Capulin Canyon

Revitalizing a Watershed with the Indigenous Lands Program

By Ungelbah Dávila

Photos of Capulin Canyon from 1980, when Congress designated the surrounding 5,000 acres as a wilderness area, are a shocking contrast to the current view of the canyon. Today, a blackened, burnt swath of earth cuts through what was once a verdant ecosystem. Located in the Jemez Mountains, Capulin, once home to Ancestral Puebloans, natural builders and artists, belongs to a landscape altered by fire. In 1996, the human-caused Dome Fire ripped through 16,500 acres, destroying most of the Dome Wilderness. Fifteen years later, just as the grasslands and forests were coming back to life, the Las Conchas Fire, one of the largest in New Mexico’s history, burned 156,000 acres—scorching the same area, as well as nearby Bandelier. Then, in 2022, the Cerro Pelado Fire devastated 45,600 acres, mostly within the bounds of the Las Conchas burn scar. Capulin Canyon, cradling its namesake tributary, cuts through burn scar within burn scar on its way down to the Rio Grande. Now a field of charred sticks occupies what thirty years ago was a lush haven for plants and wildlife.

Without the presence of plant life that would naturally regulate how rainwater or snowmelt is collected and passed along to the Rio Grande, tribal and agricultural communities in the Middle Rio Grande Basin, which stretches from Cochiti Pueblo to Socorro, have one more card stacked against them in their struggle to access healthy water. Native Americans, often acknowledged as our region’s first farmers, were also this land’s first scientists, hydrologists, architects, engineers, botanists, astronomers, and ecologists. This could be one reason that Indigenous-led organizations around the state have long recognized not only the impact fire damage has on the watershed but the connections between all land uses, lifeways, and communities.

“I come from a farming family in Santo Domingo Pueblo. We are a rich, vibrant community that  still does farming as a way to preserve our lifeways,” says James Calabaza, program director for the Santa Fe– and Fort Collins–based Indigenous Lands Program (ILP), which was created in 2005 under the nonprofit Trees, Water & People to support Indigenous communities in preserving their lands. “For some families, it’s a major form of economical revenue for them when they sell their harvest and their crops in the fall time.”

Calabaza says that every year communities along the Rio Grande that depend on irrigation for their fields are having to ration water more and more, and that this has started causing tension among communities. “A lot of the communities downstream of Cochiti Dam are senior water right holders, and they have the first right to irrigate their fields. But communities in between, like Peña Blanca and Algodones, who are also big ag-producing communities, are facing a lot of those shortages and challenges because they have junior water rights.”

But Calabaza is optimistic that the work ILP is doing will eventually help resolve some of these issues. “If we can invest a lot of our knowledge and our science and man-power resources back into rehealing these watersheds, our water systems will improve,” he says.

Revitalizing the hydrological function of the watershed around ancestral locations and Pueblo communities post-fire is the ILP’s primary focus. This spring, they cohosted the 2025 New Mexico Tribal Forest & Fire Summit in Mescalero, and in partnership with the Pueblos of Santo Domingo, Cochiti, and Jemez, they are about to launch an ongoing project to rehabilitate the Capulin Canyon watershed.

Another key project partner is High Water Mark, a company launched by hydrologist and engineer Phoebe Suina, of the Pueblos of San Felipe and Cochiti, in response to flooding in the Rio Grande Valley after the Las Conchas Fire. Since 2013, Suina has worked to support tribal governments and communities in post-fire and post-flood watershed management and rehabilitation. ILP will also be collaborating with Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps, whose projects include habitat restoration programs for adults and youth.

This year, ILP and their partners will begin work on the canyon’s 2,200-acre headwaters, and they plan to use the project as a template for all of the adjacent canyons in the Jemez Mountains.

“What we’re trying to do is bring together that traditional ecological knowledge that exists and has survived years of colonialism and oppression, to combine it with the cutting-edge Western science that is coming out of academic institutions and research facilities,” says Calabaza. “We’re hoping that this project is also reconnecting people back to the land. The water, it’s a living thing, and we treat it as a living thing moving forward. There’s just so many intersectionalities between the conservation of water, language, community, resistance, farming, education, youth engagement and outreach, and the idea of intergenerational transfer of knowledge between elders and youth. Those are all factors that are going to be webbed into our project. But the very center of it is water. Water is life, and water brings people together.”

Watershed restoration work starts with planting trees, and Calabaza says they have planted more than 125,000 trees in the last five years, with about 85,000 of them in New Mexico. This fall, with the help of the Forest Service, Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps, Santa Fe Indian School, and others, ILP will begin planting 10,000 Douglas fir, ponderosa pine, and white fir trees in and around Capulin Canyon.

Having trees on the landscape is critical for watershed function, he says, because trees help protect the soil from erosion and control the underground movement of water to prevent fast runoffs. Farmers using the water downstream are impacted by the loss of trees in higher elevations because trees are instrumental in creating a canopy for snowfall that allows it to melt more slowly and better absorb into the earth and the watershed, something that becomes vital during the hot summer months.   

“The trees are eleven months old that we’re planting back in this landscape, and it’s going to take a few years for them to acclimate,” says Calabaza. “We’re going to start also working on installing and building structures [in the canyon] that can help control some of the [runoff], especially after a really heavy rainstorm, because right now that water is just flowing very fast back into the Rio Grande. But if we’re able to stop and retain it, it’s going to just recharge that landscape. It’s going to seep in and infiltrate into the ground, and then hopefully, over time, naturally release through springs.”

ILP project manager Michael Martinez is from the Pueblos of Ohkay Owingeh and Jemez, and he says that the devastation from these human-caused wildfires is so bad that a new word needs to be invented to describe it. He says the area encompassing Capulin Canyon has been neglected, and now people’s livelihoods downstream are in jeopardy. He wishes someone had started revitalization work much sooner because of how long it takes for trees to grow and for nature to find its balance again.

“Now we’re probably fifteen years past everything, and now we’re getting into it, but it will take some time,” Martinez says. “But Mother Nature, she knows what she’s doing, and we just need that little push. That’s what we’re hoping, that once we get these structures implemented, that she can handle the rest on her own.”

Calabaza says they want to also create job opportunities for Indigenous communities and expose young people to conservation work as a possible career path. This underpins their partnerships with both the Ancestral Lands Conservation Corps and the Santa Fe Indian School, which offers a field-based agriscience class that gives students hands-on exposure to chemistry, biology, botany and ethnobotany, horticulture, and ecology.

“Natural resources–related work is seeing a decline in young adults or students coming into this field, so we’re trying to build activities and real-world opportunities for young Native Americans to participate in,” Calabaza says. “We have a partnership with Santa Fe Indian School where we’re going to provide volunteer days for middle school and high school students to come out to do some basic project activities like tree planting. . . . [E]ven though they might not want to do natural resource–related work today, they’re still going to have to take on responsibility in the future as the next stewards of our landscape, and carry on that generational knowledge that we’ve learned or has been passed through time.”