{"id":113315,"date":"2015-04-09T17:58:44","date_gmt":"2015-04-09T23:58:44","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/preserving-the-past\/"},"modified":"2015-04-09T17:58:44","modified_gmt":"2015-04-09T23:58:44","slug":"preserving-the-past","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/preserving-the-past\/","title":{"rendered":"Preserving the past"},"content":{"rendered":"\n<p><!-- gallery:368ff39d-6225-4aba-bf83-c43f99708133 --><\/p>\n<figure class=\"wp-block-embed is-type-video wp-block-embed-youtube naviga-video-embed\">\n<div class=\"wp-block-embed__wrapper\"><iframe loading=\"lazy\" width=\"560\" height=\"315\" src=\"https:\/\/www.youtube.com\/embed\/Rn9bIgBAgUo\" frameborder=\"0\" allow=\"accelerometer; autoplay; clipboard-write; encrypted-media; gyroscope; picture-in-picture\" allowfullscreen><\/iframe><\/div>\n<\/figure>\n<p>Above the banks of Lake Nighthorse, Hunter Frost, a sophomore at Ignacio High School, came upon a plaque noting the Ute Trail \u2013 a traditional route between Ignacio and Towaoc \u2013 now lies under the reservoir.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cDid you know that? The Ute Trail is under water now,\u201d he told a classmate.<\/p>\n<p>Frost thought about it for a moment.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cCool,\u201d he said. \u201cWe\u2019re fishes.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>Four students from Ignacio High School, along with teacher Lynda Grove D\u2019Wolf, toured Lake Nighthorse and the Animas-La Plata water project on Monday with an eye to the future and an appreciation for the past.<\/p>\n<p>Lake Nighthorse, southwest of Durango, holds 123,000 acre-feet of water, which is about 40 billion gallons.<\/p>\n<p>D\u2019Wolf\u2019s class studies the Ute language, the first class at IHS to do so. Monday\u2019s visit to Lake Nighthorse \u2013 a first for the students \u2013 was a field trip for the group.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cWe wanted to come to the dam to show them what it was and how it came to be,\u201d D\u2019Wolf said.<\/p>\n<p>The class drove to the top of the dam, walked along an underground pipeline that extends into the reservoir and toured areas where the dam takes water in and \u2013 someday \u2013 will release it to tribes and other water users with a stake in the A-LP.<\/p>\n<p>The Southern Ute Indian Tribe has about 1,600 members, and few grow up hearing the language at home. Only a few dozen people speak the language fluently. D\u2019Wolf\u2019s class, which began in the fall, is part of her effort to preserve the language. She also helped create a Ute language application, and she is the author of a self-published book, The life and times of a Ute woman: Where did it all go?<\/p>\n<p>When it was time to go to the next site, D\u2019Wolf spoke Ute when she told the students to move along.<\/p>\n<p>On Monday, her daughter, Lalena Weasel, accompanied the class. Weasel is a materials engineer for the U.S. Bureau of Reclamation and has worked on the A-LP since 2003.<\/p>\n<p>One day while driving around with a co-worker, Weasel saw a bald eagle pluck a fingerling from the lake and soar off, then she saw a red wolf with nine pups. After that, she came upon a mountain lion dragging a doe across a road. All in the same night.<\/p>\n<p>Weasel has strong opinions on the battle for water stemming from the A-LP. Her father, Terry Knight, was a tribal chairman in the 1980s who advocated for the project.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt\u2019s a reality that\u2019s finally honored,\u201d she said. \u201cIt is a Ute water treaty. It\u2019s not \u2018Everybody jump in and get what you want out of it.\u2019 Most people, they\u2019re greedy, and it\u2019s not right.\u201d<\/p>\n<p>No water has been released to the tribes and water districts that will benefit. That\u2019s about five years away, said John McKay, a plant mechanic who accompanied the class. Although the reservoir is full, the users still need to build substantial infrastructure to put the water to use.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cThis is an enormous, wide-scale project, and this is the first step,\u201d he said.<\/p>\n<p>The Southern Ute and Ute Mountain Ute tribes will be the primary beneficiaries, followed by the San Juan Water Commission, the state of Colorado, the Navajo Nation and the Animas-La Plata Water Conservancy District.<\/p>\n<p>The students said they never had seen anything like this dam. They walked 750 feet back into a tunnel that houses the outgoing pipeline, climbing a tall ladder into a small room known as the guard gate chamber. McKay explained they were directly underneath the earthen dam. The pipeline extends another 750 feet into the lake itself.<\/p>\n<p>Frost took the opportunity to sing a deep note in the domed room, letting the sound reverberate around his classmates.<\/p>\n<p>Sophomore Alana Watt emerged from the tunnel impressed.<\/p>\n<p>\u201cIt was the coolest thing I\u2019ve ever been in,\u201d she said.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Nighthorse, Ignacio students reflect on their Ute heritage and a desire to keep it alive<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":113316,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_acf_changed":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[5794,5735],"tags":[316],"naviga_topic":[],"class_list":["post-113315","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-education","category-news","tag-video"],"acf":[],"author_name":"dh_admin","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113315","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=113315"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/113315\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/113316"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=113315"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=113315"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=113315"},{"taxonomy":"naviga_topic","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/dh.durangoherald.com\/tj\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/naviga_topic?post=113315"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}