Settling the disaster at Amity Pueblo also may take years, says Game and Fish Deputy Director Hovatter, the only state or federal official in this debacle who accepts culpability.
He says he wants to reach an agreement but is hamstrung because the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is the entity that legally must engage in "government-to-government consultation" with sovereign Indian nations.
Rubble and stone mark the site of Amity Pueblo, an ancient 60-room adobe community toppled by time.
Corn Mountain, a sacred mesa in Pueblo of Zuni
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Hovatter says it's the state's "intention to try to find a way to return the remains we found back to that location. That's the best we're going to be able to do. I have tried to look everybody in the eye and tell them that we apologize."
Zuni Governor Arlen Quetawki, in a September 25 letter, questioned the sincerity of apologies to his people. He told state and federal officials that anything less than gathering and replacing all human remains is "insulting to the Zuni people because it trivializes our expressed concerns about the desecration of our ancestors' graves and the Zuni people's relationship to the spiritual realm."
Hovatter says plucking only what bones were visible on the site's surface never was intended as a final solution — it was just an initial step.
"It had been agreed [during an August 13 meeting] that before going to that level of detail — sifting through dirt piles — there needed to be" a consultation between the feds and the tribes because there wasn't unanimity about whether sifting all the dirt needed to be done, he says.
For Quetawki, the tribe's position "on this issue is non-negotiable."
Hovatter responded on October 4, telling the governor that a plan for fetching the surface bones "reflects the decision" of all participants at the Eagar consultation meeting as "an initial, tangible action" toward remediation.
"The fact that the situation on the ground has not changed is not this department's fault," he says. "It's our fault that the situation exists in the first place. I've never stepped back from taking responsibility . . . but the Zuni changed their mind. There was no agreement in that room for what the Zuni expected to be done. Unless we get all the tribes and players on the same page, there is no way for us to proceed."
Why not just call the other tribes to see whether they concur with the Zuni?
"I can't be a substitute for the federal government," Hovatter says.
Zuni and Acoma tribal officials tell New Times that the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service refuses to understand the tribes' concerns. Which doesn't mean the federal agency has been silent on the issue. It has worked hard to shift blame — to insist that other agencies must bear the legal and financial costs of the desert desecration.
The fishing pond and the ancient Indian ruins were doomed from the beginning.
All the players involved knew that Amity Pueblo was about 100 feet from the angling spot that Arizona Game and Fish wanted to create. But knowing this did not trigger compliance with the National Historic Preservation Act.
Section 106 of the law requires federal officials to examine project sites for potential cultural and historic items and to consult with interested parties if it's suspected that treasures might be damaged. The feds are supposed to come up with a "what if" plan in case they run into something significant — graves, for example.
And it all should happen before any ground is broken.
It didn't.
Instead, the feds informally passed responsibility to the state Game and Fish Department, which in turn passed it to the Natural Resources Conservation Service, a branch of the U.S. Department of Agriculture that was lending its archaeologist to the project.
Two years ago, none of the government officials involved wrote agreements — as required by law — about who would be responsible for following through on the federal preservation law. Yet, today, they have written several exchanges about who is to blame.
Benjamin Tuggle, federal Fish and Wildlife regional director, admits only to a "procedural" error by his agency for passing the buck on federal preservation compliance. But, he wrote in an October 9 letter, the NRCS "bears some, if not all, legal and financial responsibility."
He criticized the archaeologist employed.
"The record indicates that the NRCS archaeologist had to have seen the damage caused, [but] the Arizona State Historic Preservation Office was not contacted, and [the] project was not halted when the first artifacts were found based on the advice given by NRCS," he wrote.
Tuggle also blamed the State Preservation Office for failing to research the area before it signed off on the project. If it had, he writes, it would have realized that "historic properties would be affected, and subsequent damages to the Amity Pueblo . . . would never had occurred."
State Historic Preservation deputy officer Ann Howard fired back with a letter on October 24: "It is not the responsibility of the SHPO to conduct background research, and we believe [Tuggle] inaccurately tries to cast blame on our office."
Howard noted that her office "did not approve any design plans for pond construction." She said the preservation office's representative, compliance specialist James Cogswell, told the federal archaeologist and state Game and Fish authorities that "pond construction [must be] monitored by a [qualified] archaeologist" and that both representatives agreed.
