Black Rock: A Zuni Cultural Landscape and the Meaning of Place

CHAPTER 4. Constructing the Zuni Dam

[ 7 9 ] People the world over have constructed water-control structures, both small and large, ever since farmers discovered the need to store and redirect this indispensable commodity. However, harnessing the natural forces that direct this action does not always go as planned. The federal government’s hydrology plans for Zuni were no exception, and as a result, Zuni land-use practices were severely disrupted, and the lifestyle of the Pueblo’s inhabitants was inalterably changed. P L ANNING A DAM In the early summer of 1904, the people living in the Middle Place—the Pueblo of Zuni—undoubtedly heard the distant boom of exploding dynamite as government engineers began blasting away the black volcanic rock to start construction of a dam across the Zuni River. This activity signaled a change in the federal government’s presence on the Zuni Reservation and forever altered not only the physical landscape, but Zuni culture as well. The low roar of gasoline-powered derricks, the rumbling of dump trucks, the squeaking axles of horse-drawn wagons, and the noisy commotion created by gangs of Indian and Anglo laborers breaking rock and hauling dirt signaled a flurry of building activity at this once quiet, secluded farming area four miles east of the Pueblo. This was not as dramatic a change to the physical landscape as when the lava flowed down the valley some 17,000 years earlier. Nor was it as evolutionary as when people first set foot into the valley searching for food and building rudimentary shelters. But, as we shall see, the federal government’s decision to build the dam and adjacent town had a profound cultural and political effect upon Zuni lifestyle and worldview (fig. 4.1). But the story of this change does not begin with the first shovelful of dirt. It begins some years earlier, in faraway Washington, D.C., with politicians and“friends of the Indians”making policy decisions about the future of Native peoples in the West. The General Allotment Act of 1887, commonly referred to as the Dawes Act after its congressional sponsor, Senator Constructing the Zuni Dam CHAPTER 4 [ 80 ] CONSTRUCTING THE ZUNI DAM Henry Laurens Dawes of Massachusetts, established a new national Indian policy intended to assimilate Native people and thus put the United States “on the road to complete solution of the Indian problem.”1 The goal of the General Allotment Act was to break up communally owned reservation land and distribute the land to individual Indian landowners who would then become farmers in the spirit of Jeffersonian agrarianism. The act also called for the granting of United States citizenship along with land title so that the end result would be a land-owning Indian citizen of the United States—a person fully integrated into the American way of life. This concept was not new. The Pilgrims had endorsed the idea of the “savage” Indian transforming himself into a farmer in colonial times.2 And during the early years of the republic, President Thomas Jefferson told a delegation of Indian leaders, “Let me entreat you . . . on the land now given to you, to begin to give every man a farm; let him enclose it, cultivate it, build a warm house on it, and when he dies, let it belong to his wife and children after him.”3 By the late 1860s, the steady increase Fig. 4.1. Steam-powered derricks begin construction of the Zuni Dam, looking east, 1904. Note meandering flow of the pre-dam Zuni River. Photo by A. C. Vroman, entitled “Pueblo of Zuni Government Dam.” Courtesy of Pasadena Public Library, Pasadena, California. [ 8 1 ] C O N S TRUC TI N G TH E ZUN I D A M in U.S. immigration and the need to assimilate the newcomers into American society pushed a movement by Indian reformers to bring these same American values to Native people. The influx of new immigrants to the United States also started to increase the pressure upon land acquisition in the West, thus adding to the stress placed upon Native culture on that side of the Mississippi River. As Euro-American culture spread throughout the West through railroad building, lumbering, mining, and agricultural expansion, the friends of the Indians, as the humanistic reformers were usually called, genuinely believed that Native people had to adopt the white man’s ways or be crushed by the onslaught of pioneer settlers, unscrupulous entrepreneurs...