Zuni Sustainable Agriculture Project
Pueblo of Zuni
Donald Eriacho, Director
Andry Laahty, Assistant Director
Fred Boannie Jr., Assistant Director
P.O. Box 630
Zuni, N.M. 87327
(505) 782-5851
(505) 782-5852 Ext 15
(505) 782-2726 fax

Two simple structures that span washed-out gullies in the bottomland fields of the Zuni reservation located in the mesa country of western New Mexico's high desert tell a surprising story.

One structure is a modern, relatively high-tech device called a "rock gabion." A dam-like structure made of large rocks molded into neat, square retaining walls by heavy wire, it spans the gully from side to side and from top to bottom. It was made by a crew from the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and it took weeks and dollars to produce.

The other one -- descriptively called a "brush and rock structure" -- comes from an ancient Zuni tradition. As the name implies, it is little more than a pile of brush -- juniper and sagebrush, mostly, or whatever's handy -- held down in the gully bottom by a layer of flat, heavy rocks. A crew from the Zuni Conservation Project built it in a couple of hours by drafting all hands, from engineers to the office clerical staff. It didn't cost a cent.

Both structures are designed with a similar purpose: By holding back the rush of water that occurs after high-desert storms, they reduce erosion and retain precious water for irrigating crops, no small matter in farm country that gets only 12 inches of rain per year on the average.

But one key difference is becoming clear: The old Zuni structure WORKS. Rich, heavy silt is quickly forming behind it, and grass is beginning to grow in the gully bottom, providing a natural barrier to further erosion. The U.S. Geological Survey is running tests, and it's believed that the gully will gradually fill in, returning land to the agricultural inventory. The modern structure, on the other hand, despite its cost, appears to be making a bad situation worse. The center of it has washed out, strewing rocks downstream; the gully is nearly six feet deep now, and twice as wide, and it's quickly undercutting grazing fields.

This is what the Zuni Sustainable Agriculture Project is all about, Donald Eriacho said: Restoring the best of the old ways, capturing the historic techniques through interviews and oral histories with older members of the tribe and passing them along to new farmers -- while also adopting the best that new technology has to offer, from computerized land inventories to satellite-based Global Positioning System equipment for mapping the reservation's farms more accurately than ever before.

"We want to get our Zuni land back into farming as it once was," Donald Eriacho said. "In 1910, this place produced 10,000 acres of corn. The Zuni people could supply all the military forts with corn. People passing through going west, here they were at the point of no return. They were sustained by the Zuni people and went on their way."

But cultural changes through two world wars, and an environment despoiled by bad use -- not least by the government itself, which permitted overcutting and overgrazing in the mountains overlooking the Zunis' beautiful valleys -- destroyed much of the region's agriculture and saddled the 9,000-person reservation with the sadly typical economic profile that afflicts most American Indian reservations today, with deep poverty and long-term, chronic unemployment.

There's a chance that this will turn around now, though, thanks to a long, hard-fought lawsuit. The Zuni tribe in 1978 filed suit against the federal government, seeking to amend the damage done to its land. In 1980, the government settled the dispute, establishing a permanent Zuni Indian Resource Development Trust Fund, the interest from which goes to a variety of environmental and sustainable projects including fish and wildlife, range conservation, hydrology, soil erosion projects, a native seed bank and much more, creating nearly 50 jobs on the reservation and making the project one of the region's major employers.

And now, with the project's Sustainable Resource Development Plan complete and awaiting the signature of the Secretary of the Interior, and the consultant that helped the tribe set up the Sustainable Project now withdrawn, leaving the Zuni people themselves in charge (Eriacho became the project director on Nov. 1, 1993), they're ready to start implementing the plans they've spent the last two years drawing up.

Zuni brush and rock structures are already going in alongside the BIA's rock-and-metal gabions, and Bowannie and Laahty have conducted personal interviews with hundreds of farmers, accumulating all the data in a computer databank for study. Now, they hope beginning this summer, they will begin training and technical assistance work and some plain hard selling to encourage the farmers to learn new techniques AND the good, old ones, in the interest of making the tribe's farmland green again.

"It's taken us a long time to get to this point, and it's going to take a long time to finish," Eriacho said. "After 200 years of trying, something's got to change soon. It's going to be a chain reaction, so when more farmers come on, they'll turn around and train more, and they'll go on down the line."

All the feature stories on @GRASS-ROOTS.ORG's pages are reported and written by Robin Garr, a prize-winning journalist who has visited more than 500 innovative grassroots programs in all 50 states since 1990.

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