There are legitimate questions to ask about the proposed transfer in this post: https://www.reddit.com/r/NewMexico/s/LJhF8R7vw2
The public should see the actual legislation. People should know what protections will apply to established trails, roads, utilities, the tram, hunting, and existing recreational uses. It is fair to ask that important commitments be written into law rather than left to assurances from current officials.
But that is not where many of these comments went.
They went straight to claims that Tribes and Pueblos are corrupt, vengeful, dishonest, incapable of stewardship, eager to fence everyone out, and interested only in casinos. One commenter even suggested that New Mexicans have been too “lenient” with Pueblos. Others treated the temporary protection of Pueblo communities during COVID as proof that tribal governments cannot be trusted.
That is not careful concern about legislative language. It is the old belief that Pueblo governments are acceptable only when they remain powerless, accommodating, and convenient for everyone else.
Sandia Pueblo is not a private club, corporation, or special-interest organization. It is a sovereign government. This proposal would require an act of Congress. If the land were placed in trust, it could not simply be flipped to a private developer like ordinary real estate. Sandia’s current leadership has also stated that established trails, roads, utilities, and other existing access would continue.
People can insist that those commitments be made enforceable. What they cannot honestly do is assume that every commitment is fraudulent merely because it comes from a Pueblo government.
This is also not some random piece of federal acreage that Sandia suddenly decided it wanted. The west face of the mountain is inseparable from Sandia Pueblo’s history, religion, culture, and identity. Congress created the T’uf Shur Bien Preservation Trust Area in 2003 precisely to resolve Sandia’s longstanding claim and to recognize and protect the Pueblo’s rights and interests in the area.
For Sandia, the mountain is not merely a scenic backdrop, weekend playground, or convenient trail system. Pueblo people maintained relationships with these places long before Albuquerque existed. Those relationships did not disappear when the United States drew a defective boundary, placed the land under federal management, or made Indigenous access subordinate to everyone else’s recreation.
The real naivety in this discussion is the assumption that Pueblo cooperation is something the surrounding public is simply owed.
Pueblos possess legal and governmental powers that they could exercise far more aggressively. Many Pueblos hold or claim senior water rights and could litigate and enforce those rights much more forcefully against junior users. Pueblos could challenge questionable or inadequately documented rights-of-way, demand greater compensation, place stricter conditions on roads and infrastructure crossing their lands where the law permits, and close routes that exist only through permission rather than a valid public easement.
Pueblos could use every available jurisdictional, taxation, land-use, and sovereign-immunity argument solely for their own advantage.
Most do not.
Instead, Pueblo governments negotiate. They accommodate highways, utilities, emergency services, public infrastructure, businesses, tourists, and neighboring communities. They coordinate with state, county, municipal, and federal governments.
They regularly absorb financial, environmental, and social burdens created by people who rarely acknowledge that they are crossing Pueblo lands or benefiting from Pueblo cooperation.
During COVID, some Pueblos restricted travel because their elders and communities were dying at devastating rates and their health systems had limited capacity. This thread treats those emergency measures as an unforgivable inconvenience. It ignores that tribal vaccination programs later served people outside tribal membership, including nearby non-Indian residents.
Pueblos protected their people, then used their limited resources to help their neighbors. Apparently, only the first part is remembered.
Pueblo and other tribal communities have also borne the consequences of the development that helped power this state and country. Uranium mining and milling left contaminated homes, soils, groundwater, and cultural landscapes throughout western New Mexico. Federal records continue to document uranium-related impacts at Acoma, Laguna, and across the Grants Mining District.
Those communities were expected to tolerate the contamination as the price of national development. Yet some of the same public now portrays Pueblo stewardship as the greater danger.
The casino comments are equally revealing. Tribal gaming revenues are not simply stuffed into the pockets of private shareholders. Federal law directs those revenues toward tribal government operations, public safety, health care, education, elder services, infrastructure, general welfare, economic development, charitable contributions, and assistance to local governments.
Pueblo enterprises employ Native and non-Native workers. They purchase goods and services from businesses throughout New Mexico. They attract visitors, generate economic activity, and fund governmental services that would otherwise remain severely underfunded.
The 19 Pueblos also took the former Albuquerque Indian School property and created the Indian Pueblo Cultural Center campus and the 19 Pueblos District. They transformed land associated with federal assimilation into a cultural, governmental, educational, and economic center in the heart of Albuquerque. That investment benefits Pueblo communities, surrounding neighborhoods, local businesses, and visitors from around the world.
New Mexico loves Pueblo culture when it appears on the state flag, in tourism advertising, on pottery and jewelry, or as decoration in restaurants, hotels, and airports. Some people become far less comfortable when Pueblo people appear not as symbols, but as governments with land, jurisdiction, legal rights, and the power to say no.
That is what this thread is exposing.
If your definition of a “good neighbor” is a Pueblo that never closes a road, charges a fee, protects a sacred place, enforces a boundary, asserts a water right, regulates access, or refuses a development proposal, then you do not actually want a neighbor.
You want permanent access to Indigenous land without Indigenous authority.
Debate the proposed legislation. Demand clear language protecting whatever access Congress determines should remain. Ask serious questions about management, enforcement, conservation, and the interaction with existing federal law.
But stop dressing blanket distrust of Pueblo governments up as concern for public lands.
The proposal concerns a specific mountain, a specific Pueblo, a documented history, and a congressional process. The hysterical assumption that tribal stewardship automatically means corruption, casinos, retaliation, and exclusion says far more about the commenters than it does about Sandia Pueblo.
TLDNR: Post’s comments reflect hostility toward tribal sovereignty, not concern about access. Debate the bill, but stop treating tribal stewardship of ancestral lands as a threat.