Farm fields across the San Felipe Pueblo are lying fallow.  There is less water to work them and fewer people to do so.   

The orchards are gone, along with the pueblo’s diversion ditch to take water from the Rio Grande. Now water comes from the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District and there is not enough to reach some of the fields. Small gardens now occupy the center of fields that were once worked from fence line to fence line. 

For Ricardo Ortiz, who grew up farming with his grandparents on the pueblo, it’s hard to watch.  

In the 1970s he remembers that all his grandparents did was farm. They did not work other jobs. They traded what they grew for what they needed.   

He remembers his grandmother asking him why he would want to freeze something to preserve it when canning and drying worked just as well and didn’t require electricity.  

“Now it has changed drastically,” he said.  “Now it’s all about money. Now we spend all our time talking about money.”  

He also pointed out that when he was growing up, walking was the main mode of transportation. Going to Albuquerque to work, shop or eat was rare.  So were cars and diabetes. 

And then there are the horses.   

“They are not wild; they are horses that have been abandoned,” he said.   

They never had that problem back then, either. But now that everyone drives and feed is expensive, the horses just roam.  We saw them everywhere: in the fields, along the road and milling around by the river. 

And that brings in the next problem for the Santa Anna Pueblo, just downstream.   

It’s also dealing with adapting to low flows, explained Bart Vanden Plas, a water quality scientist for the pueblo.  For example, ceremonies for the feast day in late July involve going to the river, but often there is not enough water to bother making the trip.  

Along with low water, there is often horse poop in the water and the E. coli count is high enough to almost guarantee people will get sick if they swim.  

We took a walk with Plas along the edge of the river and saw horse droppings on top of mats of detritus that had floated in with the last high water.  

“That’s telling you there has got to be a lot of it,” he said. “You know that it is not making it through the dam.”

Because the water is central to ceremonies, the pueblos have set standards much lower than that of New Mexico and of the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency.  In Santa Ana, the standard is 50 colonies per 100 ml. The EPA standard for contact recreation is 126. Plas has recorded levels as high as 12,000.  

Not only are the counts much higher than they used to be, the high numbers are sticking around for longer through the warm season, he said.  Plas said he has seen eddies along the river with poop circulating in them. 

Both pueblos gave us permission to paddle through their lands.  And we will do so as quickly as we can, grateful the monsoon rains have provided enough water to float our canoes and with as little splashing as possible. 

Water quality note:  We were not able to get to the river on August 15. These measurements are from August 16 and were taken upstream of the Santa Ana and San Felipe Pueblos.

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