Jack Loeffler, Lore of the Land Board Member, is a bioregional aural historian, producer, writer, sound collage artist, and musician. Since 1964, he has conducted field recordings west of the 100th meridian, founding the Peregrine Arts Sound Archive in 1967 to be the repository for his professional work. His archive now holds thousands of hours of recordings of interviews, music and natural habitat, and contains well over 3,000 songs of indigenous and traditional peoples. His primary concern is restoration and preservation of habitat focusing on the relationships of indigenous cultures to respective habitats, and the role of cultural diversity in attempting to solve the dilemmas now facing humankind.
Loeffler has produced over 300 documentary programs for radio, plus scores of soundtracks, albums of music from diverse genres, films, videos, folk music festivals, museum sound collages, and books. Selected radio series include: La Musica de los Viejitos; Southwest Sound Collage; Navajo-Hopi Land Dispute; Bioregional Folklore and Music of Tohono O’odham, Yaqui, Anglo, and Mexican Folk Musicians; Moving Waters – The Colorado River and the West; and The Lore of the Land.
He has authored five books: Headed Upstream: Interviews with Iconoclasts, 1989; La Musica de los Viejitos including 3-CD set, with Katherine Loeffler and Enrique Lamadrid, 1999; Adventures with Ed: A Portrait of Abbey, 2002; Survival Along the Continental Divide, 2008; and Healing the West: Voices of Culture and Habitat, 2008. He is currently working on several projects, including the Thinking Like a Watershed aural history project.
He is the recipient of a 2008 Governor’s Award for Excellence in the Arts, and the 2009 Edgar Lee Hewett Award for Outstanding Public Service from the New Mexico Historical Society. (more)
Suzanne Jamison, Treasurer, is a management consultant and event organizer who has worked with nonprofit organizations since 1970. From 1975 to 1978, she was part of the management collective that established the Santa Fe Armory for the Arts. In 1978, she co-founded the Santa Fe Council for the Arts, serving as its executive director from 1980-1985. She has developed and implemented many national and international conferences. She has worked with Estevan Arellano, Enrique Lamadrid, and Jack Loeffler for many years, raising funds for and coordinating numerous documentation projects.
Enrique Lamadrid, Vice President, is a Professor of Spanish and Portuguese in the Language Department at the University of New Mexico, Albuquerque. In addition, he is a literary folklorist, author, ethnomusicologist, and vocal performer of Inditas. For many years, he has coordinated Connexiones, a summer exchange program with Mexico. He collaborated with Jack Loeffler on La Music de los Viejitos, an aural and photo documentation project that resulted in several articles and a book. His book, Hermanitos Commanchitos, was published in September, 2003 by UNM Press. Most recently, he has been a consultant on Camino Real de Tierra Adentro, a new museum developed by BLM and the New Mexico Department of Cultural Affairs.
Celestia Peregrina Loeffler, Radio Producer and Project Coordinator, was born and raised in Santa Fe, where she quickly realized the magic of the region. She has since dedicated her life to the art of cultural preservation and has crafted a unique career as a producer, archivist, wordsmith, model and actor. She is currently working with Lore of the Land on myriad projects that promote and preserve the cultural diversity of her beloved homeland. She holds a BA in Creative Writing from the University of New Mexico and is certified to teach English as a second language through the School for International Training. She makes her home with her husband, and the surrounding wildlife, in Durango, CO.
James McGrath, President, is a founding member of the original organization. He is a practicing visual artist and cultural consultant to organizations throughout the world. He retired as chair of the Art Department at the Institute of American Indian Arts in Santa Fe, New Mexico. In the service of promoting international understanding, he traveled throughout the world as a multicultural arts specialist representing the US government. He has a lifelong commitment to culture, arts, and education with a Native American focus.
Sue Sturtevant, Ed.D., Secretary, received her B. A. in English from Boston College, M. A. in Psycholinguistics from the University of Massachusetts and Ed. D. in Educational Leadership/Museum Studies from the University of Massachusetts, Amherst. She is currently Director and CEO of the Hill-Stead Museum in Farmington, Connecticut. The Hill-Stead Museum houses a collection of Impressionist paintings and decorative arts in a 1901 Colonial-Revival building on a 152-acre country estate. The grounds include a formal Sunken Garden, three miles of looped trails, birds and wildlife as well as a mile of unusual stone walls. Dr. Sturtevant spent sixteen years as Chief of Education for the Museum of New Mexico and later as Director of Statewide Partnerships for the NM Department of Cultural Affairs. She worked with fifteen divisions including the State Library, the Museum of New Mexico’s four museums in Santa Fe, National Hispanic Cultural Center, Museum of Natural History and Science, NM Farm and Ranch Heritage Museum, NM Museum of Space History, Museum Resources Division, NM Arts, State Monuments, Office of Archaeological Studies and the Historic Preservation Division.
Lynn Udall – is on the Board of Directors of Lore of the Land, acting as Secretary. She is retired from a 25-year teaching career in the Santa Fe Public Schools. These days she keeps herself busy as a caregiver at El Castillo Retirement home in Santa Fe and tutoring students in the Santa Fe Public Schools. Her passions are hiking, backpacking, camping, bicycling, gardening, playing scrabble, and enjoying the company of her elderly father and her three children.
Stewart Udall (January 31, 1920 – March 20, 2010), In Memoriam, former Board Member was born in St. Johns, Arizona in 1920. He grew up on the family farm during the Great Depression. He enlisted in the Army Air Corps during World War II and flew in many missions. After being honorably discharged, he attended college in Arizona and received a law degree. He married Lee Webb, and together they raised a family of six children.
Mr. Udall successfully ran for U.S. Congress in 1954 where he served until he was appointed as Secretary of the Interior by President John F. Kennedy in January, 1961. He served in the capacity under both Presidents Kennedy and Johnson until January, 1969. During his tenure, he worked vigorously in behalf of preservation of natural habitat, and it was on his watch that the Wilderness Act was passed and signed into law in 1964. After leaving Washington, for many years he worked closely with Navajo uranium miners and their widows successfully seeking recompense for them. He is presently retired and lives in Santa Fe, New Mexico. Stewart Udall is the author of several books including his classic, The Quiet Crisis, The Quiet Crisis and the Next Generation, and To the Inland Empire.
Scholars:
Lillian Hill, Hopi, lives at Kykotsmovi. She is a student at Northern Arizona University where she is part of the Center for Sustainable Environments, directed by Dr. Gary Paul Nabhan. It was at a CSE lecture program that she heard Jack Loeffler speak of his plans for this project and subsequently expressed her commitment to documenting her community. She is affiliated with the Hopi radio station, KUYI. Her plans are to develop materials she collects into language programs for the schools and for broadcast. She is currently creating curriculum for Hopi children that contains stories, traditional knowledge of plants, animals, clans, and ancient games and music. Archives she creates will be seminal in efforts to retain Hopi oral language, which conveys their deep spiritual and philosophical worldview.
Angelo Joaquin, Jr., Tohono O’odham, has been director of the annual Waila Festival for over 20 years. The Festival is held in May at the University of Arizona. He was formerly director of Native SEED/Search in Tucson. His father started the Joaquin Brothers band in the 1950s and was largely responsible for the evolution of chicken scratch, or waila, music, played at Tohono O’odham social dances. Joaquin has been documenting waila, or chicken scratch, music for many years and seeks to transfer this music from analog tape to digital archives. His Nation is starting its own radio station, KHON. Joaquin intends edit materials he collects through this project into 30-minute radio programs for broadcast throughout the reservation and neighboring communities of Tucson and Casa Grande. Joaquin has the professional foundation and deep personal dedication to keeping alive the Tohono O’odham language and way of life.
Roy Kady, Diné, Teec Nos Pos Chapter, is an accomplished weaver and fiber artist who is breaking out of the traditional mold with new styles. He lives in his family home at Many Goat Springs, above the community of T’iis Nazbas, where he maintains a large flock of rare Navajo-Churro sheep and angora goats, plus one llama. He teaches culture classes at the local K-8 school, works with at-risk youth, and recently taught weaving classes at the Diné College Shiprock campus. With TahNibaa Natani, he organizes monthly Spin-Offs for weavers from all cultures, which they host in communities within the Shiprock-T’iis area. He is committed to participating in this project because for many years he has sought to record stories that are told in the landscape, taking elders and practitioners to the many sacred sites in the vicinity that are linked with Diné Creation Stories and ceremonial stories. The Teec area, on the eastern slope of the Chuska Mountains, is rich in lore of all kinds including plants, land management, livestock, and agriculture.
Camillus Lopez, Tohono O’odham, lives in the Santa Rosa community. He is a traditional person who has served on the tribal council. He is committed to learning how to record the elders in his community, set up archives, and disseminate that knowledge through the other Tohono O’odham communities.
Tessie Naranjo, Santa Clara Pueblo, lives in northern New Mexico. She is a fluent Tewa speaker, a nationally recognized community advocate, and a language and culture teacher in her home Pueblo. An independent consultant, she is the past chair of the Native American Graves and Repatriation Act Committee and active with Keepers of the Treasurers. Working with the Pueblo of Pojoaque, she coordinated a project interviewing 38 elders for archives in the Tribal Library and Archives. Naranjo holds a Masters Degree in Health Education and a Doctoral degree in Sociology.
Tessie works with her sister Dr. Rina Swentzell. Together, they were Katrin H. Lamon Resient Scholars, working on the project “Seven Santa Clara Pueblo Women: Defining a Feminine Worldview.” As an extension of this philosophy, she is interested in exploring several significant concepts that seem to permeate Pueblo life: movement, duality, identity, community, and relationality as keys to understanding the survival of Tewa culture. She has connections with several community museums and cultural centers that are appropriate locations for the archives.
Rina Swentzell , PhD, was born in Santa Clara Pueblo. She earned her B.A. in Education and her M.A. in Architecture from New Mexico Highlands University. She earned her Ph.D. in American Studies in 1982 from the University of New Mexico. Swentzell writes and lectures on the philosophical and cultural basis of the Pueblo world and its educational, artistic, and architectural expressions. Her writing appears in magazines, scholarly journals, and edited collections and she appears in video presentations for television and museums commenting upon Puebloan cultural values. She has been a consultant to a number of museums including Santa Fe’s Institute of American Indian Arts and the Smithsonian, and was a visiting lecturer at both Yale and Oxford in 1996. She has contributed to Lore of the Land as a board member and scholar since 2007.
William deBuys is a Professor of Documentary Studies and serves as a private conservation consultant whose clients have included The Conservation Fund, The Nature Conservancy, U.S. Forest Service, and the National Biological Survey. He is the author of several books and articles and the recipient of numerous fellowships and awards. His book River Traps was honored as The New York Times Notable Book of the Year in 1990. Other awards have included the Robert Langsenkamp award, the Pflueger Award and the Watershed Steward Award.
William deBuys is a writer and conservationist based in Santa Fe, New Mexico. His first book, Enchantment and Exploitation: the Life and Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range, which won a Southwest Book Award, combines the cultural and natural history of northern New Mexico. His second book, River of Traps, one of three finalists for the 1991 Pulitzer Prize, combines memoir, biography, and photography. DeBuys’s third book, Salt Dreams: Land and Water in Low-Down California, destined to become a classic, is an environmental and social history of the land where the Colorado River comes to an end.
Lyle Balenquah, Hopi, is a member of the Greasewood clan from the Village of Bacavi (Reed Springs) on Third Mesa. He has earned degrees (B.A. 1999, M.A. 2002) in Cultural Anthropology and Southwestern Archaeology from Northern Arizona University. For over 10 years he has worked throughout Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah as an archaeologist documenting ancestral Hopi settlements and their lifeways. Currently he works as an independent consultant but his work experience includes time with the National Park Service, The Hopi Tribe, and the Museum of Northern Arizona. He also works as a part-time river guide on the San Juan River and other rivers in the Southwest, combining his professional knowledge and training with personal insights about his ancestral history to provide a unique forum of public education. As a farmer, rancher, hiker and hunter, he is an active participant in the natural and wild realms, where he strives to better understand himself and his relationship to these environments. As a member with Lore of the Land, he will focus on producing programs that highlight his experiences, and the experience of others who live, work and rejuvenate among the deserts, mountains and watersheds of the Southwest.
Alta Begay, Diné, lives in Utah and Arizona. She grew up in a traditional home where Navajo culture and language were taught. Her extended family members are rooted in Navajo traditional healing practices and lifeways. She has a BA in Human Services in Psychology, a MA in Counseling, with endorsement in School Psychology. Her family home in Jeddito Island was part of the Hopi-Navajo disputed lands. She and her immediate family subsequently built a relocation home in Blanding, Utah. She worked for Native Americans for Community Action, Inc., counseling other individuals who were relocated to the Flagstaff area. She was a co-founder of Diné be’ iiná, Inc., a nonprofit Navajo organization preserving the lifeways and culture based on the Navajo-Churro sheep. She has been recording healing songs of Navajo practitioners.
Alta is part of the first year project. Her assistant is her husband, Terrell Piechowski, who is also in the healing profession. She is heading the Lore of the Land team investigating the preservation of the tape library of Navajo aural history recorded in the early 1960s. She will be collecting aural histories from traditional Navajo and non-Navajo spiritual healers who serve the Navajo population. She plans to document the viewpoints of Navajo teachers and administrators about their roles in creating an educational system that fits the cultural needs of the Navajo people. These interests in healing and education complement her work in counseling and school leadership.
Sonia Dickey is a writer, editor, historian, and aural historian born on the banks of the Savannah River in Savannah, Georgia, in 1975. An eighth-generation South Carolinian, Sonia has long been drawn to remote, wild places. She grew up exploring the islands and waterways of South Carolina’s lush Lowcountry and spent much of her childhood outdoors camping, fishing, and hiking with her grandparents. In 1998, Sonia received her bachelor degree in history and anthropology from Georgia Southern University. Three years later, she obtained a master’s degree in history from the same institution.
Continuing her graduate studies at the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque, Sonia moved to the Southwest in 2001. Here, she focuses on environmental and Native history. Her dissertation, “Sacrilege in Dinétah: Native and Naturalist Encounters with Glen Canyon Dam, 1950–2000,” centers on the Colorado River watershed and calls for the inclusion of Native voices in the history of the Glen Canyon Dam debacle and current debates that surround decommissioning the dam and draining Lake Powell.
Although emerging from watersheds in the verdant East, Sonia now calls the arid West home. In her free time, she wanders the canyonlands, mountain ranges, and waterways of the Southwest with her two best compañeros, Alan and Max. She also enjoys reading, listening to music, gardening, biking, kayaking, birding, and communing with the natural world.
David F. García, MA, is from the traditional agriculture-based community of El Guache, New Mexico. He is currently completing a PhD. Program in Anthropology at the University of Texas at Austin. As a researcher investigating local knowledge systems in northern New Mexico and practices, his interests include: acequias, foodways, religion, spirituality, folkloristics, Indo-Hispano drama, dance and music as they relate to sustainability and cultural survival of Indo-Hispano communities. He is specifically interested in how shifts in economic bases relate to transformations in the relationships that people have to the environment and local resources.
He is currently an intern with the Acequia de los Salazares, a political subdivision of the state of New Mexico. In conjunction with Lore of the Land he is currently conducting a community based oral/aural history project known as “Pláticas sobre el uso del acequia y la tierra” (Dialogues concerning the uses of the Acequia and the Land). In addition to the above duties he is also a multi-talented musician and performer of local Spanish music as a solo artist and also a member of the statewide recognized Al Hurricane Band.
Gary Snyder is a poet, author, scholar, cultural critic, and Professor Emeritus of the University of California at Davis. He graduated from Reed College in Portland, Oregon in 1951. After graduate study in Linguistics at Indiana University he entered Graduate School at U.C. Berkeley in the Department of East Asian Languages. He studied Chinese poetry with Chen Shih-hsiang and did his Han-shan translations then. In the Bay Area Snyder associated with Kenneth Rexroth, Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, Philip Whalen, Allen Ginsberg, Jack Kerouac and others who were part of the remarkable flowering of west coast poetry during the fifties. In 1956 he moved to Kyoto Japan to study Zen Buddhism and East Asian culture.
For the last thirty-eight years he has been living in the northern Sierra Nevada. He has divided his time between environmental and cultural issues with a focus on the Sierra Nevada ecosystem, and teaching with a focus on creative writing, ethnopoetics, and bioregional praxis at the university.
He has been a Guggenheim Fellow and is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. His book, Turtle Island won the Pulitzer Prize for poetry in 1975, and his book of selected poems No Nature was a finalist for the National Book Award in 1992. Mountains and Rivers Without End (a book-length poem) won the Bollingen Prize for poetry in 1997. In 2004 he was awarded the “Masaoka Shiki International Haiku Grand Prize” in Japan. He is a Chancellor of the Academy of American Poets. He has two sons and two stepdaughters.
Juan Estevan Arellano is a journalist, writer, researcher, graduate of New Mexico State University, and a Fellow of the Washington Journalism Center. He is now a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of New Mexico’s School of Architecture. He has received an Individual Fellowship from the Ford Foundation, and in 2007 the New Mexico State Legislature recognized him as one of the 15 top Hispanics in New Mexico. He is also involved in setting up the International Acequia Documentation Center, under the auspices of the Lore of the Land.
He is a former director of the Oñate Cultural Center and at present resides in Embudo, NM, with his wife Elena. He has served as mayordomo and commissioner of the Acequia Junta y Ciénaga and is a former Concilio member of the New Mexico Acequia Association. He is an advocate of traditional agriculture and acequias, and is very involved in preserving the genetic diversity of the fruit trees and food traditions that came up the Camino Real de Tierra Adentro from the Middle East, via the Iberian Peninsula and Mexico. He is also a board member of Sustain Taos.
