Navajo Times, July 28, 2022
View as published here

Story and photo by Diane Joy Schmidt

ALBUQUERQUE___The Albuquerque FBI Division, with Raul Bujanda, Special Agent in Charge, announced a new database they have been working on for the last six months, a vetted list of missing Indigenous persons in New Mexico and across the Navajo Nation, including in Arizona, Colorado and Utah. They will update the list every month. The list is now publicly available on their website at WWW.FBI.GOV/MMIP

All agencies want to see the list be complete. The FBI said that if an Indigenous family member who is missing is not included on this list, “the relatives are urged to contact their local or tribal law enforcement agency and ask them to submit a missing persons report to the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC. If further assistance is needed, family members or local law enforcement can contact the New Mexico Attorney General’s Office or the FBI.”

Currently, there are 177 names on this list of missing Indigenous persons, some going back years, and some reported this month. The list includes 61 women and almost twice as many men, 116. The youngest person on the list, Anthonette Cayedito, disappeared from her home in Gallup in 1986 when she was nine, and a progressed photo of her is included on the database. Looking at the list, many reported missing are young teen-aged girls and boys, the most recently reported as of July 14, 2022. 

Is having an up-to-date centralized list important? Raúl Torrez, Bernalillo County District Attorney, said that if a missing person has had a contact with law enforcement somewhere in the country, this information will reach the NCIC and then family members can be notified and that, in the last two months, leads generated from this list already helped solve two cases.

The new database, as yet unnamed, was announced at a press conference that was hurriedly called mid-morning on Monday for 3:30 PM that afternoon, July 25, at the offices of New Mexico Attorney General Hector Balderas. Top state officials were front and center including U.S. Attorney General for NM Alexander Uballez, NM Indian Affairs Department Secretary Lynn Trujillo, who is Chair of the MMIWR Task Force, and recently appointed NM Dept. of Public Safety Secretary Jason Bowie, who said his office “is the first agency in the United States to modify its NCIC Missing Person Form to allow reporting agencies to identify Indigenous people and their respective tribes, pueblos, or nations.” Bowie has also said elsewhere that his department has an antiquated computer system he is now having updated that they hope to see online by 2023. 

FBI agent Bujanda was quick to admit that attention to this issue has been a long time in coming. He and other officials each stressed that all the cases are going to be treated with great care.  It is hoped that the database will be a model to other states. 

It is an attempt to begin to remedy a problem that has long been a great hurt. Family members have long felt the pain of a missing family member compounded by inaction by authorities.

It is a matter of public record that nationally, general police crime data is not always getting reported to centralized databases. According to a recent report by by Ellen Rabin for the New Mexico Legislative Finance Committee, while New Mexico is actually one of the top five best states for reporting crime. still, only a fragmented picture has been available. Even though laws have been passed and law enforcement agencies may not receive full funding if reporting isn’t done, the problem continues. Austin Fisher of Source New Mexico reported that lawmakers were concerned when they heard the report last week. 

Frank Fisher, FBI spokesperson, explained that this new database list is not FBI information. Fisher said, “This project is only a start. What this list represents are the 177 Indigenous persons that are in NCIC and are actively being sought across the country by all law enforcement.”

He emphasized that the list is a work-in-progress and said, “We expect the list to grow as it is publicized, and relatives of those missing Indigenous persons who aren’t on it to contact their local and tribal law enforcement.”

He also explained that some names may have dropped off that should still be on the list, and if that has happened, that families need to get the information to law enforcement to get the name back on the list. 

He said, “At the same time, it’s possible some of the names of individuals currently on this list will drop off as they are located. The Albuquerque FBI Division plans to update this list monthly on our website, FBI.GOV/MMIP. Because of the way NCIC tracks a long-term missing person, they could have been removed when not validated by law enforcement after 60-90 days of entry or yearly thereafter. Families could have reported a missing loved one, law enforcement could have correctly entered them into NCIC as missing; however, they could have been removed after 60-90 days of entry or one year thereafter if not validated correctly.  We need to get these individuals re-entered if they are still missing.”

“This list is a validation of the status of missing indigenous persons as listed in the National Crime Information Center, or NCIC. The information the NCIC gets is from the local/state/tribal law enforcement partners. We discovered many records of missing Native Americans were incomplete or outdated. Because we identified names of missing Indigenous persons from sources other than NCIC, we ensured each and every one of those names was accurately listed in NCIC as a missing person. Through this process using a wide array of other databases and sources, as well as contacting the law enforcement agencies that put the original data into NCIC, the FBI succeeded in vetting 177 names of indigenous persons in New Mexico and the Navajo Nation who are actually missing at this time.

Since the FBI stated that they worked with the Navajo Nation and others on this database, to clarify what this meant, the FBI was asked if they solicited information directly from the Navajo Nation.

Fisher answered, “We didn’t add names to NCIC. We vetted what was already in there against other databases and with the help of our partners like the Navajo Nation to determine if the records were current and valid. If they were, they were included in this list of 177 names we released yesterday. This is still a work in progress.”

Again, the list is on the FBI website, at WWW.FBI.GOV/MMIP. 

By Diane Joy Schmidt, Special to the Navajo Times May 5, 2022

Albuquerque – A 10-mile buffer zone is proposed for new extractive leases around Chaco Canyon, but the problem is, it won’t ban the existing drilling, for which communities never had any say to begin with. 

On April 29, the U.S. Bureau of Land Management’s last public Listening Session on the federally proposed Chaco Canyon National Historic Park Area withdrawal was held in Albuquerque at the National Indian Programs Training Center from 8 to noon. Comments can still be made through May 6th (see below).

While initially the Navajo Nation Council was supportive of the 10-mile proposal, they then voted to oppose.  Despite their opposition on the one hand, and the public outcry for years by Native groups and environmentalists, it is dispiriting how little the withdrawal will actually accomplish. 

Mark Armao, Indigenous Affairs Fellow for environmental publication Grist.org, reported on Feb. 17, “In Chaco Canyon, a moratorium on oil and gas leases might be too little too late.”  Armao points out that “companies with existing leases” within the proposed 10-mile withdrawal buffer zone “can continue to extract minerals within its boundaries,” so it is a “superficial fix.” While the plan will prevent new leasing, data provided to Grist by the BLM data shows there are already 310 active wells on 88 active federal leases.  Carol Davis, director of Dine Care, a Navajo-led environmental organization, said, ‘There’s still going to be development going on in that 10-mile buffer, and there’s nothing to prohibit that.’”

The Biden administration, while promising to limit development, has recently bowed to pressures to allow more fossil energy extraction. As announced on April 16th (NPR- Colorado), “The Interior Department on Friday said it’s moving forward with the first onshore sales of public oil and natural gas drilling leases under President Joe Biden… A federal judge in Louisiana ordered the sales to resume, saying Interior officials had offered no ‘rational explanation’ for canceling them.” 

Bigger problems
George Werito, President, Ojo Encino Chapter and the Tri-chapter Alliance, which includes Counselor, Ojo Encino, and Torreon, has called out for years for attention from the federal government to the effects of the active drilling on communities next to Chaco.

Werito said that he supported the Chaco withdrawal, but he wanted to confront problems already caused by drilling. He pointed out that the drilling may benefit some individual allottees there, but not the community.

“I’m against more drilling,” he said. “Things are really booming in my area. They don’t actually consult the community. Most of the work is being done (with approvals) by the BLM.” Werito also laid blame on Window Rock.

“Roads are the big issue,” he said. “Every day where we have school bus routes, the oil field trucks are speeding. They take over, they don’t respect rights of ways. How are you going to help us?” he asked. “Allottees are getting money off the royalties, money goes to the state and federal, but as a community, no.”

Noting the deliberate way the land was broken up into checkerboard areas to weaken Native control, he said, “There is trust land, fee land, BLM, state, Indian allotments.”

“You have to be there to understand the situation,” he said. “We need to be treated better. If you’re going to drill, can I get water, new roads, build us some infrastructure?”  The roads, which have never been good, have become pitted with dangerous potholes from the heavy trucks using them. 

Laced with irony
Speakers supported the proposed Chaco buffer, but the irony of the situation was not lost on them, and said more must be done.

Doreen Bird, Santo Domingo Pueblo, a Phd. with a master’s in public health, said, “The land calls us as matriarchs, as people to come speak for it, because it’s not given the opportunity to speak words, though the climate issues that we’re having—that’s one way that our land is able to speak up for itself. “

“But (here) we need to use English words, we need to use documents, things like the Constitution. But that’s not always appropriate for us as indigenous people.”

“I think it perpetuates the continual historical trauma that the United States government has forced upon our people… In your leadership role (the panel), you have to report back to the government. You don’t have to report back to the moms in the ground, the insects and the plants that are being desecrated based on human decisions.”

“I don’t give consent,” she said.  “Neither do my children, or my family, we don’t give consent for any extractive industry. We’re here to say no, no more. And this is only the beginning. The 10-mile radius does the very bare minimum.”

Julia Bernal, director of Pueblo Action Alliance, who has spent the last five years fighting for federal protections against fracking, referenced “the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples’ expressed free, prior, informed consent principal. Follow the leadership of our governors,” she said, “because they really are thinking about seven generations down the line, not just for our communities, but non-indigenous folks as well, having that birthright to clean water, clean air and clean soil.”

Joseph Hernandez, Navajo from Shiprock, a NAVA Education Project energy representative, said, “We’re asking that we keep what’s in the ground, keep it in the ground. We’re asking that we allow our relatives there to continue their traditional culture, traditional practice of harvesting the medicine in the area,” he said. “And this is a complex issue. It’s complicated on every hand, because my relatives were chased out of the park when the park was established. And because of that historical trauma, our Navajo elders have a hard time taking your word, the federal government,” he said. “I’m just thinking about the next generation, about the grandkids. That’s why I’m here. Ahéhee’.”

Friday May 6th, is the last day comments can be entered in the federal record for the Chaco Canyon Withdrawal. To submit:
Online: https://eplanning.blm.gov/eplanning-ui/project/2016892/510.
Email: BLM_NM_FM_CCNHP_Area_Withdrawal_Comments@blm.gov
Mail, postmark May 6th: Chaco Area Withdrawal, c/o Sarah Scott, Project Manager, 6251 College Blvd., Suite A, Farmington, NM 87402.

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1st Place, Green/environmental Reporting, New Mexico Press Women

HM, Green/environmental Reporting, National Federation Press Women, 2023

SOCIETY PROFESSIONAL JOURNALISTS Top of the Rockies 2023
Agriculture Reporting, 3rd, small newsroom

by Diane Joy Schmidt

At five years old I rolled under the table with laughter at Passover after my thimble-full of wine. Passover was a time our family really enjoyed themselves together. And what always struck me as a novel passage in the Haggadah, the story that is read at the Passover service, managed to shape my life’s outlook: that while in every age, some new freedom is won, yet, “each age uncovers a formerly unrecognized servitude—requiring new liberation to set man’s soul free.” Participating in the Exodus was my training-ground for a career as a writer. 

Today, as spring comes in 2022, it’s hard not to feel we are losing ground in human rights hard won in the United States. Democratic freedoms, the right to vote, civil rights, rights for women, for workers, the right to equal access to healthcare, to protection of clean air and water, all these rights are threatened today. And overshadowing all that now, the coronavirus pandemic, climate change, and now the invasion of the Ukraine and the threat of nuclear war. I am reminded of the lyrics to The Merry Minuet, written in 1959 by Sheldon Harnick (who also wrote the lyrics to Fiddler on the Roof), sung by the Kingston Trio, which famously ends “What nature doesn’t do to us/will be done by our fellow man.” As a country, as a planet, we are struggling. But we have made progress. And as it is written in the Haggadah, “each age uncovers a formerly unrecognized servitude—requiring new liberation to set man’s soul free.” 

This speaks to the cyclical, and timeless present of Jewish history. The story of Passover is the recitation of the Exodus, when Moses led his people out of Egypt. Passover is always celebrated at the beginning of spring, when budding leaves remind us there is rebirth, there is hope. 

I have an apple tree in our backyard that has bloomed every year exactly at Passover. The Hebrew calendar is a lunar calendar, like in all aboriginal cultures, and which women’s menstrual cycles follow. Each month begins at the new moon. Passover is celebrated every year at the full moon, half-way through the month of Nissan, which usually occurs in March or April of the Roman calendar. Easter occurs the day after the first full moon following the spring equinox, the first day of spring, a solar event, when the sun crosses the equator moving north, so the holidays often occur near the same time each year. This year the first night of Passover is celebrated on Friday evening, April 15th, and Easter is on Sunday, April 17th. My apple tree got sick over this last year and I didn’t know what to expect, we thought it had died, but this week one sprig has valiantly sprung out of a lower limb to show itself. We had planned to cut down the tree, but I can’t give up on it now. I have to find out if there is a way to prune and save it. 

Sometimes we think love has died, hope has died. Spring is a time to look at the budding trees, the flowers coming up and blooming, and to feel our hearts awakening too. Passover reminds us of nature’s constancy. The ritual order of the Passover meal, the seder, helps us to liberate our minds from the dross of the past, and remind us there is always hope. We repeat the story of liberation from bondage every year, and it reminds us that we must continue to strive for liberation. 

There are many kinds of slavery, and in this most modern of times, we recognize we may be slaves to consumerism, to debt, to addictions, to unfair responsibilities, to our own bothersome thoughts and feelings, to bad habits of all kinds. Perhaps we cannot solve the problems of the world, but we can always improve ourselves. As is often quoted from the oral commentaries, Rabbi Tarfon taught: “It is not your responsibility to finish the work [of perfecting the world], but you are not free to desist from it either.”

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Diane Joy Schmidt is a journalist, photojournalist, novelist and screenwriter in Albuquerque who was raised in the traditions of Reform Judaism, and is an admirer of all things spiritually resonant. Visit her at www.dianejoyschmidt.com.

Published Times of Israel, Passover Week, and Gallup Independent, New Mexico, Spiritual Perspectives, April 16, 2022, page 18.

2nd Place, Personal Opinion (bylined, not editorial) Column, New Mexico Press Women

BY DIANE JOY SCHMIDT New Mexico Jewish Link Winter V. 52 #4

At a recent Hadassah Albuquerque get-together at the Village Pizza in Corrales, the talk turned to mice. With friends in Santa Fe, it was pack rats. Placitas is having a bad year for both. The word is, peanut butter seems to work best to bait snap-traps. Havahart cage traps are the most humane, if you don’t mind catching and releasing the occasional squirrel. A smelly detergent, Fabuloso, spritzed on tires and under the hood – the lavender fragrance is best – along with lights in reflectors under the car, works better than the expensive ultrasonic anti-rodent deterrent, which Santa Fe pack rats simply ignore. Everyone is suddenly finding chewed wires and nests in their automobile engines. The increase in rodents has another unintended consequence – more people across the state are putting out rodent poison, and more hawks and owls, who eat the rodents, are dying. 

But an innovative solution from Israel has just come to our local attention.The Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel (SPNI) is the oldest and largest non-profit for environmental protection and education, established more than 60 years ago there. In Santa Fe, Dan Pava, well-regarded urban planner who now sits on the Santa Fe Planning Commission, is the newest U.S. board member, and just hosted an SPNI team from Israel of famed pioneering ornithologist Dan Alon, Director of Conservation and Environmental Protection, and Jay Shofet, Director of Partnerships and Development. They spoke at the home of  David and Patricia Shulman, after first going on a nature walk at the Leonora Curtin preserve in La Cienega. Rabbi Paul Citrin, long-time SPNI board member, will host an Albuquerque gathering when they return in the spring of 2022.

Birds know no borders. In response to a question about how Americans might support SPNI despite current anti-Israel sentiment, Pava pointed to the very effective and cross-border pest control barn owl program, developed by their Professor Yossi Leshem. By placing nesting boxes in fields for owls and kestrels to control out-of-control rodent populations, they provide an alternative to harmful and expensive pesticides for farmers. The project has cross-border cooperation, and has been introduced to Jordanian and Palestinian farmers, after overcoming their cultural fear of barn owls who traditionally are seen as harbingers of evil spirits. 

This barn owl nesting boxes project could easily be introduced in New Mexico, where bat boxes have already been seen as an effective alternative to mosquito spraying, and awareness of the harmful effects of pesticides is growing. 

That is but one of hundreds of effective and innovative projects SPNI has undertaken in Israel. Israel is home to the many birds of the Bible. As it is said, “The voice of the turtle dove is heard in our land.” However, the turtle dove is now threatened, and they succeeded three years ago in making it illegal to hunt them. The enormous Griffon Vulture, whose wingspan is up to 9 feet, is the most mentioned animal in the Bible. But tragic news hit on this day, when nine of the only 200 known population in Israel were found poisoned. A farmer, using an illegal poison, had baited a goat to kill wolves attacking their herd. Alon was on the phone to Israel immediately in Santa Fe when he got the news.

Ornithologist Alon brought awareness thirty years ago to the problems caused by draining the swamps of Hula Lake in the 1950’s, when malaria there was rampant. But this caused unforeseen environmental damage. The dried dust run-off clogged rivers and most importantly, destroyed a critical habitat for the half-billion birds that migrate through Israel twice a year. Alon was able to initiate a major rewilding of the Hula Lake area, and, in this case working together with the Jewish National Fund, it has been restored to a wetland that serves the millions of migrating birds that come through Israel.

Israel is a crossroads for one of the largest annual bird migrations in the world. As SPNI explains, “Israel stands at the junction of a major migratory flyway, funneling hundreds of millions of birds from across Europe, Asia and Africa twice a year. Despite its small size, Israel is critical to these birds’ survival. Without its nice habitats these birds would not complete their grueling journeys across the desert belt of North Africa and the Arabian Peninsula.”

  Pava drove Alon and Shofet down to Albuquerque that night, where I caught up with them at a diner near the airport before they boarded a plane, going next to Texas, then on to Toronto and New York, and eventually back to Israel. When asked how Israel is faring in its ecological efforts, Alon pointed out first that Israel has much to be proud of, and said “Israel has one of the biggest proportions of nature reserve areas, 25% of Israel is a major reserve,” but that its growing population and development threatens key critical habitats. He is most excited to point to a recent success of the Society, also known NatureIsrael, with a new campaign, Start-up Nature. “In Israel last year, we managed to create new nature reserves, of maybe 50,000 acres (about 78 square miles), which is very impressive for Israel, in a country that has 9 million people and is about 8,000 square miles.

“With community support and integration of economic development for tourism, the government granted 4 million dollars for the establishment of these two new preserves. We are now needing to raise 11 million more to husband these reserves along to survive (long-term).” The sites already have visitor centers and viewing platforms. These sites were formerly fishponds for aquaculture, at two Kibbutzim, Ma’agan Michael on the coast between Tel Aviv and Haifa, and at Kfar Rupin in north-central Israel, and now need further remediation to restore native indigenous plants.

Already predators, insects and birds have returned. 

Pava points out that 2000 years ago, the Judeans knew how to practice dry-land agriculture that was sustainable, and where strictures that we read in the Bible now, like letting the land rest every 7 years, were the result of their indigenous knowledge base.

This is one arm of the next 3-year plan. Alon continued, “At the same time we work very hard with the planning system of Israel, to make sure that all the developing projects of Israel, if it’s housing, energy, that everything will be (designed to be) taking care of the environment.” Alon explained that they are establishing throughout Israel, “what we call ecological corridors, which allow animal to move between protected areas divided because of agriculture. This ecological code is now part of the Israeli planning system. This is a great achievement.”

While the Hula Lake project was eventually championed by the Jewish National Fund, the JNF campaign of planting forests is destroying the natural habitat. A cultural shift is necessary. As Shofet said frankly, “I now regret every tree I planted for my bar mitzvah.” Alon added, “These forests are worse than a road construction.” 

What is obvious today, is that clearing the naturally arid desert environment with bulldozers to plant forests of highly flammable European pine trees is not so smart. However, changing the culture of ‘greening Israel’ is a fight. As Alon put it, it’s in their DNA. But he is not shy of a fight. SPNI successfully sued the Jewish National Fund, and presented scientific papers to back up their case, so now JNF has to get permission from the government before planting.

Alon put it this way. “I want to say something. I think that there’s a message here. And the message is that Israel needs a new way of thinking about the environment. Firstly, it’s not anymore the old traditional way that people from abroad think of helping Israel. There are two ways we need to act in Israel. One, is to protect any important nature sites in Israel, under nature, reserve or national park or any thing like that. And the second is to find important sites that we can rewild, like fish ponds, and invest there. This is what we need to do today. Not planting more trees. Not creating all kinds of non-ecological parks. This is the way to go. So, I think that this is why we are here, to talk to people about the way we think Israel should go further with nature protection. And not only Israel. I mean, it’s Israel, but we are responsible for half a billion birds that pass through to us.” This critical migratory route links three continents. 

For much more information, google Nature Israel or type in WWW.NATUREISRAEL.ORG, to go to the American Society for the Protection of Nature in Israel website. They are known all over Israel for their field schools, where all Israeli children come to learn, and they also have very popular tours where visitors can come and stay in a range of comfortable accommodations and explore the extensive nature trails. 

by Diane Joy Schmidt view as published

On Yom Kippur, the Day of Atonement, in the unforgettable prayer Unetanneh Tokef, God reviews our fates and decides who will live and who will die in the coming year, but, we say, by sufficient repentance, prayer, and charity our sins may be forgiven, a little: 

On Rosh Hashanah it is inscribed,
And on Yom Kippur it is sealed:
How many shall pass away
and how many shall be born,
     
Who shall live and who shall die,
Who shall reach the end of his days and who shall not,
Who shall perish by fire and who by water,
Who by sword and who by wild beast,
Who by hunger and who by thirst,
Who by earthquake and who by plague…
But repentance, prayer, and charity temper judgement’s severe decree.

I have sat through these services for many years with numb awe and dread; but they seem to be words about another place, another time, not reaching me personally. An understanding of this ancient tradition comes to me best in three songs by the musician Leonard Cohen: Who By Fire, Hallelujah, and, You Want it Darker, where his poetic paradoxes break open the heart. About his song Who by Fire, Cohen identified that “This is based on a prayer recited on the Day of Atonement.” He wrote: 

And who by fire, who by water
Who in the sunshine, who in the night time
Who by high ordeal, who by common trial
Who in your merry merry month of May
Who by very slow decay
And who shall I say is calling?

It’s an odd phrase, “And who shall I say is calling?” By breaking the cadence of the old words, it causes new reflection. There are various ways this has been interpreted. 

For example, the Israel Forever Foundation website writes that “The line ‘And who shall I say is calling?’ can be understood as a break from faith in God. According to Cohen, that element of doubt is what made the song into a personal prayer for him.”

Rabbi Brian Field, of Judaism Your Way, a Jewish congregation in Colorado, sees something deeper, writing, “Cohen revisits the mystery, the not knowing the Sacred Name … Finally, one can read this from a mystical perspective. In the Kabbalah, Who is a name for God, a name that points to the emptiness (in Hebew: Ayin) out of which everything arises, and into which everything falls.”

In stanzas of his most covered song, Hallelujah, Cohen recognizes that frailty of our humanity that is expressed in the High Holy Days, and asks for forgiveness of our imperfections: 

I did my best, it wasn't much
I couldn't feel, so I tried to touch
I've told the truth, I didn't come to fool you
And even though
It all went wrong
I'll stand before the Lord of Song
With nothing on my tongue but Hallelujah

Then there is ‘You Want It Darker,” the title song of his final album. It is a mourner’s prayer, for Cohen himself, for all of us. The chorus goes: 

Magnified, sanctified
Be thy holy name
Vilified, crucified
In the human frame
A million candles burning
For the help that never came
You want it darker? 
We kill the flame.
Hineni, hineni
I'm ready, my Lord

“Magnified, Sanctified/be thy holy Name,” is literally the first line of the Mourner’s Kaddish. The next line mourns our human capacity for evil and our being left to repent for it, drawing on the Christian, “Vilified, crucified/In the human frame.”

Then, “A million candles burning/for the help that never came” speaks of the Holocaust, that God did not hear us.  And then, the sarcastic, “You want it darker? We kill the flame.”  Like, ‘you think we can’t behave any worse? Just watch.’

Then comes the chant of “Hineni, hineni, I’m ready, my Lord.” When God calls on Abraham to sacrifice his son Isaac, Abraham says the Hebrew word, Hineni, here I am. Hineni is also, as pointed out in a Times of Israel article on Cohen, the name of a prayer of preparation and humility addressed to God that is chanted by the cantor on Rosh Hashanah.
Then there is the startling middle stanza: 

I struggled with some demons 
They were middle class and tame
I didn't know I had permission
To murder and to maim
You want it darker?
Hineni, hineni,  I’m ready, my Lord.

The album You Want It Darker was released two months before Cohen passed away, at 83, on November 7th, 2016. The next night Trump was elected president. On January 6th, 2021, it seems the tame middle class got to murder and to maim. It is high time that we turn, to reflection, prayer, and repentance in this country. 

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Gallup Independent Spiritual Perspectives 7.31.2021

New Mexico Jewish Link Autumn 2021 volume 52, number 2

An Interview with Maria Espinosa

As published in Lilith.org April 30, 2021; NM Jewish Link, Summer 2021. Awarded Society Professional Journalists, Arts Profiles, 2022.

By Diane Joy Schmidt

“I’m proud to say, I’ve just turned 82,” says author Maria Espinosa. “I’d love to take a painting class or a sculpture class. But, no, no, I just feel, ‘Maria, you haven’t finished your work yet. You have X number of novels, stories you’ve got to complete, and you’ve got to do your damnedest to get them out in the world. And that’s what you were born on earth to do. When I was much younger, I wanted to be a dancer and actress, a singer, anything but a writer.” Asked if it take a kind of courage to write, Espinosa replied, “Oh, very much so. Even more so as you get older, to go against the prevailing currents and to write what you need to write, whether it’s popular or not.”

Happily for us, Espinosa has continued to write, and her fifth and most recent novel, Suburban Souls, was just published by Tailwinds Press. It tells the story of Jewish German Holocaust survivors in 1970’s San Francisco. 

All her books have Jewish themes, unexpectedly so, she says, as her parents were deliberately unobservant. Espinosa’s previous novels include Longing, which won the prestigious American Book Award. Born Paula Cronbach, she met the Chilean writer Mario Antonio Espinosa Wellmann in Paris and entered a turbulent marriage. She lived in the San Francisco Bay area most of her adult life, but moved to Albuquerque nine years ago when her daughter Carmen, a dancer and social worker, also moved here.  

Suburban Souls explores the psychological terrors of modern domesticity. But each

character is drawn with such empathy that the reader is able to see them in a forgiving light. Saul and Gerda tear their marriage apart, leaving a mark on their teenage daughter, Hannah, who loves them both. As the reader is drawn into this tumultuous world, we find our own struggles illuminated, forgiven, and explained in the particular terrors brought about by the isolation and sterility of a modern suburban lifestyle.

Espinosa thinks of her books as psychological. In discussing Suburban Souls, Espinosa said that while she had thought she was writing about people she had known in the Bay Area, she came to realize the story was really about her mother’s life in the suburbs: 

ESPINOSA: My mother felt quite trapped in her role as a suburban housewife. And the suburb is a character itself in the novel because the suburb was a place that sprang up, right after World War Two, a place of housing for children, families, fathers who came home from the war; a place where newcomers who had no roots there came. So people like my mother, like Gerda, were in this town where they had no history or family, had no grandparents, no cousins, no sisters or brothers. Nobody around to offset fear, isolation, and the tremendous burdens it puts on the family. There was no one to relieve that pressure.

DS: And Gerda’s husband, Saul?

ESPINOSA: He’s kind of stuck. So many men that are really burdened by their role being the provider of a family, and by their careers, from the ‘50s on. It was their role to be the provider of the family, to provide the finances, to keep the family going, their ego and their sense of self depended so much on what their role was in the outer world, and it was so easy to ignore the woman home with the kids. ‘She has it easy.’

DS: There’s a lot of sensuality, sex, the fleshiness of them. And then, Gerda comes to that extreme, wanting to kill her children. As I read, I felt myself inside each character.

ESPINOSA: Then the book works! Yes, if you did, because some people might be repelled by Gerda. You have to have a stern backbone to say, ‘Okay, I’m going to look into this disturbed character.’

DS: With Gerda, it was easy to fall into her logic. It was perfectly valid up to a point, and then it just got away from her.

ESPINOSA: A lot of her disturbance came from her family. Her parents died when she was very young, she was raised by an uncle and aunt who were quite invasive and abusive on an emotional level. So she had no firm sense of who she was, no firm sense of identity, or self-esteem, really, only the sense that she was looking for something from Saul, her husband, that he could not give her. He was all enclosed in his own suffering, how he struggled so hard to make a go of it. So, ‘why couldn’t she do the same?’

DS: Does Saul find his way?

ESPINOSA: I think he’s a very valiant soul. He stands by Gerda at the very end. You know he’s going to be there for his children. You know he’s going to stand in and do what he can. Whether he finds another woman, who knows.

DS: So, it’s about fulfillment through relationship?

ESPINOSA: A lot of it is, a lot of it is also the outer world. I mean, the Holocaust was a huge movement where one culture was trying to annihilate a whole other culture. So when you grow up feeling that a whole group wants to kill you just because of who you are, because you’re Jewish, or whoever you are, it does something to your psyche. And I think in my own life, even though I’ve never been a Holocaust survivor, I am in a historical sense, because I feel it is embedded in my cells and my chromosomes, all the memories of past persecution, the pograms, all the times I have to flee for my life, in other lives and other bodies, in my ancestors’ lives. So there it stays with you.

DS: That leaves a person with a void?

ESPINOSA: I think more a sense of danger. You don’t feel at one with the mainstream culture, ever. At any moment to have to flee. Passports, always in order—my mother’s side of the family was that way.

DS: Are you saying that the effect of the Holocaust was to make a person (even in America) feel unwanted, that they had no business being here?

ESPINOSA: Yes, in a subliminal sense, an unconscious if not a conscious sense, very much.

DS: And that could erode one’s own— 

ESPINOSA: —confidence.

DS: And then, carried from generation to generation. Then there’s Hannah, Gerda’s daughter.

ESPINOSA: Hannah runs away to get away from her mother, away from the chaos at home.  Gerda, meanwhile, is going crazy with her daughter’s absence. She begs her to come back.

DS: Should Hannah feel guilty about what is happening to Gerda?

ESPINOSA: I don’t know. She probably will feel guilty about it. Yes. But, she also felt that she had to leave Gerda, in order to survive, herself.          

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This interview was first published by Lilith Magazine at lilith.org 4/30/2021.

Maria Espinosa (born Paula Cronbach) is a novelist, poet, and translator as well as a teacher. Her publications include five novels: her fifth and most recent novel, Suburban Souls, Longing, which received the American Book Award, Dying Unfinished, which received a Josephine Miles Award for Literary Excellence from PEN Oakland, Incognito: Journey of a Secret Jew, and Dark Plums. She has lived in the San Francisco Bay area most of her adult life and moved to Albuquerque nine years ago.
https://www.mariaespinosa.com

Diane Joy Schmidt is an award-winning screenwriter, journalist, essayist and photojournalist. Her literary photo-essays appeared this last month in Another Chicago Magazine (“A Red-tailed Hawk”), andlast yearin Sweet and Geometry. A five-time Rockower Award winner, she writes for the New Mexico Jewish Link and the Gallup Independent and her work has also appeared regularly in the Chicago Tribune, Hadassah Magazine, The Intermountain Jewish News and The Navajo Times. In 2020, she received an M.F.A. in Screenwriting and New Media from Antioch University Santa Barbara and her new screenplay Mitzi Gets It has just received Writer-Recommend from the Austin Film Festival.
https://www.dianejoyschmidt.com/.

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Gallup Independent 2.27.21 ; New Mexico Jewish Link Spring, 2021.

My mother told me about the Golden Rule when I was a very small child. I don’t remember what I did, but I must have done something wrong. I remember looking to see if she was holding a gold-colored ruler behind her skirt. She recited, ‘Do onto others as you would have others do onto you.” I didn’t get it. Then she tried reasoning. She said, kindly enough, “If you are nice to others, they will be nice to you,’ but that required an imaginary leap into the future, something that a four-year-old wouldn’t make. The version in Leviticus 19:18, “Love thy neighbor as thyself,” made even less sense to me, as I knew my mother didn’t even like our neighbor, an old man who made my father listen to his dirty jokes over the hollyhocks. 

Perhaps if she’d used the other version, “What is hateful to you do not do unto another,” that might have made a bigger impression. As in, ‘Don’t hit your brother if you don’t want him to hit you,’ or, ‘If you hit the dog, it will bite you.’ It would be a more commonsensical approach.

For any family, people or country, for any society to hold together at all, it has to start with that most fundamental idea. 

A story that dates back centuries explains that this is a core tenet of Judaism. A non-Jew asked a rabbi to explain Judaism while standing on one leg. The rabbi, annoyed, sent him away. The man then went to Rabbi Hillel the Elder, who told him, “Whatever is abhorrent to you, do not do to your fellow man. That is the whole of Torah. The rest is commentary. Now, go and study.” 

The positive version, “Do onto others as you would have others do onto you,” might be better for the grownups among us, as it instructs how to practice making the world a better place. 

But Hillel’s version may be what’s needed right now, because it forces us to put ourselves in another person’s shoes. Do not do to others that which is distasteful to you. Don’t make up lies about someone else—how would you like it if they did that to you? Don’t make fun of a person who looks different from you—what if that turned out to be someone in your group? Don’t exclude others from having the same rights as you. If we are all made in God’s image, all a spark of God, then it follows that you wouldn’t like to be excluded either. 

This extends to all living creatures, great and small, all of creation. It’s a teaching that is found in most religions and cultures in the world. It is the concept of reciprocity. But apparently some in this country are having to relearn this. We seemed to have lost the finer points of common sense in a proliferation of made-up stories to bolster some wishful thinking, a false belief that the election was stolen. This is causing an erosion of our democracy.

When people want to believe the most outlandish conspiracy theories, and refuse to believe reality, we have slid down a most treacherous slope. The only way out, the antidote, is to start again with this foundational teaching, however it speaks to you: Treat others as you want to be treated, don’t do something to others that you wouldn’t want done to you.  

Story and Photos by Diane Joy Schmidt
Another Chicago Magazine, 2020

Frank and I decided to get away for the night and drove down to Socorro. It was Halloween, when the veil is torn. In the final evening light, the El Camino sign shone outside the motel window like a ghost skyscraper.

In the morning we went to the Bosque del Apache wildlife refuge. There was a large bird landing on a snag out in the water and a man who was just leaving the viewing platform told me that it was an immature golden eagle. After a while a woman in khakis and waders arrived. I told her it was an immature golden eagle. She demurred politely, and averred as how her specialty was the Semipalmated plover. Frank said that the bird that had eyed me steadily was a Red-tailed hawk and that, like the eagle, the Red-tailed hawk has great healing powers.

At noon we headed for Green chile cheeseburgers at the Buckhorn Tavern. There I opened Red Calvary, by Isaac Babel. Babel had joined the Red Army in 1918 at the suggestion of his mentor, Maxim Gorky, who told him he needed more life experience. I read:  

I was greeted by Pani’ Eliza, the Jesuit’s housekeeper. She gave me amber tea and sponge fingers. Her sponge fingers smelt like a crucifixion. A cunning sap was contained within them, and the odorous fury of the Vatican.

After reading that blood-soaked language a few times, I noticed the page itself had taken on a reddish cast. I looked up. Above us, a crucifix hung dolorous, bathed in the red glow of the Budweiser sign.

At the far end of the room a woman waited for a table with her husband. In a red jacket, her long black hair pinned with a rise like a rooster’s coronet, an enormous jangle of keys hung from the jeans of her short body. Her face was set in sufferance, like an Italian actress waiting for her cue. Her keys might have opened the church, and she the one to serve sponge fingers like death.

I went to use the bathroom. Marilyn Monroe was there to greet me with a smile, a refreshing Michelob in her hand.

On the way home, a gigantic airliner crossed the highway right in front of us coming in low to land at the Albuquerque airport. A rush of adrenaline flooded me and with it a strong thought, that someone had called to tell us that we’d been robbed. It was rather unlikely. Still, I called the house phone.
 
Sure enough, being startled by the jet had triggered a sixth sense—there was a message from the bank that had been left while we’d sat in the Buckhorn under the red-limned crucifix—and they’d found unauthorized charges on a debit card.

 When we got home the dogs demanded a walk. The acequia madre, the 400-year-old mother ditch, was making a long sinuous slow bleed into the dirt, carrying the last irrigation waters of the season.

 And the raccoon family’s baby had made little paw prints to dry in the mud alongside her parents.

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Diane Joy Schmidt is a writer, screenwriter, and photojournalist in New Mexico. In 2020 she earned a dual MFA, Screenwriting and New Media, Antioch University Santa Barbara. Her picture-stories have appeared in the New Mexico Jewish Link, Another Chicago Magazine, Sweet: A Literary Confection, and Geometry Journal.

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Judge’s comment, “Moody, evocative language accompanies atmospheric, evocative photos. Just a superb piece of writing with quality art. I wanted more.” 2021 First Place, Photographer/Writer, National Federation of Press Women, as published by Another Chicago Magazine.

1st Place, Personal Columns, 2021, Society of Professional Journalists Top of the Rockies, for Gallup Independent, for 3 columns: “NDN Kars, Windshield Cracks,” “Frozen II: A Heroine fights historical denial,” and John Lewis, Tisha B’Av and the Obligation to Vote.
Rockower Award for Excellence in Arts Criticism, HM, 2021, American Jewish Press Association, for “Windshield Cracks, How the Light Gets In,” NM Jewish Link.

I recently tuned in to “Native America Calling.” What I heard, it was like a light came on, it broke open my heart. I found a new spiritual insight listening to that radio show. And I was having a very dark day.

The guest was musician Keith Secola (Ojibwa), from Minnesota, best known for his song NDN Kars. The recorded program can be found online at https://soundcloud.com/native-america-calling, 10-28-2020, “A Conversation with Keith Secola.” Radio host Tara Gatewood (Isleta) asked Secola to talk about NDN Kars, He said, “The song originally started as a graffiti on a bathroom wall in Winton, MN, they carved it a little derogatory. I wanted to turn it around, the spelling, back in the early 80’s when I wrote this song, N-D-N, with the spelling phonetically,  changed it to something that would give you strength or power, that richness of something that you couldn’t see, that belongs to all of us. People would say, ‘Did you write that song about my uncle’s car, or my sister’s car, or my dad’s car?’ In many way the song becomes metaphysical…”

The song has become a national anthem for Native peoples, the most requested song on Native radio in the U.S. and Canada for almost three decades.

Secola explained what he was doing, saying, “There’s a lot of irony we’re using in oppressor’s language to un-oppress ourselves, to give humanity back to ourselves. I think humor is a portal, is a key, to pass through, because you have to reach a higher level of understanding. This is our special humor, like (callers) said, it belongs to us. When I wrote ‘Put an Indian Power sticker on his bumper, that’s what holds the car together,’ something that’s as metaphoric as that, something that we understand, a code, but it’s something that just doesn’t belong to any person or anybody, so it’s a beautiful thing—when I hear non-Native bands cover that song too, it’s really quite beautiful.” 

As Secola talked friends started to call in, from Minnesota to Gallup to South Dakota to Shiprock. One woman caller told him how she was driving along looking at the cracks in her windshield when the song came on the radio, and hearing the song made her proud. An Indian car comes to be, when there is no money to fix it up. Later, it ends up in the yard getting cannibalized for parts, and enjoys a second life as a a vehicle of the imagination. That’s a strong image, and it’s something no way a white person is going to be able culturally appropriate, this image of a broken down Indian car—something so beloved, loved, in and for its humanity. 

Still, when this woman called in and talked about her cracked windshield, this white listener made a connection, with something in my own experience, and I think that’s important when two peoples might see something, hear each other. I was suddenly reminded of the song “Anthem,”  by Leonard Cohen. It has a similar irony and strength in brokenness. Cohen sang: 

Ring the bells that still can ring
Forget your perfect offering
There is a crack in everything
That’s how the light gets in.

It’s not exactly the same thing they’re talking about, but in a way it is.

Secola sings:

My car is dented
The radiator steams
One headlight don’t work
The radio can scream

I got a sticker
It says “Indian Power”
I stuck it on my bumper
That’s what holds my car together

We’re on the circuit of an Indian dream
We don’t get old
We just get younger
When we’re flying down the highway
Riding in our Indian Cars.

Secola’s words speak with a soaring poetic genius and wit, when he sings, ‘Indian Power—that’s what holds my car together.’ Next to that, Cohen almost sounds prosaic, “that’s how the light gets in.”  Both address spirituality, with Cohen’s words drawn from the Kabbalah.  Both Secola and Cohen wrote their songs in the early ’80’s, neither song was produced until 1992, and both are anthems, one for Natives, the other for many Jewish people in the U.S. and Canada. 

    Why I’m thinking that connecting these two poets is so important is because they both achieve a breakthrough—they break through the oppressive thinking of what has over centuries come to be some kind of religious fanaticism that has taken hold of our world, in the Abrahamic religions, because, if you look back, it really wasn’t there in the original—it got layered on.

And then, it happened, on that radio show, Keith shared a few bars of a new song he just wrote: “Everybody’s moving. Everybody’s moving to a different situation.” 

That week’s Torah portion, Lech L’cha, Genesis 12:1−17:27, is about the same thing. In the Jewish tradition, each week a portion of the Five Books of Moses is studied in synagogues over the course of a year. God tells Abram, “Go forth from your land and from your birthplace and from your father’s house, to the land that I will show you.” 

    These texts have different commentaries going back centuries.“Go forth” speaks to the divine calling us. Rabbi Menachem Feldman writes that the Kabbalah teaches, “that the soul reaches greater heights than it would if it had never embarked on the journey.” God doesn’t tell Abram where he’s going, just, to a new situation.

There are still ways for us all to get humble. Maybe, we could find peace while driving with a cracked windshield listening to NDN Kars on the radio. 

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View as published \ Fall 2020/Stav 5781 The New Mexico Jewish Link: COLORADO’S HOLOCAUST AND GENOCIDE EDUCATION BILL, AND ITS IMPLICATIONS FOR NEW MEXICO
First Place, Education, New Mexico Press Women 2021.

By Diane Joy Schmidt

On July 9th, Colorado became the 13th state to pass a bill that Ho- locaust and genocide education be taught in high schools. Sue Parker Gerson of the ADL Mountain States, who also runs the ADL’s Governor’s Holocaust Remembrance Program for the region, said this was very close to her heart. The bill was 20 years in the making in Colorado. The Jewish Community Relations Council, the ADL, and Jewish Colorado were lead organizations who worked together and with the legislature there.

Colorado’s Governor Jared Polis signed House Bill 20-1336 standing together with 97-year-old Holocaust survivor Fanny Starr at the Jewish Center in Denver. The bill requires high school students to learn about the Holocaust and genocide as a prerequisite to graduation.

The Colorado bill details definitions of the Holocaust and genocide and includes, in clause c., that “Holocaust and Genocide studies means studies on the Holocaust, genocide, and other acts of mass violence, including but not limited to the Armenian genocide.” Colorado schools have until 2023 to put together curriculum and identify source materials, and each district in Colorado will decide how they will implement it.

Each state’s bill is slightly different. On July 23, Delaware’s Governor Carney passed their Holocaust and genocide education bill, for both middle and high school students. The following week Massachusetts passed their bill, also to begin in the sixth grade. Many of the reported incidents of anti-Semitism occur in schools.

Arizona currently has bills working their way through their house and senate. The Anne Frank Center USA’s 50 States Initiative has made it a goal to see bills passed in every state. The federal Never Again Education Act supports the US Holocaust Museum in providing educational materials.

To date, no bills specifically mention teaching about the Native American genocide, a shadow that hangs over this country’s history.

Pulitzer-prize winning historian John Toland writes in his book, Adolf Hitler: The Definitive Biography, on page 702, “Hitler’s concept of concentration camps as well as the practicality of genocide owed much, so he claimed, to his studies of English and United States history. He admired the camps for Boer prisoners in South Africa and for the Indians in the wild West; and often praised to his inner circle the efficiency of America’s extermination—by starvation and uneven combat—of the red savages who could not be tamed by captivity.”

This passage was pointed out in the article “Hitler Studied U.S. Treatment of Indians,” Indian Country Today, 8/8/16, by Elicia Goodsoldier.

The Navajo’s Long Walk took place here in Arizona and New Mexico a little over 150 years ago, where close to 10,000 Navajo people were rounded up in a scorched earth policy ordered by the government, beginning in 1864, and marched from their lands across Arizona and New Mexico in winter some 400 miles to an internment camp at Bosque Redondo, near Fort Sumner, some 80 miles from the Texas border. Many died along the way and another 2,000 died of starvation over the next four years, until a treaty in 1868 finally allowed them to return to a smaller area of their lands.

The decimation of Navajo women of child-bearing age during those years created a significant genetic bottleneck that may be the cause of a number of genetic mutation-based diseases suffered by Navajo families (See Erickson RP. 2009. “Autosomal recessive diseases among the Athabaskans of the Southwestern United States: Recent advances and implications for the future.” Am J Med Genet Part A 149A:2602–2611).

These include a very rare deadly pigmentation disease that has received particular attention, explored in the award-winning documentary “Sun Kissed.” The very rare XP gene mutation, xeroderma pigmentosum, causes children to become severely sun-burned after only a few seconds of exposure to the sun. Generally found within one in a million, it has now appeared among some Navajo families, statistically, among one in 30,000. Individuals with the disorder can never go outside during daylight hours, are about a thousand times more likely to develop skin cancer and suffer an early death.

Another contributing cause of these various genetic mutation diseases may also be the effects of 40 years of deadly uranium contamination throughout the Navajo Nation, where the EPA has identified that over 530 abandoned uranium mines remain.

The Uranium Education Pro- gram at Dine College in Shiprock, New Mexico points out that there are many hundreds of additional contaminated sites, not just the mines themselves. “Uranium mining and milling has left large areas of the Navajo reservation contaminated with abandoned mines, mine waste and mill tailings and associated radiation. There are well-documented problems with lung cancer and silicosis (Black lung) in former Navajo uranium miners, and there is great con- cern among uranium millers and other Navajos who reside near con-taminated areas about late effects of radiation exposure from these sources. There has been growing concerns over various environmental issues and their impacts to health and the environment.”

Jews know well the devastating effects of inherited diseases as a result of a genetic bottleneck. One in four is estimated to carry a genetic mutation. Following a model aggressive screening campaign led by Jewish doctors, the deadliest, Tay-Sachs, has been virtually eradicated. Couples routinely seek genetic screening.

The most common disease is Gaucher disease. The National Gaucher Foundation states that “Gaucher disease can affect anyone, occurring in up to 1 in 40,000 live births in the general population.” However, “Gaucher disease is more common among Jews of Ashkenazi (Eastern European) descent, occurring in approximately 1 in 450 within this population.”

A very aggressive type of breast cancer, found mainly among Jewish women, is also found to be prevalent among Catholic Hispanic women in northern New Mexico and southern Colorado. This has stimulated lively inquiry and is being studied in relation to the history of Jewish Conversos who settled here over 500 years ago following the Inquisition.

For further information about the Native American experience, the Smithsonian’s American Indian Museum has begun an online cur- riculum, Native Knowledge 360 Degrees, which “provides educa- tors and students with new perspectives on Native American history, cultures, and contemporary lives.” Their website has information about the Long Walk at https:// americanindian.si.edu/nk360/navajo/long-walk/long-walk.csht- ml. The Navajo Nation Museum, in Window Rock, Arizona, has a large-scale permanent panel dis- play, and the Fort Sumner Historic Site/Bosque Redondo Memorial museum was dedicated in 2005.

The Long Walk is only one part of the story. The Pueblo Indians have theirs, and a series of forced-march resettlements occurred throughout the country, the best-known being The Indian Removal Act of 1830 that resulted in the Trail of Tears.

Jewish Holocaust survivors and their families have expressed concerns that the Holocaust is in some way diminished by identifying other atrocities in the world as genocide. No comparison is implied.

Over the last twenty-five years, the Shoah Foundation, founded by film director Steven Spielberg, has collected the testimony of survivors of the Holocaust, and in addition, as their website details, of survivors of other genocides, including “the Guatemalan Genocide, which killed some 200,000 civilians in the early 1980s, mainly indigenous Mayans,” and, in Armenia, Rwanda, Cambodia, and most recently, genocide being carried out by ISIS against Yazidis, Muslims and Christians.

The Shoah Foundation has a new initiative “Stronger Than Hate,” following the recent rise in antisemitism and hate against others, together with the University of Southern California, to provide educational materials through their eye-witness accounts to help stu- dents recognize and counter hate.

The Jewish people are in a unique position to bestow recognition on the wounds of others. Historic trauma is exacerbated when there is lack of knowledge and resulting denial. The historic atrocities committed against the Native American population of North America, call for our attention. At this time, while there is no active effort yet to pass a bill in New Mexico mandating the teaching of the Holocaust and other genocides, if this effort does go forward here, it would be an historic opportunity to include an initiative joining together with Native educators, that addresses the little-told history of our first citizens. #