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as Silko notes in her story about Felipe Riley. She makes it clear that
Felipe’s method of farming was a delicate art; as James Vlasich observes
in the introduction to his book Pueblo Indian Agriculture, “Dry farming
is more precarious than other forms of irrigation and requires the talent
of an expert agriculturist” (3). Traditional agriculture methods in Pueblo
communities allowed the people to live there prosperously since long
before the Bureau of Reclamation or the Army Corps of Engineers
started damming rivers and digging wells. Fields were irrigated through
the low-impact method of “ak chin,” which involved surface-channeling
seasonal runoff (HKM 4). For most of their history, Laguna and Acoma
agriculture have “depended on the combination of snowmelt moisture,
direct precipitation, intermittent runoff from mesa tops, and floodplain
irrigation along the riverine bottomlands” (Rivera 2). The cosmology
of the Pueblo people that holds water to be sacred was clearly evident in
traditional agricultural practices that worked in concert with the land so
closely and so conscientiously that they were able to thrive. Not only did
Laguna people try to not waste water, but they were able to use what they
had to create abundance.
The Pueblo people had many, many generations to learn how to
cultivate a variety of crops in the desert without negatively impacting
the land. Felipe Riley’s story in Sacred Water indicates the abundance
of crops that traditional agriculture enabled without technologies any
fancier than a carefully placed stone check dam. An early traveler to
the Southwestern territory in 1866, James F. Meline, had to admit that,
despite the “primitive” appearance of Pueblo technologies, “they always
stored a year’s supply of food and raised every kind of vegetable or fruit
known in the region” (Vlasich 95). The vegetables and fruits the Pueblo
people grew were numerous; wheat, corn, chili, melons, watermelons,
beans, peaches, and tobacco were among their many crops (Vlasich 95,
Ortiz 281). Of course, once the United States government became
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involved, the Pueblo people, who had had plenty to subsist on since time
immemorial, were pressured to “modernize” and “improve production” by
a government-employed farmer at the Pueblo agency (Vlasich 101). The
U.S. government went so far as to attempt to re-educate Pueblo children
in “correct” methods of farming, but as Vlasich notes, the real trouble
for traditional farming came when “relocation programs took many
of the best and brightest away from the reservation farms” in the post-
WWII era (287). Pre-requisite to the forced “modernization” of Pueblo
agriculture was the privileging of Western techniques, developed in the
East and transplanted in the West, and the subsequent de-privileging of
local knowledge, developed in the desert through centuries of experience.
Through the story of Felipe and the erosion of his dams, Silko seems to be
gesturing towards the gradual decline of traditional Pueblo farming and
the irreplaceability of such lost knowledge.
Other Pueblo writers have written about the changing landscape
of Pueblo agriculture. In the 1979 anthology The Remembered Earth,
Acoma poet Simon Ortiz, alludes to other circumstances that in the 70s
were making traditional agriculture less possible. One of the changes in
the land was the decreased seasonal flow of the San Jose River and the
pollution of the water through mining uranium. Ortiz writes in a short
piece entitled “Up the Line”:
All that land is good land and it used mainly to be farmed.
The Rio de San Jose, which is really just a small creek now,
runs through there and is used for irrigation. There isn’t that
much farming done anymore, less in Laguna than in Acoma,
just small garden crops, some corn, alfalfa, beans, chili, and a
few orchards. The water isn’t much good anymore because of
the uranium mining and milling. (283)
The decline of farming in Laguna and Acoma has been significant—the
1827 Census of employed Pueblo people listed that, of the 446 total
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