Santa Fe Community
College was first established in 1983 and began classes in temporary
facilities at an industrial park on Cerrillos Road. According to his memoirs, Larry Meyer, one of
the five Rancho Viejo owners, shortly after acquiring the land saw a newspaper
article saying that the pubic institution was looking for a permanent campus.
Meyer quickly contacted Tina Ludutsky, the school’s Assistant to the President,
who said she would be interested in seeing the land.
Ludutsky
thought the site was “beautiful out here” and arranged for Meyer to meet with
College President Dr. Bill Witter for another land tour.
“On our way
out of the ranch property, we came up upon a little knoll, or high area. We stopped and got out.” They talked about the size of the land that
the school needed and settled upon a donation of 100 acres. Meyer brought the proposal to RV ownership
partners Leland Thompson and Fred Chambers who agreed. Subsequent conversations with the college led
to a donation of 260 acres with SFCC purchasing an additional 100 acres along
the east side of Richard Avenue at the northern end of Rancho Viejo. The deal included restrictive covenants that
should the school use the land for other than educational reasons, it reverts
back to the Rancho Viejo Limited Partnership.
As Larry
Meyers recalls in his memoir, “Before donating the land, we had to extend the
road and the water and gas lines.
Richards Avenue, at dirt road at the time, stopped about a quarter of a
mile from the north boundary of the property that we were giving to the college. We had to improve Richards from Rodeo Road
south all the way to the site, 2 ½ miles, and bring it up to the city’s
specifications so they could pave it…We also had to put in drainage culverts
under the road, which should have been done by the property owners north of
us.”
In 2002,
Larry Meyer was recognized with an honorary doctorate in community service by
the Santa Fe Community College.
Rancho
Viejo Limited Partners also basically donated nineteen acres to Santa Maria de la Paz Catholic Church along
the west side of Richards Avenue, across from SFCC. While starting out slowly, perhaps to its
semi-remote location, Santa Maria de la Paz has now has become the biggest Catholic
congregation in Northern New Mexico. As
with SFCC strict covenants stipulate that should the land be only be used for
the church or it reverts to RVLP.
Additional acres of land were later gifted to house the Santa Nino Regional Catholic School (SNRCS).
This
original donation originated with an inquiry from Al Grubesic, a Santa Fe
realtor, about the possibility of purchasing five acres of RV land. RVLP sold them the property for $90,000 and
when the Church determined that it needed more space for a playground they were
given an additional fourteen acres ‘all for the original $90,000.
In addition
of its land gifts to Santa Fe Community College and Santa Maria de la Paz
Catholic Church in December 1988 Rancho Viejo Limited partners also donated 140
acres to the Institute of American
Indian Arts.
Three major factors had led to
the creation of IAIA: (1) dissatisfaction with the academic program at the
Santa Fe Indian School (SFIS); (2) a Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) paradigm
shift towards post-graduate education; (3) and the influence of the Southwest
Indian Art Project launched by painter Helen Hardin (daughter of Santa Clara
Pueblo artist, Pablita Velarde) with help from the Rockefeller Foundation.
The longstanding
American policy of assimilating Indians into “mainstream America” had used
formal education as its primary tool.
From the experiments at the Hampton Institute in the 1870s to creation
of Boarding Schools in the 1880s, the U.S. Government, through its Bureaus of
Indian Affairs (BIA) controlled Native American schooling. The Indian Re-Organization Act (1932-1945)
was intended to insure that tribal culture and ways of life were part of the
educational process. However from the
mid 1940s to the mid 1960s the government policy shifted from that model to
what came to be called “Indian Termination” – that, with or without their consent,
tribes must be terminated as entities and their members must begin to “live as
Americans." This program ended the government's
recognition of the sovereignty of tribes, and any exclusion of Native Americans
from state laws.
Or as former
U.S. Senator from Colorado and Native American Ben Nighthorse Campbell said in
a speech delivered in Montana: “If you can't change them, absorb them until
they simply disappear into the mainstream culture. ... In Washington's infinite
wisdom, it was decided that tribes should no longer be tribes, never mind that
they had been tribes for thousands of years.”
This
termination policy was reversed in the mid 1960s and that change, along with rising
Indian political activism, resulted in tribal governments being restored, and to
an increase in the Native American self-determination.
“IAIA was
established during the waning years of the termination policy, but still reflected
the BIA philosophy of educating Indians to leave the reservation,” according to
Ryan Flahive, Archivist at IAIA in his book Celebrating
Difference - Fifty Years of Contemporary Native Arts Education at IAIA.
Flahive
continued, “However IAIA’s gains in prominence paralleled the development of
the self-determination policy, a federal policy designed to provide for more
tribal authority and self-governance…Gradually, tribal controlled colleges
began to spring up nationwide beginning in 1968 with the Navajo Community
College (now Diné College) located in Tsaile Arizona. In 1978 the Tribally Controlled Community
College Act was passed and further urged the self-determination of Native
American education.”
At the same
time the BIA Department of Education underwent a significant policy shift under
the leadership of Hildegard Thompson who recognized the need to prepare Indian
students for an “urban, technological society” – leading to a de-emphasis on
vocational education and a new stress on education beyond high school. Haskell Junior College (now Haskell Indian
Nations University) in Lawrence Kansas was chartered in 1970 as a general
education junior college; the Southwest Indian Polytechnic Institute (SIPS) was
opened in Albuquerque offering opportunities in science, technology,
engineering and mathematics; and IAIA was begun as a vocational art school to
replace the program at the Santa Fe Indian School. The Institute’s curriculum was to be based on
“cultural difference as the basis for creative expression” as articulated by Lloyd
Henri “Kiva” New – co-founder, IAIA’s first Art Director, and later President
of the school.
“Kiva” New
envisioned a school, which would provide an education that fostered pride in
students' indigenous heritage, and developed skills designed to improve their
economic opportunities. New was a hands-on visionary, teaching a printed
textiles course focused on dying technique.
One of 37
tribal colleges located in the United States (according the IAIA website), “IAIA was established in 1962 during the
administration of President John F. Kennedy and opened on the campus of the
Indian School in Santa Fe, New Mexico. It was first a high school formed under
the Department of Interior’s Bureau of Indian Affairs. Under the leadership of
Dr. George Boyce, Lloyd Kiva New, and others, the Institute embodied a bold and
innovative approach to arts education. In 1975, IAIA became a two-year college
offering associate degrees in Studio Arts, Creative Writing, and Museum
Studies.
“IAIA became one of three
Congressionally chartered colleges in the United States in 1986, and was
charged with the study, preservation and dissemination of traditional and
contemporary expressions of Native American language, literature, history, oral
traditions, and the visual and performing arts.”
In his memoirs Larry Meyer (one of the
original Rancho Viejo Partners) says that the donation of land in Rancho Viejo to
IAIA was initiated by a conversation between Bill Johnson and Leland Thompson (another
of the Rancho Viejo Partners). According to IAIA Archivist Ryan Flahive,
Johnson who was in charge of government programs for IBM, had been tasked by
Interior Department appointee Patricia Keyes with finding a larger, permanent
site for the newly chartered IAIA. Bill
Johnson would later serve as Chairman of the Board of Trustees for the IAIA
Foundation. Leland Thompson made an
initial oral commitment for about ninety acres.
Larry Myers
describes his view of what followed that conversation.
“Leland
assured me, ‘It’s no problem. Lets just
let them go ahead and build it, and we’ll finalize it later.’
“The
Indians did put in the road, but when it came to the water line, they only put
in part of it; the partnership ended up covering the difference.”
IAIA’s
recollection of the water line is different.
In any event the deal took eight years to complete.
According
to its website, “IAIA has graduated more than 3,800 students, representing more
than 90% of the 562 federally-recognized tribes. More than 20% of IAIA alumni
have gone on to earn a graduate degree…Many of the country’s most illustrious
contemporary American Indian artists, poets, writers, musicians and cultural
leaders are IAIA alumni, while others are affiliated with IAIA as faculty,
staff, visiting artists, and scholars. Among these are Dan Namingha, Fritz
Scholder, David Bradley, Doug Hyde, Allan Houser, Charles Loloma, Otellie
Loloma, Earl Biss, T.C. Cannon, Sheldon Peters Wolfchild, Darren Vigil Gray,
Sherwin Bitsui, Rose Simpson, Patty Harjo, Bill Prokopiof, Kevin Red Star, Joy
Harjo, Irvin Morris, Char Teters, Lloyd Kiva New, Nocona Burgess, Sherman
Alexie, and many more!
In 1991, IAIA
founded The Institute of American Indian Arts Museum – now the Museum of Contemporary Native Arts. MoCNA is the only museum to focus on
contemporary intertribal Native American art showcasing work by Native artists
in its over 7,000 piece National Collection of Contemporary Indian featuring
the Allan Houser Sculpture Garden. MoCNA
is housed in the historic Santa Fe Federal Building (the old Post Office), a
landmark Pueblo Revival building listed on the National Register of Historic
Places.
In 2013
IAIA began offering its first graduate program, a low-residency MFA in Creative
Writing. The school currently has
roughly 320 students living on campus and 520 FTE (Full Time Enrollment). It generally has around 80 different tribal
groups represented in the student body – this would also include First Nations
(indigenous American Indians), Hawaiian, South American, and other Indigenous
groups. The 2018 graduation class of
twenty-nine MFAs, thirty-one BFAs, four Associates of Art, and thirteen
certificates represented forty-seven tribes, among them: Seminole of Florida,
Maricopa, Diné, Sicangu Lakota, Blackfeet, Sicangu Lakota, Cherokee nation of
Oklahoma, Santo Domingo Pueblo, Otoe-Missouria, Ogala Lakota, Zacalecas, Turtle
Mountain Chippewa and Shoshone.
Rancho
Viejo LP has also gifted property to: Amy Biehl Community School (14.7 acres)
on the north side of Avenida de la Sur East; Rancho Viejo Seventh-day Adventist Church (5 acres), and Santa Maria El Mirador Easter Seals (6.7
acres) – all three along the eastern or southern side of A Van Nu Po (the road
curves); a 2009 donation for the fire station on Rancho Viejo Boulevard (3.75
acres); as well as The Academy for
Technology and the Classics (10.49 acres).
According
to their website, “The Academy for Technology and the Classics (ATC) Foundation
accepted an extremely generous donation of over 10 acres of land in the Rancho
Viejo neighborhood from the Rancho Viejo Limited Partnership. On this land the
Foundation built a 35,000 square foot classroom building that the school moved
into for the start of the 2007/2008 school year. The ATC Foundation worked with
the County of Santa Fe to sell $7,000,000 in tax-exempt New Mexico Industrial
Revenue Bonds to finance this construction.”
On the
business side – in 2013 Bicycle
Technologies International (BTI) broke ground for a headquarters building on
what would come to be called Velocity Way – off of Richards Avenue, across from
Santa Fe Community College. BTI – a
supplier of pretty much all things related to bicycles from equipment to
clothing from multiple manufacturers sold through a network of BTI dealers – is
the first business in what is projected to be an “Employment Center” (i.e. location
for organizations that provide jobs) located in RV along the west side of
Richard Avenue extending from the southern boundary of Santa Maria de la Paz Roman Catholic Church to the northern edge of
Avenida del Sur.
Additional Notes:
Amy Biehl
The folliwng is from Amy Biehl Community School website.
“Amy Biehl was a gifted and dynamic
young woman committed to making a difference. From an early age, Amy would set
her mind on a goal or idea and refuse to let go of it. Amy embodied a unique
spirit of determination throughout her life. In everything she did, Amy sought
to be the best. Even if she wasn't a 'natural' at a chosen activity, Amy worked
tirelessly until she became a self taught expert.
“At a young
age, Amy decided that she wanted to go to Stanford. With this goal in mind, she
maintained a 4.0 GPA throughout her elementary and secondary education,
graduating as valedictorian of her class. At Santa Fe High School, Amy heard
Nelson Mandela's story and applied her signature determination to the cause.
The call to 'Free Mandela" was advertised on her postcards, letters,
notebooks, and even her life long passion for human rights.
“After
graduation, she received a grant to work of 'pre-election observance' in Nambia
for three months with President Sam Nujoma and other prominent political
figures. Amy was described as facilitator, bringing several groups together
with the common goal of creating a free and democratic South Africa.
“Amy stood
out in a nation that had been divided by more than forty years of legally
sanctioned racial separation under Apartheid. She was one of the few white
people who ventured to study Xhosa language rather than ask locals to speak
English for her. Amy seemed to want to adopt South African culture as her own.
She often seemed to forget that her white skin carried negative connotations in
a society oppressed by those of her racial profile.
“On August
25, 1993, Amy Biehl's life was tragically cut short in an act of political mob
violence in the Guguletu Town-ship outside Cape Town. At Amy Biehl Community
School we strive to continue Amy Biehl's legacy of kindness and inclusion.”
The school is in partnership with the Los Alamos National
Laboratory (LANL) and implements an inquiry based hands-on science curriculum
that integrates reading and writing skills.
