By BEN NEARY
NMWF Conservation Director
ALBUQUERQUE _ A federal judge based his rejection of Jemez Pueblo’s claim that it owns the 90,000-acre Valles Caldera National Preserve in the Jemez Mountains on the grounds that many other pueblos and Indian tribes also have used the area
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 issue last fall in Albuquerque.
On Sept. 27, Browning released his 530-page opinion with information about American Indian religious practices, sites and other details blacked out.
“The Court concludes that Jemez Pueblo has not established aboriginal title to the Valles Caldera,” Browning wrote. “Although the evidence proves that Jemez Pueblo has actually and continuously used and occupied the Valles Caldera for a long time, the evidence also shows that many Pueblos and Tribes also used the Valles Caldera in ways that defeat Jemez Pueblo’s aboriginal title claim.”
Jemez Pueblo had pressed its claim to the land since the federal government acquired it in 2000 from private owners. 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.
Jemez Pueblo claimed its members have continued to use the area for religious and ceremonial purposes even while it was in private hands.
However, Browning found that other pueblos and Indian tribes also used the area for activities including pilgrimages, hunting and collection of culturally important objects. He rejected Jemez Pueblo’s claim that it had exclusive use of trails and routes in the area.
Browning ruled that the United States has clear title to the land.
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.
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. That’s when, the pueblo argued, the government began interfering with the pueblo’s use of the area.
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.