Draft Environmental Impact Statement for Roca Honda Mine

Chapter 3. Affected Environment and Environmental Consequences
houses, camps), resource procurement areas (plant gathering areas, hunting areas, mineral
sources), water sources (springs, drainages, tinajas), transportation features (trails, navigational
markers), religious or ceremonial locations (shrines, blessing places, offering places), herding
corrals, and farming areas. Within the area of overlap, it would not be unusual to have landscape
components that are defined, interpreted, and assigned meaning under multiple culturally
significant contexts. Evidence of this was seen during the field visits to the proposed project area,
with individual cultural features interpreted in multiple ways by the involved tribes.
Tribal Significance
Each of the involved tribes ascribes importance to the landscape related to traditions, beliefs,
practices, lifeways, and social institutions of their respective communities. This area of overlap is
imbued with layers upon layers of traditional cultural meaning and affiliation specific to each
cultural group (Chestnut Law Offices, 2009). In general, these landscapes provide a basis for
understanding the world and the peoples’ place in it. They are a foundation for personal and group
identity, thereby helping to answer questions about who the people are individually, as a member
of the tribe, and as a member of various tribal social groups. Each landscape provides a context
for group history and for understanding the individual resources within the landscape and the
association of those resources with the group history. These resources are material representations
of what the people know about their culture and history. The landscapes perform a function for
the tribal communities by helping them understand past and current behaviors (Anschuetz, 2012).
Archaeological Resources
All five involved tribes maintain a special connection to the American Indian archaeological
resources located within the ethnographic landscape surrounding Mt. Taylor and the proposed
project area. Archaeological sites provide a tangible connection to history and place,
commemorate the lives of the ancestors, and impart specific information about tribal histories and
culture, all of which help to shape and inform tribal identity. Archaeological sites not only
document and provide evidence of tribal histories, they are considered to be sacred for a number
of reasons. Sacredness of the sites is rooted in the oral traditions and religious knowledge that
relates to the movement of the tribal ancestors through the area. The life force or spirits of the
ancestors still reside within the materials and locations at these sites (Anschuetz, 2012 p. 32;
Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, 2012a), and as such, these sites provide a place to
communicate with the ancestors. Tribal people reconnect with spirits of the deceased through
offerings, and these reconnections are believed to replenish the land. Laguna considers each site
to have a heart and each site as consecrated (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, 2012a:11-12).
For Zuni, archaeological sites “are sources for religious instruments (such as arrowheads),
referenced in Zuni religious songs and prayers, and are living abodes of ancestral spirits”
(Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, 2012b:33).
Archaeological sites are viewed as key to the retention and transmission of traditional culture and
history. Each archaeological site is believed to contain records of events, instructions from
ancestors, and reminders from ancestors to current generations, and therefore has a teaching
purpose. The Acoma people “view their ancestral archaeological sites as part of an ongoing
transformational process within which the current generations interact and maintain their cultural
identity” (Anschuetz, 2012:32). With the onrush of the modern world, these sites are seen as even
more important to the recognition, retention, and transmission of traditional history and sacred
knowledge to the youth (Colwell-Chanthaphonh and Ferguson, 2012a:40).
318 DEIS for Roca Honda Mine, Cibola National Forest