APPLICATION FOR REGISTRATION NEW MEXICO STATE REGISTER OF CULTURAL PROPERTIES FORM A Revised 05/18/07 CONTINUATION SHEET Section: 12 Page 1 _____________________________________________________________________________ Significance: PART ONE: INTRODUCTION This nomination is the proposed by the Five Nominating Tribes. The Tribes can only describe the significance of the TCP to themselves. This should not be taken as an assertion that the mountain is not equally significant to other people, for example, other Indian Tribes, or the hispanic communities that have lived near the mountain, some for over 200 years. Only one area of significance (Acoma use) is needed to have a TCP nominated for either the State Register of Cultural Places or the National Register of Historic Places. In their determination that Mt. Taylor is eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places (NRHP), Benedict and Hudson (2008) examine how each of the affiliated Indian Tribes and Pueblos view Mt. Taylor as an essential feature of their landscapes and maintain their distinctive identities through their traditional and continuing relationships with this Mountain. They observe that among most traditional American Indian communities, the associations that people maintain with important landscapes, such as Mt. Taylor, are “not limited to the physical realm of topographic features, stone, trees, [and] water, but also includes the spiritual world. Their cultural practices and beliefs reflect a sense of place” (Benedict and Hudson (2008:14). Benedict and Hudson show how Mt. Taylor, as a landscape, provides guidance to people in ways that motivate, organize, and structure how they live their everyday lives as members of their communities. They note, “The concept of landscape blends the land itself with the perceptions of individuals and communities in the context of their cultural values and beliefs” (Benedict and Hudson 2008:15). Quoting a passage by Ferguson (2002:4.6), Benedict and Hudson (2008:15) convey their understandings that (1) people and their landscapes cannot be separated, and (2) the processes through which people create and maintain their landscapes are informed by the processes through which culture instills values, beliefs, and historical memory among the members of their respective communities. Applying the same cultural landscape perspective to which Benedict and Hudson (2008) refer, this essay comprehensively documents and explains the cultural and historical significance of the Mt. Taylor Cultural Landscape for the five Nominating Tribes. 1 Each Tribe begins its statement of affiliations with the Mountain by giving its traditional name for this landscape: • Pueblo of Acoma refers to Mt. Taylor as Kaweshtima. • The Pueblo of Laguna Pueblo knows this landscape as Tsibina (variously spelled Tsipina or Tse-pi’na , with some community members sometimes identifying the northeastern side of Mt. Taylor as Kaweshtima . 1 In its recent determination that Mt. Taylor was eligible for listing on the National Register of Historic Places as a Traditional Cultural Property, the U.S. Forest Service reported that other New Mexican Indian Tribes, including the Pueblos of Isleta and Jemez, maintain significant cultural affiliations with the Mountain (Benedict and Hudson 2009); (Attachment 5). A resolution passed by the All Indian Pueblo Council in 2007 (see Attachment 14) similarly establishes that all 19 of New Mexico’s Pueblo Indian Tribes possess significant cultural and historical relationships with this Mountain. APPLICATION FOR REGISTRATION NEW MEXICO STATE REGISTER OF CULTURAL PROPERTIES FORM A Revised 05/18/07 CONTINUATION SHEET Section: 12 Page 2 _____________________________________________________________________________ • The Pueblo of Zuni calls the Mountain Dewankwin Kyaba:chu Yalanne . • The people of the Navajo Nation identify the landform as Tsoodził . • The Hopi Tribe names it Tsiipiya . This linguistic diversity exhibited among the traditional names used by the Nominating Tribes to identify the Mt. Taylor landscape, and the discussion of the challenges that the Tribes faced when defining the TCP’s boundary (Section 10), confirms that considerable diversity exists among the communities in how they characterize the importance of the Mountain in the cultures and histories of their people. As discussed further in the final section of these introductory remarks (see below), the Nominating Tribes decided that each community would provide its own statement describing the significance of the Mt. Taylor Cultural Landscape in acknowledgement and respect for this diversity. The specific content of the Nominating Tribes’ compiled statements about the Mountain’s significance encompasses varies widely in cultural belief, meaning, behavior, and material expressions and consequences. Even so, Benedict and Hudson have distilled 10 themes that underlie and unite the varied contributions: • Mt. Taylor is a place where practitioners go to conduct traditional and religious activities; • The Mountain not only has been in use since time immemorial, these age-old traditional uses are ongoing; • Mt. Taylor is a place that figures prominently in oral traditions regarding the origin, place of emergence, and migration; • The Mountain is viewed as a breathing entity that embodies a spiritual essence; • Spiritual beings recounted in oral traditions inhabit Mt. Taylor; • Mt. Taylor is considered a sacred landscape, part of a larger cultural landscape; • The Mountain encompasses the peak, adjacent mesas, plateaus, and valleys; • Mt. Taylor is important in ceremony; • The Mountain plays a vital role in cosmology and religion; and • Mt. Taylor is a distinctive landmark and a way point to aid travel. [after Benedict and Hudson 2008:16] The information corresponding to each of these themes, in turn, provides the basis for the counts of contributing cultural properties provided in Continuation Sheets No. 10.1, 10.2 and 10.3 the lists of cultural functions and uses provided in Continuation Sheet No. 7, and the discussion of the contributing cultural properties presented in each tribe’s significance statement. The data also justify the identification APPLICATION FOR REGISTRATION NEW MEXICO STATE REGISTER OF CULTURAL PROPERTIES FORM A Revised 05/18/07 CONTINUATION SHEET Section: 12 Page 3 _____________________________________________________________________________ of Criterion (a), Criterion (b), and Criterion (d) as qualifying the Mt. Taylor Cultural Landscape for listing on the New Mexico State Register of Cultural Properties (SRCP), as well as the NRHP. A. Definitions and Principles Relevant to Documenting and Evaluating the Significance of the Mt. Taylor Cultural Landscape In their authoritative publication, Guidelines for Evaluating and Documenting Traditional Cultural Properties (a.k.a. National Register Bulletin 38 ), that also serves as a guide for nominations to the New Mexico State Register of Cultural Properties nomination and registration processes, Parker and King write, The National Register of Historic Places contains a wide range of historic property types, reflecting the diversity of the nation’s history and culture. Buildings, structures, and sites; groups of buildings, structures or sites forming historic districts; landscapes ; and individual objects are all included in the Register if they meet the Criteria for Evaluation (36 CFR 60.4). Such properties reflect many kinds of significance in architecture, history, archeology, engineering, and culture. [1998:1, emphasis added] Parker and King define culture to include “the traditions, beliefs, practices, lifeways, arts, crafts, and social institutions of any community” (1998:1), they characterize the term traditional to refer to “those beliefs, customs, and practices of a living community of people that have been passed down through the generations, usually orally or through practice” (1998:1). The Nominating Tribes use these definitions in their significance statements as guiding principles in documenting their relationships with the Mt. Taylor TCP. Parker and King also emphasize that context is all important as another principle for documenting and evaluating traditional cultural properties (especially see 1998:5, after 48 FR 44717). Context , in a general sense, refers to the environment in which some phenomenon exists. The cultural significance of the Mount Taylor TCP is identifiable and explicable through “the role that the property plays in a community’s historically rooted beliefs, customs, and practices” (Parker and King 1998:1). Moreover, contexts used in the TCP documentation and evaluation enterprise should “reflect the history and culture of such groups as the groups themselves understand them, as well as their history and culture as defined by Euroamerican scholarship (Parker and King 1998:5). With these first definitions in place, Parker and King conclude, A traditional cultural property, then, can be defined generally as one that is eligible for inclusion in the National Register because of its association with cultural practices or beliefs of a living community that (a) are rooted in that community’s history and (b) are important in maintaining the continuing cultural identity of the community. [1998:1] One final definition, that of the cultural phenomenon known as landscape , warrants consideration given its importance in how the Nominating Tribes approached the tasks of documenting and evaluating Mt. Taylor as a TCP. As noted earlier, Benedict and Hudson adopt this term in describing