By BEN NEARY
NMWF Conservation Director
ALBUQUERQUE _ A federal judge has denied Jemez Pueblo’s claim that it owns the nearly 90,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in the Jemez Mountains.
U.S. District Judge James O. Browning on Aug. 31 issued a sealed opinion denying Jemez Pueblo’s claim that its aboriginal property rights to the area were never extinguished. The judge held a trial for several weeks on the pueblo’s claims last fall in Albuquerque.
Jemez Pueblo has pressed its claim to the land since the federal government acquired it in 2000 from private owners for $101 million. The land had been in private hands since the federal government declared the area to be vacant land in 1860 and transferred it to private ownership.
Browning in his written final judgment on the case ruled that the United States has clear title to the land.
Attempts to reach lawyers for the pueblo and the federal government were not immediately successful.
In addition to sealing his opinion in the case, Browning also sealed his “findings of fact and conclusions of law,” which would provide his stated rationale for why he ruled as he did.
The pueblo’s claims have centered on its assertions that members have continued to use the area for religious and ceremonial purposes even while it was in private hands.
Former Jemez Pueblo Gov. David Joshua Madalena gave a statement in support of the pueblo’s legal claim in late 2017. He said the Jemez people refer to the area not as the Valles Caldera but as Redondo Wavema.
“It is our holy land,” Madalena said. “It is as important as the Vatican is important to Catholic. Blue Lake is to the Taos. We preserve it as the best way we can and not to destroy it in any way.”
The lands at issue include the Valles Caldera, a collapsed volcanic dome in the heart of the Jemez Mountains. In addition to spectacular scenery, it offers world-class trout fishing and holds a trophy elk herd. As a national preserve, it’s an important recreation and tourism destination.
The federal government in 1860 granted the land to the heirs of Luis Maria Cabeza de Baca as partial settlement for a property dispute elsewhere. It passed through various private hands over the next 140 years before the Dunigan family of Abilene, Texas, sold it to the federal government for $101 million in 2000.
Money for the purchase came from the federal Land and Water Conservation Fund, which collects revenues from offshore energy production. The ranch purchase took years of effort from conservationists in the state, notably including former New Mexico Game and Fish Department Director Bill Huey.
Although the Dunigans provided the government with a warranty deed, they specified they weren’t warranting the property against Indian claims.
The case came to Browning after the U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver in 2015 overruled a 2013 decision by U.S. District Judge Robert Brack.
Brack had dismissed Jemez Pueblo’s claims to the land. He said the pueblo missed its chance to sue the federal government when it failed to do so within five years of the 1946 passage of the Indian Claims Commission Act.
However, the three-judge panel of the 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled that, because the government’s 1860 transfer of the land to the Baca heirs didn’t necessarily extinguish the pueblo’s aboriginal title, it didn’t create a pre-1946 claim for loss of that title that had to be filed within the five-year window.
Jemez Pueblo maintains that its claim against the federal government didn’t begin until 2000, when the federal government acquired the land from the Dunigans and, the pueblo says, began interfering with the pueblo’s use of it.
At a hearing in September, lawyer Peter Dykema of the U.S. Department of Justice’s Environment and Natural Resources Division in Washington, D.C., argued to Browning that the pueblo’s argument was “at war with common sense.”