a mistake, but the pueblo let the matter go for years because the tribe could still use the land.

When the Forest Service took over, however, “we were denied access for traditional purposes and hunting,” he says.

In 1986, the pueblo asked the secretary of the interior to correct its land patent from the federal government. Two years later, U.S. Solicitor Ralph Tarr denied the request.

“Our review indicates that the pueblo received in its 1864 patent at least as much land as was intended in the 1748 Spanish grant, and most likely more,” the solicitor’s opinion reads.

Sandia Pueblo sued in 1994 to have the opinion reviewed. U.S. District Judge Harold Greene of Maryland recently denied the federal government’s bid to throw out the pueblo’s lawsuit.

The pueblo now will go to trial to try to prove its claim.

Snow says Greene made his decision unfairly and without hearing the government’s side. The government filed an answer Feb. 21 to the lawsuit, again disagreeing with Sandia Pueblo.

“Tarr’s opinion still speaks for itself,” Snow says.