The Stolen Smith Family Totem Pole
RISING A TRIUMPHANT 41 FEET INSIDE THE HIBBEN CENTER on the University of New Mexico’s Albuquerque campus, the Smith Family Totem Pole traveled a long and controversial route from the Tlowitsis Nation…
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What We're Reading: Blind Eye
A DOUBLE MURDER ANCHORS MARTHA BURNS’S debut novel, Blind Eye (Atmosphere Press), but the mystery of its perpetrator fits into larger dramas of generational abuse and a community’s reluctance to…
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Give The Telephone Museum a Ring
DEEMED TOO DELICATE FOR ERECTING TELEPHONE POLES and laying cables, women were relegated to uncomfortable chairs and repetitive-injury-inducing switchboard tasks. They had to “always smile when…
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In Praise of New Mexico Churches
IN HISTORIC CHURCHES OF NEW MEXICO TODAY (Oxford University Press, 2017), Frank Graziano travels throughout the state to detail the history of churches and the people who care for them today…
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Tomé's Church Renovation Is No Small Miracle
"PEOPLE ARE DRAWN TO THE MIRACLES Jesus performed,” Father Michael Demkovich tells a dozen parishioners at Tomé’s Immaculate Conception Church during a Wednesday morning Mass. “But that wasn’t why he…
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Adobe Churches Face Challenges
SUNBAKED BRICKS OF MUD WERE an easy building material for Spanish colonists, who erected churches atop stone foundations and then plastered the walls with more mud—reapplying it when rains washed it…
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A Church Worth Saving
IN 1986, SERVICES AND PARISHIONERS at Nuestra Señora de la Candelaria, in Doña Ana, moved to the new Our Lady of Purification, across the parking lot. The new church was larger and held amenities like…
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Nuts for Del Valle Pecans
IN 1986, SALLY HARPER DREAMED of turning her family’s newly acquired pecan orchard into an all-organic enterprise. By the early 1990s, she had trucked thousands of pounds of pecans to health-food…
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These Baskets Carry Native History
MADE OF BIRCHBARK, THE CANOE STRETCHES 21 feet from stern to bow. A Dene (Northern Athabaskan) maker, likely from the Upper Yukon in British Columbia, Canada, crafted it around 1900—but not for…
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Building on Sacred Traditions
FATHER ALBERT BRAUN SO LOVED the Mescalero Apache people that he dedicated decades of his life to creating a Romanesque church with rock walls that soar as high as 90 feet. The cornerstone was laid in…
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