February 17, 2005 - Albuquerque, New Mexico.

After having a leisurely breakfast we returned to our computer tasks for a bit until it was time to drive back over to Terry's place. After a bit of discussion, we all decided to see the Museum of the Pueblo Indian cultures in Albuquerque. There I found out about the history and current culture of the 19 pueblos in New Mexico. The current pueblo populations were similar in many basic respects but surprisingly different in others. The 19 pueblos spoke 3 different languages that were distinct enough to be mutually incomprehensible, and that surprised me.

The history of all the pueblos included common elements such as myths of origin and political events like the successful 1680 revolt against the Spanish occupation forces. Also documented was the ambivalence to the Roman Catholic religion that was forced down their throats during the occupation, and the current mixed set of old and new beliefs that characterize many of the people. The population figures for most of the pueblos showed, however, declines since the time of initial contact, and often the declines were on the order of 10 to 1, such as a decline from roughly 7,000 to 700 population in one pueblo or 2000 to 200+ in another.

One point that puzzled me in the pueblo descriptions concerned the source of their livelihoods. The rather vague wording was that some revenue came from "leasing of property for commercial use", and that takes in a lot of territory! I was curious if the commercial use was oil refineries, mining, ranching, factories, or whatever, but nowhere could I find a clue. Silly me. It wasn't until the next day when we drove past a couple of those selfsame pueblos on our way to Santa Fe that the true nature of the commercial use became clear: Gambling Casinos! Ah yes, the red man's revenge was in full blossom at some of those 19 pueblos, and apparently successful to judge by fact that that one pueblo was replacing the prefabricated "salt dome" type of building housing the extant casino with a brand new gambling complex combined with a multi story hotel to house the high rollers. That's what I call progress!

Seriously, the pueblos have every legal right to run casinos, but I just wished that they had been honest and upfront about it in their self-descriptions in the museum. Maybe they felt that gambling casinos would not quite fit in with their spiritual, in harmony with mother earth, holier-than-thou image that was being presented elsewhere in the museum. Call a shovel a shovel even if it has manure on it, as my apocryphal Grandpappy used to say. Once I found a whopper of an omission like that, I had to wonder how much of the rest of their self-descriptions were just self-serving advertising puffery. It's like when you catch a politician making one whopper of a lie like "Weapons of Mass Destruction", and then you have to apply either a lie detector or the sniff test to everything else he says.

Even taking those distortions into account, however, the cultures seemed to be remaining strong in the sense of preserving many of the beliefs, rituals, practices, and language of the original inhabitants. We finished watching two roughly 18 minute movies, one on the construction of pottery by traditional methods and another on a painter of traditional themes. I found the movie on the painter interesting and the movie on making pottery absolutely gripping. I had no idea how careful they had to be to avoid any kind of air pocket or fault line in the clay that would break the pot during the firing process.

We finished our visit in the very extensive museum shop covering much of the first floor of the museum. That was a dangerous place for people like us, and we ended up purchasing a turquoise necklace for Monika and a polychrome pot for me. The necklace was unique in that it was composed of 5 or 6 pieces of turquoise all inlaid into a common shape with tiny silver filigree between them, something we had seen only rarely before. Similarly, the pot was unique in that it had a small bass and a big flaring bowl, but was almost closed on top with only a tiny little hole. In the museum I had learned that pots like that were often used for storing seeds, but we thought this one would stand very nicely on our Egyptian desk in the front hall with a couple of stalks of dried flowers stuck in it.

We paused for a great taco salad lunch at Garcia's Kitchen at 1113 4th Street N.W., and then parked just outside Old Town Albuquerque to walk around the shops there for a couple of hours. I bought a blimp model at a balloon shop and took some panoramic shots of the outside of the old church as we wandered around the central square.

Then we stopped off back at Terry's place to feed the dogs before continuing on to our trailer where Monika fixed dinner for all of us. We chatted away the rest of the evening until Terry and Phyllis went home, and then worked on our computers a bit before retiring for the night.