The Santa Fe Review

Finally after all the speculation, the rumor is confirmed. This morning the superintendent of the Santa Fe Indian School, Everett Chavez, publicly announced (on, of all places, 94 Rock’s Morning Show ) that the Paolo Soleri amphitheater will be destroyed as part of the school’s “aggressive educational agenda.” (You can find an audio link to the interview at the top of this page.)

Cutting through the typical talk radio banter, Mr. Chavez sounded like a thoughtful and intelligent man. The Paolo Soleri costs $95,000 to $99,000 a year to maintain, he said, and it would cost $578,000 to bring it up to code, which would include compliance with the Americans With Disabilities Act. Last week’s concert, he said, took in only $5,000.

After the show, he added, there were beer bottles all over the place, and one of the 19 Pueblo Governors remarked about the miasma of marijuana smoke — a “huge cloud of illegal stuff.” That, Mr. Chavez said, is not the kind of behavior they want to instill in their students. A better place for concerts, he insisted more than once, is the Indian casinos.

All of that begs the question, finally asked by one of the DJs: But why do you have to bulldoze the place? Why not find someone to take over and upgrade the venue? Rather than giving a straight answer, Mr. Chavez played the spiritual card.

“Our people are taught not to get attached to material things,” he said. He remembered when the kiva at his pueblo had to be replaced because the population had grown. And there was the time that his father (like his grandparents, an Indian School alum) refused to give him an old pickup truck he loved. It was traded in for a new one instead.

Likewise the Paolo Soleri now must be traded in for — for what? Mr. Chavez wouldn’t say.

He added that there will be three or four more events before the demolition, including a tribute to Stewart Udall, the former Secretary of Interior and friend of the school, who died this spring. How politically astute. Mr. Udall was, of course, the father of Senator Tom Udall, one of the few people with the clout to put a stop to this — and to demand a resolution of the legal questions still surrounding the earlier destruction of the old campus.

Instead the Senator will be there at the Paolo Soleri for a last hurrah, smiling and shaking hands, pretending that being friends with a few powerful Indian leaders is the same as being a friend to the people they rule.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

After my latest round of correspondence with local preservationists, the status of the Paolo Soleri seems less certain than it did when I wrote yesterday’s dispatch. The historian Sally Hyer indeed included the amphitheater in her 1989 survey of 28 historically significant structures on the Indian School campus. Five years later the Bureau of Indian Affairs and the New Mexico Historic Preservation Office concurred that many of the buildings were eligible for Federal protection. The question is whether the Paolo Soleri was among them. I hope to know the answer soon.

Unfortunately, it may not matter. The amphitheater’s status would be as a “contributing” structure to the Santa Fe Indian School Historic District. But there is no longer anything to contribute to: the Historic District was wiped out in 2008 by the Pueblo Council. Whether it would do any good to seek eligibility for the Paolo Soleri as freestanding architecture is also unclear. The Pueblo Council takes its money from two pots: casino proceeds and Federal grants. Unless the latter pays for the destruction, Section 106 protections would not apply.

From what I have learned in recent days, there is little doubt that the BIA was fully aware that the Pueblo Council planned to destroy the campus as soon as it gained control. Yet the property was transferred  from Federal protection without the covenants required by  law. What the Inspector General (or failing that the U.S. Attorney) should be investigating is which officials were responsible and whether there was some kind of deal.

I was reminded today by Zane Fischer’s column in the Reporter, Soleri Eclipse, about the blueprints he uncovered last year for what appears to be a huge commercial development  to rise from the ruins along Cerrillos Road. Before that can happen the three remaining buildings described here yesterday must be removed, including what may be the most historically significant of them all. As Mr. Fischer notes, these are blocks away from the Paolo Soleri, but maybe the Pueblo Council’s demolition contractor, Flintco, has offered the school a package deal.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

In this morning’s Journal, Kathaleen Roberts writes that the Paolo Soleri Theater “was considered for nomination to the National Register of Historic Places” (which would have afforded it Federal protection) but that “the effort fizzled.” What happened was much worse.

In 1994, some two dozen buildings on the old Indian School campus — apparently including the amphitheater — were deemed eligible for the historic register. That is an important distinction. Whenever Federal funds are involved in a project, Section 106 of the National Historic Preservation Act gives eligible buildings the same regard as those that have already been admitted to the list: strict procedures involving public disclosure and consultation with other agencies must be followed before the buildings can be destroyed.

If eligible buildings are “transferred, leased, or sold out of Federal ownership or control,” then Interior Department regulations (36 CFR Part 800 — Protection of Historic Properties) require that “adequate and legally enforceable restrictions or conditions” be put in place “to ensure long-term preservation of the property’s historic significance.”

As we’ve written here before, the Bureau of Indian Affairs violated Federal law by failing to include those provisions when it handed over the school to the All Indian Pueblo Council. (Again please see my original letter to the Inspector General of Interior for details.) This may be more than a matter of negligence or incompetence. If officials within the BIA ignored the requirements while knowing of the Pueblo Council’s secret plans to raze the campus, they may also be guilty of conspiracy to circumvent the law. This is what I have been trying to get the Inspector General of the Interior Department to investigate.

If the leaders of the Pueblo Council now plan to put the Paolo Soleri on the chopping block, a good time to watch for the wrecking cranes will be some dark night in July. That is when the Pueblo Council has indicated that it will tear down the Academics building, which was constructed in 1962 in International style and has been leased recently to the Tierra Encantada Charter School. A second International-style structure, the Administration building, will probably also be leveled then, along with the U-shaped Arts and Craft building, which was designed and built by John Gaw Meem in 1931 and earned him his commission to remodel the rest of the school in the same Spanish Pueblo Revival Style.

Of these buildings, only the third is on the eligible list. Here is how it was described by Sally Hyer in her report, “Santa Fe Indian School Historic District”: “This building faces on the main campus walk and is surrounded by spruce, elm, and poplar trees and a grassy lawn.” No longer. It is the same building pictured in the forefront of the photograph I posted in yesterday’s installment, a barren wasteland of weeds.

Related posts: A Special Report: The Mysterious Destruction of the Santa Fe Indian School

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Postscript

I just heard from a staff member at the Indian School that the demolition of the Paolo Soleri is a done deal.

	Supposedly they will issue a press release one of these days . . .

	Apparently the Board of Trustees is behind the decision and they

	have an architectural image of what the "new" campus should look

	like . . . We have a meeting in the morning. Not sure if the Paolo

	will be addressed, but I would say the majority of the staff is

	against the demolition.

Not that it will make a difference. The Pueblo Council runs the tax-supported school as though it were its personal fief.

Midway through May, a page appeared on Facebook imploring the secretive administrators of the Santa Fe Indian School not to tear down the Paolo Soleri amphitheater. Day after day, heartfelt testimonials poured in from students and alumni sharing memories of graduation ceremonies at the Paolo (the most recent was on Friday) and the mind-blowing concerts they attended there.

The possible demolition is a rumor, but there are good reasons to fear that it is true. As readers of my past installments know, school officials have already flattened — with no warning or consideration for anyone’s feelings but their own — the beautiful old buildings of the historic campus, and they have cut down a forest of old shade trees. What happened was illegal. The only question is whether it is the Bureau of Indian Affairs or the All Indian Pueblo Council that is to blame. Possibly they acted in collusion. Whoever is responsible has gotten off scot-free. (For a condensed version of the legal issues, please see my letter of September 25, 2008 to the Interior Department.)

With the new public Facebook page, some of the school’s former students — who were as shocked as anyone when the bulldozers rolled in — finally have a forum for expressing their sorrow. Here is how Audrey Archuleta of Española put it:

	After what they did to the trees on that campus,

	this is not surprising. Whoever is making these

	decisions should be ashamed of themselves. What

	else can you say? Every time I pass by that campus

	now it makes me angry, ashamed, and sad all in the

	60 seconds it takes to drive by.

This is from Lisa Elkins of Thoreau, New Mexico, at the edge of the Navajo Nation:

	My mom grew up on that campus. It was a shock to

	come home and find that they destroyed that school,

	NO TREES, NO HISTORIC buildings. It was a crying

	shame! Now this??

Norma C. Romero, a member of Taos Pueblo, wrote about the sadness she felt over how the campus has been laid bare and turned into a dust bowl:

	Paolo Soleri is our last stand. Our Grandparents and

	many generations have put the foot markings on the

	ground on which it stands. What has become of the pride

	we all each held? This is a sad day not only for me,

	but thousands who share the same feelings.

So where is one to turn? The Old Santa Fe Association and the Historic Santa Fe Foundation have been too timid to demand an investigation. Withering under political pressure, the New Mexico State Historic Preservation Office (called the SHPO) failed to intervene. Within the SHPO’s office I know employees who are sickened by what was allowed to happen on their watch. But they are afraid to speak out lest they lose their jobs. I don’t know what I would do in their situation.

In theory, both the BIA and the SHPO are within the jurisdiction of the Interior Department, whose Inspector General, Earl Devaney, is required to investigate allegations of crimes. He apparently can’t be bothered. Yesterday in reply to my latest inquiry, I heard from one of Mr. Devaney’s assistants, Scott Culver. His title is Deputy Assistant Inspector General. One of his functions is apparently brushing off people who inconvenience his boss by asking that he do his job.

Here is Mr. Culver’s nonresponse to my letter:

	We understand this issue has been raised with the Bureau of Indian

	Affairs and the State of New Mexico Office of Cultural Affairs --

	Historic Preservation Division, which are the appropriate forums for

	your complaint. Thank you for contacting our office.

What a classic run-around. I originally wrote to the Inspector General in September 2008 after being stonewalled by the BIA and after the New Mexico SHPO dropped the matter like a hot potato. So I appeal to the next level of the hierarchy, the Inspector General, and after repeated inquiries am referred by Mr. Culver back to the very culprits I am complaining about. He obviously read none of the supporting documents I submitted.

Through his own inaction, Senator Udall has been as complicit in the cover-up as Mr. Devaney. (Here is my latest letter to the Senator’s office.) Given this stalemate, the only recourse would seem to be the Justice Department. Hence this other letter I recently sent to Kenneth Gonzales, the new United States Attorney for New Mexico. Though not a tribal member, Mr. Gonzales graduated from high school in Pojoaque and worked for Senator Bingaman on Indian affairs. Will he be sympathetic to the politically powerful Indian Council or to the pueblo people whose memories have been destroyed?

Just like the buildings that were razed in 2008, the Paolo Soleri, named after the Italian-born architect and built by students from the Institute of American Indian Arts, was listed in 1989 as a “historically contributing” building because of its Neo-Expressionist architecture. (The details are in a 1989 document titled “Santa Fe Indian School Historic District,” by Sally Hyer. I have posted it in two parts: A description of the buildings and Historical context.)

It is still possible that the Paolo Soleri can be saved. It is also still possible that the bureaucrats who destroyed the rest of the old campus can be brought to justice. But nothing is likely to happen unless the impassioned souls who have flocked to the Save Paolo Soleri Facebook page demand to be heard.

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review

Postscript

Digging through my files this morning on the Santa Fe Indian School, I see that one of my earlier communications with the Department of Interior, dated March 11, 2009, was also with Scott Culver. He assured me that his office was reviewing the matter and “will inform you of the disposition of your complaint.” Of course that never happened. I waited three months and then contacted Senator Udall on June 8, 2009. Four months after that I got a call from one of his staffers, Raven Murray, assuring me that they were pressing the matter and that Interior had assured the Senator’s office that a legal opinion was forthcoming. All that, it seems, was smoke and mirrors.

A couple of weeks ago on bloggingheads.tv, I was telling my colleague John Horgan about my trip to the Sandia Crest antenna farm to see if I would get a headache from the microwaves. Bill Bruno, the Los Alamos physicist and anti-wireless crusader, had proposed the experiment in a comment he appended to this story in the New Mexican. Try as I might I could not detect any aftereffect. The reason, Arthur Firstenberg (the other big Santa Fe wireless foe) told me in an email is because weaker levels of microwaves are, paradoxically, more harmful than stronger ones. Electromagnetic homeopathy!

During my discussion with John, I placed my own cellphone on top of my microwave meter and asked him to give me a call. (You can watch the video here.) As in previous experiments, the needle leapt to the top of the scale before reclining. The gyrations may look alarming on camera, but what I was measuring was a minuscule amount of energy flux. Then again, the Firstenberg effect would predict that the greatest danger comes when the needle hardly moves at all.

I was reminded of all this on Monday afternoon when the long-delayed Interphone study, the largest yet on the epidemiology of cell phones and brain cancer, was finally published. More than 5,000 brain tumor patients in 13 countries were asked to recall in detail how often they had used their mobiles during the last 10 years. Then the data were compared against those of a symptomless control group.

The results were so murky that for four years the researchers argued over the meaning. In the end, the International Agency for Research on Cancer concluded, as has almost every previous study, that there is no correlation between the amount of time spent talking on a cell phone and brain cancer. In fact, weirdly enough, regular users had a lower risk of getting brain cancer than people who didn’t use cell phones at all. Maybe the phones were acting, through some spooky new physics, as handheld radiation therapy machines, nipping tiny malignancies in the bud. More likely, the authors concluded, the result is an artifact caused by unreliable data, sampling bias, or random error.

There was also another puzzling anomaly: Among people who reported that, over the years, they had spent as much as 12 hours a day (!) with a phone against their ear, the risk of a tumor called glioma jumped all of a sudden by 40 percent. Or so it appeared. Maybe people with brain cancer, desperate for an explanation, were prone to overestimating the severity of their cell phone habit. Maybe their memory or their reason was impaired by the tumor. When you dig into the details, there was so much room for error that it’s questionable whether the study was worth the $25 million cost.

Even if the effect should turn out to be real, it begs to be put into perspective. Glioma is exceedingly rare. A person’s odds of being diagnosed with the cancer is one in 30,000 or 0.0033 percent. A 40 percent increase would make that 0.0046 percent

“If there was a large and immediate risk we would have seen it,” Anthony Swerdlow of the Institute of Cancer Research told Clare Murphy of BBC News.

	Whether it is worth doing more research, that is a question for

	society [he continued]. These are expensive studies, and there are

	many other things in the world that should be investigated.



	It is society which has to answer the question of how long you

	continue to investigate something that does not have a biological

	basis.

In fact another, even bigger investigation is already under way. The Cohort Study of Mobile Phone Use and Health, or COSMOS, plans to monitor 250,000 volunteer cellphone users for 30 years. Final results are due in 2040. Please stay tuned.

Related posts: The Electromania Archives

George Johnson
The Santa Fe Review