UNITARIAN CHURCH NEWS RELEASE
The Unitarian Church of Los Alamos will host its Second Sunday Forum Dec. 10, featuring an indigenous perspective – that of Patrick Cruz – about growing up in Los Alamos. Cruz has lived two lives – one as a Los Alamos resident/kid – the other as a Pueblo person from Ohkay Owingeh.
About his talk, Cruz writes: “A big part of Los Alamos’s demography consists of people coming to town, staying for a duration of time, then leaving for other job opportunities. Often, newcomers come from, and leave to, places that have only a scant or invisible presence of Native peoples. As a Pueblo person, I lived a double life.”
One where his background didn’t matter and he was just another Los Alamos kid, and another where he had long roots to this very place (Los Alamos) stretching back to a time before the Spanish homesteaders and the Boys Ranch, to a thriving Pueblo culture so utterly different from Los Alamos.
In many ways in Los Alamos, Indigenous peoples are invisible. Native tribal lands are merely place names that Los Alamos residents drive through on their commutes and weekend excursions to Santa Fe. And yet, in Cruz’s mind, there are constant reminders all over the town and its surrounding landscape of Pueblo spaces; invisible to most residents, but alive and breathing Pueblo places to him. He wishes to voice and bring awareness that these places are not just about Los Alamos’s unique town history and great contributions to global geopolitics, but that there is another independent history and life to this place that has existed long into the past…and continues to exist today. It remains in Pueblo landscape and space.”
Forums are non-religious, community-oriented programs that are open to the public.
The forum starts at 11:45 a.m. at the Unitarian Church of Los Alamos, 1738 North Sage St.
Patrick Cruz is a Ph.D. student in the anthropology program with an archaeology focus from the University of Colorado, Boulder. He is also the Curator of Collections at the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture in Santa Fe. He is a member of Ohkay Owingeh, a Tewa speaking Pueblo community in northern New Mexico. His interests are in the pre-contact American Southwest, particularly in the events that led up to the abandonment of the Four Corners region at the end of the 13th century, and the consequences as they involve the northern Rio Grande region of northern New Mexico. His other interests include Puebloan agriculture and hunting strategies, migrations, landscape archaeology, phenomenology, Indigenous archaeology, historic linguistics and Tewa language preservation. Overall, Cruz has 25 years of experience working with museum collections and in the archaeology fields, including institutions such as Bandelier National Monument, the Center of Southwest Studies at Fort Lewis College, and the Museum of New Mexico (New Mexico History Museum and the Museum of Indian Arts and Culture). Cruz is also an intermediate Tewa speaker, and a traditional micaceous Tewa potter as well as having interests in the study of Pueblo pottery traditions.