Eventually, all things merge into one, and a river runs through it. The river was cut by the world’s great flood and runs over rocks from the basement of time. On some of the rocks are timeless raindrops. Under the rocks are the words, and some of the words are theirs.
— Norman MacLean, A River Runs Through It
William Paul Wanker, Ph.d.
Whose words reside under the rocks of the Rio Grande near Santa Fe? Are they the words of Cochiti pueblo members past and present, who reside on one side of the river; are they the words of Santo Domingo members who reside on the other; or are they the words of a more “dominant” culture? These are the questions that arose in my mind when first visiting an exhibit of the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture (MIAC) some years ago, called A River Apart, in Santa Fe, New Mexico. The exhibit examined the distinctive pottery styles that emerged not only figuratively from the water and clay of the Rio Grande basin, but literally from the respective cultures situated along the sides of the river. It is a question that remains with me today.
If ever there was a river that seemed to exist from the beginning of time, it is the Rio Grande. The Rio Bravo del Norte is a river of both character and sustenance. It rises from clear water springs in the San Juan Mountains of southwestern Colorado, picking up color from the rocks and earth of the desert southwest to turn a muddy brown by the time it hits the New Mexico pueblos. Past this point, it begins to feel the pull of irrigation, slowing to a meandering crawl by the time it hits Big Bend, in Texas. And it slows even more by the time it hits Brownsville and Matamoros, becoming just a trickle of its old self when it touches the Gulf of Mexico. But despite this change, never once in its history did it relinquish its identity or fail to meet its responsibilities to its environment or its people across the 1885 mile journey.
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