Albuquerque's
Environmental StoryAlbuquerque's
Environmental Story
Talk to your grandparents, or older people, about their youth. Write a Grandparent's Book based on these recollections. Then write about your lives as though you were starting a book to be given to your grandchildren. Use a word processing, drawing or desktop publishing program, if possible. Topics to be addressed in both books might include:
Most memorable experience
Most frightening experience
Having fun
Clothing, food, type of home, toys
Favorite holidays
What I want to be when I grow up
Discuss the special places, events or other characteristics of Albuquerque which you find most attractive (balloon fiesta, luminaria, State Fair, Zoo, mountains, ethnic diversity, etc.).
Draw a favorite scene.
Transfer these drawings to cloth.
Make a quilted wall hanging or tapestry.
Create a computerized slide show of the classes' favorite places.
Conduct a discussion group on the subject of ethnic diversity in Albuquerque. Discuss how the various groups, Black and Southeast Asian too, impact on and enrich each other; how they are similar and different.
What are some of things that schoolmates of different backgrounds (Hispanic, Anglo, Black, Native American, and Asian) have in common? (dancing, music, movies, sports).
What common needs do they have?
Do students of different backgrounds respond differently to the realities of their daily lives (friendship, family, recreation, and problems)?
In what kinds of activities do students of different backgrounds benefit from interaction with each other?
How can students of different backgrounds contribute toward helping
each other? Toward solving community problems?
How can discussions help define damning ethnic stereotypes?
Visit the Petroglyph State Park, or read books about petroglyphs. Use symbols seen at the State Park. Make up other symbols which reflect our modern culture, and develop a story using them.
What ancient people other than the American Indian made petroglyphs?
In what ways are petroglyphs and graffiti seen in our current society similar? In what ways are they different?
How were petroglyphs made by early Indians? How were they used?
Write a short essay on something (not a person) which you find beautiful and then, share these writings with the class. Use a computer program, if possible.
Why do different students select different subjects?
What things do the Indian, the Hispanic, and the Anglo cultures find beautiful? Are they similar or different in all three cultures?
Which of the subjects written about could be destroyed by some outside force? How would the writer feel if the subject were destroyed?
Prepare a multi-media presentation which depicts the richness and diversity of Albuquerque's major cultures and its natural environment.
This can be done by blending and collating bits and pieces of music, art, poetry, designs based on patterns from nature, and sounds from nature.
The finished product of images, sounds, shapes, and colors should embody and suggest the mood of Albuquerque's cultural and natural scene.
Slide projectors, opaque projectors, camcorders, strobe lights, CD's, computers and tape recorders can be used in various combinations for effect.
Read the following quotations and discuss the questions below.
With beauty before me, I walk
With beauty behind me, I walk
With beauty below me, I walk
With beauty above me, I walk
It is finished (again) in beauty
It is finished in beauty
It is finished in beauty
Abide with me; fast falls the eventide
The darkness deepens; Lord, with me abide
When other helpers fail, and comforts flee
Help of the helpless, oh, abide with me.
Rain-makers, come out from all roads that great rivers may cover the earth;
That stones may be moved by the torrents...
Let our children live and be happy.
Send us the good south winds.
Send us your breath over the lakes, that our great world may be made beautiful an our peoples may live."
With the ways of the white man entering into our lives, perhaps it will not be long before our people became a wandering tribe, aimlessly roving the path of self-determination and destruction. But it is for our children to decide and work for. We cannot tell them of the why our people survived, for they would not believe us. We must just hope they, too, can survive what lies before them.
Adios acompanamiento
Pues ya todo esta cumplido;
Ponganmen en la sepultura
En la tierra del olvido.De la nada fui formado
Por obra de mi criador,
Y en el juicio universal
El sera mi defendor.A Dios me postro humillado
De mi culpa arrepentido,
El que me a de perdonar
Por lo mal que le a servido.En Dios espero reposo,
En Dios espero consuelo,
De que en el juicio tremendo
Me abra las puertas del cielo.From the last verses of Adios al mundo, and alabado reproduced in Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood. The Penitentes of the Southwest by Marta Weigle, 1976. U.N.M. Press, Albuquerque. It is also reproduced in Brother of Light: The Penitentes of the Southwest by Alice Corbin Henderson, 1937, Harcourt Brace and Company, New York.
How do our poetry and religious hymns express our values?
How does each of us learn values?
What values are expressed in the religious works above?
What fears are expressed in the third quotation?
How can the traditional holistic philosophy and the reverence for the universe felt by so many Native Americans be integrated into the realities of the 20th century life?
What effect did the boom town atmosphere of many uranium-mining New Mexico towns have on the beliefs and behavior of Indians in those towns?
Read aloud the passage from Frank Waters' The Man Who Killed the Deer* which reveals some of the thoughts of Rodolfo Byers, a white trader who lived among the Indians for thirty years:
"What an appalling difference, really, between this race and his own which has supplanted it. No man knew what it was, because his vision of another, his vision of the life around them both, was compacted of the sum total of the very things which differentiated him from his fellow.
Byers thought of the world of nature as the white man sees it: the sparkling streams and turbulent rivers as sources of potential electric power; the mountains gutted for the gold and silver to carry on the commerce of the world; the steel and iron and wood, cut and fashioned, smelted, wrought, and riveted from the earth to bridge with shining hills the illimitable terrors of the seas - a resistless, inanimate world of nature to be used and refashioned at will by man in his magnificent and courageous folly to wrest a purpose from eternity. And yet, what did he really know of the enduring earth he scratched, the timeless seas he spanned, the unmindful starts winking at his puny efforts?
And he thought of the world of nature as the Indian had always seen it. The whole world was animate - night and day, wind, cloud, trees, the young corn, all was alive and sentient. Of this universe man was an integral part. The beings about him were neither friendly or hostile, but harmonious parts of the whole. There was no Satan, no Christ, no antithesis between good and evil, between matter and spirit. The world was simply one living whole in which man dies, but mankind remains. How then can man be lord of the universe? The forests have not been given to despoil. He is equal in importance to the mountain and the blade of grass, to the rabbit and the young corn plant. Therefore, if the life of one of these is to be used for his necessity, it must first be approaches with reverence and permission obtained by ritual, and thus the balance of the whole maintained intact.
What then is pine, thought Byers, the potential mast of a ship, a life that stands and breaths and dies like man, or the craven image of a thought? What is the world we see? It is as each man sees it, and his vision is compounded of the tissues and bloodvessels of his eyes, and the blood hat feeds them, and the nerves that lead into the nerve center of his brain, and the sensations that stimulate an image in his mind. And there alone it truly exists - in the mind of man which sees it as only he can see it, according to his conception of the life of which he is a part.
So Byers looked at the wooden post and at the man who carve it, and knew that each saw there a different thing.
The brotherhood of man! It will always be a dreary phrase, a futile hope until each man, all men, realize that they themselves are but different reflections and insubstantial images of a greater invisible whole.
There ware those who have eyes and cannot see, who have ears and cannot hear. they are blind and deaf, they have no tongues save for the barter of the day. For which of us now knows that awakened spirit of sleeping man by which he can see beyond the horizon, hear even the heart beating within the stone, and speak in silence those truths which are of us all?
A means, a tongue, a ridge, to span the wordless chasm that separates us all; it is the cry of every human heart."
Obtain permission to visit a cemetery. Use newsprint, paper or cloth to make tombstone rubbings in both old and new parts of the cemetery. Discuss what can be learned about Albuquerque's history, culture, and medical advances.
How does the range of age of death compare in the older section of the cemetery to the newer parts? What was the average age of death at the beginning of the century The median age? Do there seem to have been patterns which might indicate epidemics? Is it possible to tell whether men or women died earlier? Do library research to see how infant mortality has changed through the years; how life expectancy has changed.
Are many of the family names noted in the older parts of the cemetery familiar names today? Are any of the first names in the older parts different from those which are frequently used today?
How did family size compare in the old days with today?
"Civilizations leave marks on the earth by which they are known and judged. In large measure the nature of their immortality is gauged by how their builders made peace with the environment."
Nathaniel Alexander Owings
(Up to Section III, Back to Additional Activities 4, On to Eye Opener Worksheet 5)