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Saturday, December 31, 2005

City Handles Rocks With All Due Respect
Albuquerque Journal Editorial
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    Another mile-marker along the slow road toward completing Paseo del Norte on the West Side: Nine boulders ranging up to 6 tons were moved from the right-of-way to the protected ground of Petroglyph National Monument.
    Dealing with the rocks was among the last roadblocks to a project that has been on the drawing board since the late '80s. And in the view of some, there was no appropriate way to deal with them except leaving them in place— and canceling the road project.
    Laurie Weahkee of the Sacred Alliance for Grassroots Equality Council, a group prominent in the long fight against Paseo, said it was "a tragedy" that the boulders were moved and that the road is going to be built. In a commentary published in the Journal on Nov. 19, Weahkee said the project was an example of lack of respect for Native American culture.
    To put this in perspective, the choice of Paseo's alignment was incorporated in the decision making about the establishment of the national monument, guaranteeing the widest possible public support.
    The monument set aside 10 square miles right in the path of development. Within that acreage lie an estimated 25,000 petroglyphs, now protected in perpetuity.
    Paseo stretches 1,200 feet across the narrowest point of the escarpment, and only five petroglyph-bearing rocks were endangered.
    Those rocks, apparently wrapped in blankets, were carefully moved on Wednesday. Four other unmarked rocks nearby were moved along with them, and all were painstakingly placed in the same compass orientation and relation to each other as they were found.
    Short of abandoning its obligation to provide infrastructure to meet the needs of growth, it's hard to imagine carrying out this assignment with any greater measure of respect.