.......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... .......... ..........

BANDELIER NATIONAL MONUMENT – With each swipe of his trowel, Vidal Gonzales is working to keep intact the ruins of homes that once contained the everyday lives, the tears, the joys, the loves and pains of the many families that came before him.

“This means a lot to me,” said the 17-year-old from Santa Clara Pueblo. “These are my ancestors’ homes, so I treat everything with respect.”

Those thoughts were echoed by others in the eight-member, all-Native youth crew working this week on stabilizing the ruins of Tyuonyi Pueblo here, where Ancestral Puebloans lived from around 1325 to the mid-1400s near Frijoles Creek. The 10-week program, which includes trail building and other tasks for the crew, is a joint project with the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, the National Park Service and the National Trust for Historic Preservation.

ADVERTISEMENTSkip

................................................................

The youths are being overseen by three seasonal staffers from San Ildefonso Pueblo who are experienced masons, said J.T. Stark, a preservation specialist with the National Park Service at Bandelier.

Those men can share the knowledge about working on ancestral sites with the youths, as well as help them learn traditional skills, he said.

For Michael Martinez, who has worked on the Bandelier stabilization programs for three years, such work is something he does twice a year at home in San Ildenfonso. “At home, we plaster the houses with regular mud, without the bonding agent.”

An acrylic bonding agent is added to help harden the mortar used at the Bandelier site, he said, but otherwise the mixture of sand, silt and clay that he was watching John Moya, assistant crew supervisor from Ohkay Owingeh, mix together Tuesday was all traditional. That’s a switch from many years past, when concrete was the mortar of choice. “We’re trying to do away with that,” Martinez added.

‘Definitely a privilege’

Noting that this is the first time an all-tribal crew has worked in the program, Moya said it was an important part of “preserving a sense of our culture.” The program also helps instill values in young men in the area of “goals, lifestyle, education, health” and more, he said. “We’ve all learned a lot.”

Kinsley Moquino, 17, said he likes to be outdoors, involved with nature, and wants to encourage others, including his own siblings, to do the same. “It’s good to get the youth out instead of doing nothing over the summer,” said Moquino. He added that he goes out to work in his family’s fields, mostly alfalfa and hay, after he gets back to his Santo Domingo home from his work at Bandelier.

He has also become more interested in the history at the national monument, he said. With the spiritual sites in the area, he said, he has a sense of knowing his ancestors “are around us and watching over us.”

Over the years, said Robert Bird, 23, he would come up to Bandelier from his Cochiti Pueblo home in the summer “to relax, have a good picnic.” So when he heard of the youth corps work up there, he was interested. “It’s been great,” he said.

“It’s a beautiful place to work every day,” said crew supervisor Daniel Bird from Santo Domingo Pueblo, which now uses the tribal name Kewa. “It’s definitely a privilege to come out here and work every day.”

A graduate in December from New Mexico State University with a bachelor of science degree in wildlife biology, Bird said he started with the Youth Corps program when he was 17. Now he would love to start a similar one in his own or another tribal community, he said. Too many young people, he said, hang out with nothing to do, especially during the summer break from school.

The all-tribal nature of this particular crew, Bird said, helps the youths “learn things you can’t learn from textbooks, things that are passed down from older generations.”

Besides the cultural aspect, the program gives youths exposure to what it takes to get into higher education, what it takes to get and keep a job, and also connects them with mentors and helps them learn networking, he said.

‘Really respectful’

That’s a good part of what the Rocky Mountain Youth Corps is aiming for, said Ben Thomas, executive director. Part of Americorps, the Taos-based agency aims to “inspire young men and women to make a difference” in their own lives and in their communities, he said. People ages 16 to 25 are eligible, Thomas said, adding that the crew at Bandelier is not all-male by design, but only because no young women applied for it.

Rocky Mountain Youth Corps, whose membership swells in the summer, has 113 corps members this summer, not counting crew supervisors and administrators, he said. “That’s the biggest summer we’ve ever had,” Thomas said, adding that five new crews were recently established in Albuquerque working on a variety of projects.

Applications are being taken for the fall crews, ages 18 to 25, he added. You can find them at youthcorps.org.

Earle Sanchez, one of the staffers from San Ildefonso, said young people in the program say the experience is a great résumé-builder. “They tell me it makes you really stand out,” he said.

“The guys are really respectful of this area,” Sanchez continued. “They communicate pretty well with each other. They all get along. I was happy to jump on board and try to make this happen.”

Through the summer, the crew members have invited one another to their community feasts and dances, sitting down in one another’s homes and learning about their cultural differences, Moquino said. “We are all the same, but have different ways of living,” he said.

“We visit each other’s communities, see some of the cultural practices,” Daniel Bird said. “We see the importance of what we’re doing here.”

And that importance for Bandelier, Stark explained, is to preserve the ruins, not adding, not subtracting, but maintaining their scientific integrity so that future research might be able to discover additional insights about the people who lived there.

As mortar has disintegrated and top layers of stones were in danger of toppling, the youth crew has put in fresh mortar to keep everything in place. They have also worked on another site and on building trails in Bandelier.

Tyuonyi Pueblo, the first set of housing ruins you encounter when you take the main trail from the visitor’s center, has 240 ground floor rooms, he said. When Edgar Lee Hewett first excavated it in the early 1900s, he speculated it had two to three stories, Stark said, basing that estimate on the amount of rubble surrounding the ruins. But Stark said the bases of the outer walls suggest to some that they might not have been strong enough to support additional levels.

So he declined to speculate on how many people might have lived in Tyuonyi at one time. Pointing to unexcavated ruins and other housing uncovered throughout Bandelier’s portion of Frijoles Canyon, though, Stark said, “you probably had thousands of people living down here.”