Spring 2025

2025 / Vol. 130 / No. 1

This issue is teeming with animals and the more-than-human.

Tamara Enz’s article covers ancient life in New Mexico from the Precambrian Period 4.5 billion year ago to the Permian Period 252 million years ago. What is now New Mexico was once covered in jungles and warm shallow seas. All of this history is captured in the new Hall of Ancient Life at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History & Science.
An essay by Harrison Candelaria Fletcher invites us into his unusual, animal-filled childhood in Albuquerque’s North Valley, which included a very special connection to a screech owl.
A coauthored article by Rebecca Ward and Rebekha Crockett dives into the long, rich history between the Diné and Navajo-Churro sheep.
Marcus Chormicle’s photo essay captures the environmental and cultural complexities of how oryx came to live and thrive at White Sands.
Pam Houston’s essay about her deep connection to Santa Fe, including the refuge she sought there during the pandemic, invites us all to consider where and among whom we feel most at home.
In her profile of Santa Clara Pueblo artist Eliza Naranjo Morse, writer Mariko Thomas encourages us to see the world through Morse’s eyes and to consider what we can learn from the soil, ocotillo, and rabbits—among many other beings in the natural world.

A white antelope skull with long, dark, straight horns mounted on a plain white background. [gen-ai]

Ritual Killing: Oryx in New Mexico

As the desert transitions from deep blacks to dim greys and blues, we creep through the mountain pass. We leave the city lights behind us and roll into the dark nothingness. Our headlights rip through the morning and carry us onto base. _ Beginning in 1969, oryx were introduced to the Chihuahuan Desert. Frank C. Hibben, a foreigner to the desert himself, brought these aliens onto the land.

By Marcus Xavier Chormicle

Categories: Featured, New Mexican history, Southwestern history, Visual art

oil on canvas painting view of village at night from above with celestial abstractions in the sky

A Parallel Beauty

I was on a video call early in the pandemic with my friend Jamie Figuroa, when I articulated it for the first time. I had just finished reading her novel, Brother, Sister, Mother, Explorer, which is set in Santa Fe and captures so well the community’s beauty and power, as well as its dangerous magic and its shadowy underbelly. There are a group of older women who pedal along the edges of scenes on bicycles.

By Pam Houston

Categories: Essays and memoir

Our Place in the Family of Things

There’s a place I like to walk with my dog on the outskirts of Santa Fe. The trail offers views of the city and the pink and orange cotton candy clouds that often illuminate the sky at sunset. As I walk, I take in the soft hoots of owls as the sun slips behind the mountains and the echoes from coyotes throwing their voices between the hills.

By Emily Withnall

Categories: Editor's Letter

charcoal drawing of a wolf sleeping on its side

Snow Pillow

The winter earth summons all to reflect. As birds move south, and with them their chats and songs, the cycle of hibernation and rejuvenation commences. A deep reflection on what has happened and how everything culminated in this moment commences. Wolf returns to landscapes he has always known because the land directs his memory, and codes embedded in DNA dictate his path.

By Joanne Aartman

Categories: Framework

color photograph of western slope of the sandia mountains

Before the Famous Fossils: Ancient Life in the Paleozoic Era in New Mexico

Talking about ancient life and the Paleozoic Era (252 to 541 million years ago) in New Mexico elicits various unexpected responses. Oh, cool! The ancient Puebloans. Well, no. A little further back. Great! Dinosaurs. Charismatic megafauna get all the press, but no, earlier in geologic time. Occasionally, Oh. I tried that diet. No, again. Long before people living the Paleo diet, those who walked through White Sands at the end of the last ice age, and before New Mexico’s famous dinosaurs, the Bisti Beast and Coelophysis (74 and 208 million years ago, respectively), what we now call New Mexico was a dynamic landscape teeming with life.

By Dr. Spencer G. Lucas, Paul Sealey, Tamara Enz, and Tira Howard

Categories: Featured

color photograph, portrait of an owl face

The Beautiful City of Tirzah

Animals come after my father dies. Dogs. Cats. Ducks. Geese. A goat. A peacock. They wander to our North Valley home several years into his absence—appearing on our doorstep or catching our eye from feed store cages. Always, we take them in. We line our laundry room floor with old bath towels, fill cereal bowls with tap water, then flick off the ceiling light to watch them sleep.

By Blair Clark and Harrison Candelaria Fletcher

Categories: Essays and memoir

Two groups of sheep in a barn separated by a metal divider

A Brief History of Navajo-Churro Sheep

After shearing a Navajo-Churro sheep, the raw wool is still warm when it is handed off for processing. The fleece is first skirted—a process in which burrs, animal waste, second cuts, and ratty wool is removed prior to washing. The lanolin, which provides the sheep with natural waterproofing, gives the fleece a slightly sticky texture. The fleece from each sheep is bagged separately because many fiber artists prefer to know that the wool they are using comes from only one sheep.

By Rebecca Ward, Rebekha Crockett, and Tira Howard

Categories: Featured