CHACO NOW

(Excerpts below from Chaco Now – new and archival poems by V. B. Price, officially on shelves September 29. Available for purchase now at Casa Urraca Press.)

When President Donald Trump’s Secretary of the Interior Doug Burgum signed Secretarial Order 3418 in February 2025, he required the use of all federal lands to be examined with the goal of dramatically increasing fossil fuel energy production at the expense of other economic and cultural uses. Perhaps the most damaging fallout from Burgum’s order was a rollback of the ban on oil and gas exploration in the ten-mile buffer zone round Chaco Canyon’s World Heritage archaeological sites. A year later, in March 2026, Interior’s Bureau of Land Management (BLM) proposed to revoke or, as one document states, to “axe,” the buffer zone’s ban on energy production that had been ordered by New Mexico’s Deb Haaland when she was Interior Secretary under President Joe Biden. In April 2026 the New Mexico congressional delegation reintroduced the Chaco Culture Heritage Area Protection Act, which would make Haaland’s ban permanent. These matters are all part of a tempestuous two-hundred-year history of Euromerican exploration of the canyon and efforts to chart, excavate, and preserve the remains of its astonishing architectural achievements.

Theories abound about why the great buildings of Chaco were abandoned around 1150 CE. But from that time on, those engineering and architectural marvels were left to erode and sometimes fall victim to looters and eventually scientific scavenger hunters from the great museums of the east coast. The first documented European exploration of the canyon was led by Mexican official Jose Vizcarra, who surveyed a few of the larger structures in 1823. After that, the remoteness of the canyon kept explorers at bay for more than half a century. All the while, storms and drought kept wearing away at the great houses along Chaco Wash and beyond. What could be the

first concerted effort to shore up and preserve Pueblo Bonito and other sites was undertaken by Richard Wetherill, who eventually staked a homestead claim to much of the canyon in 1901. Wetherill worked for the American Museum of Natural History in New York, and he crated up or, some might say, looted massive quantities of artifacts from Pueblo Bonito, including an estimated ten thousand ceramic vessels, fifty thousand pieces of turquoise, and thousands of stone tools, and sent them east to be catalogued and exhibited and never to be returned. Numerous other museums and research centers have materials taken from Great House excavations in the Canyon, including the Smithsonian Institution, the Maxwell Museum of Anthropology at the University of New Mexico, the Museum of Indian Arts & Culture (part of the Laboratory of Anthropology) in Santa Fe, the Natural History Museum of Utah, and the Chaco Research Archive at the University of Virginia.

The great moment that symbolized the fragility of Chaco’s architectural heritage took place on January 22, 1941, at 3:24 p.m., when an immense thirty-thousand-ton vertical slab of stone called Threatening Rock, tall as a nine-story building, broke loose from the canyon wall behind Pueblo Bonito and came crashing down, wiping out some sixty rooms of the Great House. Researchers found that ancestral Puebloan people had left prayer sticks and other ritual objects in the widening crack between the rock and the canyon wall as early as 1100 CE, presumably to help keep Threatening Rock in place. The legend of the great rock was so captivating that an aerial photo of it still standing was taken by Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh during a flyby in 1929.

The thirteen major ruins and almost four thousand smaller archaeological sites of the Chaco complex came under the protection of the University of New Mexico in 1949. Ten years later, Chaco had become the property of the National Park Service and was designated as a National Monument. Chaco was listed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1966. In 1987, UNESCO made the Chaco Culture National Historical Park a World Heritage site. But despite all the inherent protections that come with such designations, the Chaco area, like everywhere else in the world, is subject to the depredations of climate change. In 2023, a tremendous rockfall occurred at one of Chaco’s many camp sites, echoing the disaster of the fall of Threatening Rock. The rockfall was chalked up to extreme heat caused by global warming, the very conditions that the drilling ban in the buffer zone was trying to help mitigate in its own small way.

What follows is an edited column on the buffer zone that I wrote in the Mercury Messenger in April 2026.

Threatening the integrity of the Chaco Culture National Historical Park and UN World Heritage Site in north-central New Mexico is the perfect example of how deep the Republican Party has sunk into mean-spirited political cussedness.

As I write this in April 2026, the Trump administration is in the process of revoking a Biden-era Public Land Order signed by then-Interior Secretary Deb Haaland that prohibits oil and gas drilling on some 330,000 acres of federal public land around Chaco Canyon. That land provides a ten-mile buffer zone between the architectural masterpieces of Chaco Canyon and the massive fracking enterprise polluting and uglifying the natural gas-rich San Juan Basin.

If the administration has its way, the buffer zone could be cut in half or eliminated altogether. They don’t seem to be scheming this atrocity for economic reasons. The San Juan Basin is estimated to produce some 67% of New Mexico’s natural gas, generating $300 million plus in annual revenues. Fracking in the ten-mile buffer zone might produce something close to $3 million in yearly revenue, a mere drop in the bucket compared to the rest of the basin.

If this threat to Chaco Canyon isn’t about money, what’s it about? It can only be an act of political bullying, a direct assault on the cultural integrity of our blue-voting state and on the sovereign Pueblo nations that are vehemently opposed to reducing or eliminating the buffer area that protects their sacred landscape. Without it, the monuments to the Pueblos’ ancestral heritage could be turned into what Pueblo leaders are calling an industrialized sacrifice zone.

It’s possible that without the buffer, fracking—with all its noise, lights, fumes, machinery, digging, and thumping— could take place right up next to such fragile masonry treasures as Pueblo Bonito, Chetro Ketl, Pueblo Alto, and Casa Rinconada. Fracking would severely compromise the aesthetic and natural serenity of the site, damage the irreplaceable “ruins,” and all but wreck the educational and recreational benefits of the canyon to the public.

Screwing the public like that would be perfectly in keeping with Republican policy these days, which works overtime to turn the federal government into a punishing, vengeful, oppressive, demeaning, and purposefully intimidating menace, devoid of conscience and any sense of public service.

So of course Republicans in power would dream up the ruination of a public treasure that provides peace, solace, and often an intense experience of enlightenment about the genius of a culture that has flourished here for millennia. Those threatening Chaco Canyon just don’t give a damn about how government can serve the wellbeing of the public. They use government as an instrument of coercion and religious conformity. I’ll bet the revenue to be gained from fracking the buffer zone wouldn’t begin to cover a variety of government “expenses” such as, for example, the “renovation” of the Lincoln Memorial Reflecting Pool.

In a state that thrives on its cultural resources, Chaco Canyon is the jewel in the crown. To harm it—a sacred Puebloan landscape—in any way is a sacrilege. As landscape architect and scholar Baker Morrow wrote in the prologue to Anasazi Architecture and American Design (UNM Press, 1997), “by the eleventh century AD, a simple love for masonry buildings and a tremendous facility in creating them had allowed the Anasazi to develop a highly stylized regional tradition having many local variants.… The Anasazi frequently oriented their towns and key buildings to the cardinal directions. Moreover, startling evidence suggests that the Anasazi of Chaco Canyon may have organized many of their buildings and building complexes in patterns that are harmonious with the cycles of the sun and the moon, thus bringing architecture firmly into the service of ritual.… The modern Pueblos represent an unbroken tradition that is now well over a thousand years old. A close look also suggests that the celebrated ‘Santa Fe’ style might more accurately be called ‘Anasazi traditionalism’ because it continues to evoke the spirit of the region more deeply than any other building approach.”

In the epilogue to the same book, I wrote that “Anasazi architecture has an important role to play in the future of American society. Unlike Spanish/Pueblo Revival-style architecture in modern Santa Fe, or colonial American architecture in Williamsburg, however, Anasazi architecture has more to contribute to the health of the future than history lessons or Disneyesque ‘imagineering.’ … (T)he ecological sensitivity and savvy of Anasazi designers is a model for restructuring fundamental Euroamerican concepts of land use and site selection as post-industrial America struggles to retrofit its dysfunctional cities and suburbs for environmental efficiency and cost-effective sustainable growth. The basic Anasazi land-use strategy of adapting the built environment to the conditions and contours of the natural environment, working with natural forms and cycles rather than considering them obstacles to overcome, has immense philosophical and practical value in the future.”

The insulting and frivolous nastiness of any move to damage the serious meaning and beauty of Chaco Canyon’s historic sites is indicative of the wretched values that have come to soil and pollute American conservatism in the twenty first century.

Violation

Shrines, sacred
precincts, holy lands
must have
inviolable
safe space
in the human world,
even in their wide-open
intimate calm, even if
they’re not shut off, taboo
like a sanctum sanctorum.
At Chaco now, its promised land
lies naked, helpless
on the verge of rape,
its zone of peace
compromised, turned into a sandbox
of greedy clamor.
The tinkertoy poisons
and gold-leaf politics
in the wrecking-balled White House
are working to leave the serenity
of its stones unprotected
from the terrible grinding
and roaring and spilling and gagging
of drilling and fracking,
night skies ruined
by blinking lights
and methane flares,
right next to the shrine’s
holy silence,
wrecking its serene midnight,
untouchable distances,
soiling the ultimate richness
of its isolation, the unbounded
purities, the joyous peace
that is its offering to each of us,
that lifts from us
the scrambled burden
of the desperation of our needs.

I Take My Great

age there,
not as baggage,
but as histories
of light bulb flashes

moving across
surfaces of time,
searching for the path,
the right way,

the right outcrop
to follow across
the great galaxies of stones,
constellations

of sharks’ teeth, nodules, nacre
like the under-wings
of dragonfly angels.

Just keep looking
for the right way,
and you will find exactly
what you didn’t

know you needed, everything
that makes you strong enough
to keep losing your way
into the truth

you can never predict,
only accept exactly as it comes,
locked in matrix
or in starlight photons,

down so far in darkness
it becomes as convincing
as what made no sense
before you found it.

Running to Wijiji

When you know who you are
you do who you are,
polishing a mountain
without a goal.

(There is
nothing
more.
There is
nothing
other.)

At ten,
I did who I was;
I had no choice;
knowing and doing were not apart;
and where I was
was as much of myself
as what I did.

(Now is
a holy
place.)

Then years of trying
and coming apart,
polishing stones
not the mountain,
until
the canyon
wore me away
so I could see myself
singular as rocks,
as shadows, clouds,
as cliff curves, edges,
water scars and swirls,
real as skin,
clear as sudden change,
my body
opening to the stars
like Chacra Mesa
on the skull of the world.
Now at fifty,
I am the place again.

(The front
and the back
are part
of the same.)

At ten, the place
was a forest street
where I did who I was,
biking to escape
tender failures,
sailing through arbors of high ponderosas,
winding like grassy streams
through Saturday morning sun.

When you are who you are
you do who you are.

(The sacred
and profane
are sacred.)

At dawn near La Fajada,
breathing in
the rising light,
I am
ten and fifty all at once.
Running through fossil fields of corn,
running the cool space of canyon shade
as one runs memories through the gorge of time,
I see myself
in the shadow at my side,
bike rider, now
dawn runner
reaching Wijiji
at
the
moment
the sun
blooms
wildflower light,
lightning white
over the canyon rim,
over the edge of my brain.
Stunned by God
again and again,
why should I doubt
any longer?

Coda

Now is
a holy
place.
There is
nothing
more.
There is
nothing
other.
The front
and the back
are part
of the same.
The sacred
and profane
are sacred.