Exploring Pecos National Historical Park in New Mexico: History, Culture and Reclaiming My Story (June 5, 2013)

We find it amusing that bad actors were planning our demise while I was running around feeling free af with my new service dog Onyx. Ain’t she regal and beautiful. Nothing they did or said takes away from our story and our experiences.

We went to New Mexico to support survivors, get meaningful work done, and experience a place rich in history and culture. While other people were apparently preoccupied with access, status, and controlling the narrative, my friend and I were busy living.

There is something almost surreal about looking back at photographs from New Mexico and realizing how much joy existed alongside danger I could not yet fully see. My friend and I had fun. And we supported survivors connected to the Justice Denied documentary, completed advocacy and media work, traveled through Albuquerque and Santa Fe, learned about the region, and made time to visit Pecos National Historical Park. We did not fly across the country to sit inside somebody else’s dysfunction. We came to contribute, explore, and make the trip count.

That is exactly what we did.

While others were discussing ways to undermine me and maneuver around my boundaries, we were out experiencing New Mexico. I did not understand the full meaning of everything happening around me at the time. Years later, as I rebuilt my memory and placed photographs, messages, dates, and public events back into order, the contrast became impossible to ignore: while they were focused on power, access, resentment, and retaliation, we were focused on purpose.

History of Pecos National Historical Park

Our first stop was at the Pecos National Historical Park visitor’s center and museum.

We Came to Work—and We Still Made Room for Joy

The documentary mattered to us because the survivors mattered. We believed stories of military sexual assault, retaliation, and institutional betrayal deserved to be heard. We gave our time and energy because we wanted the public to understand what service members had endured and why meaningful military justice reform was necessary.

But supporting a serious cause did not require us to surrender the entire trip to conflict, personalities, or misery. We got the work done, and then we traveled. We explored Albuquerque. We spent time in Santa Fe, including its historic churches and distinctive downtown. We paid attention to the landscape, architecture, faith, art, food, history, and culture. We took photographs. We laughed. We learned. We enjoyed being somewhere new.

We were not interested in participating in the Trauma Olympics. We did not care who could dominate a room with the most painful story, demand the most attention, or behave abusively while using survivor status as a shield. Trauma does not create a hierarchy of human worth. It does not excuse entitlement, manipulation, cruelty, or threats. And it certainly does not give anyone ownership of another survivor’s time, labor, boundaries, or voice.

We were interested in getting shit done—and then seeing New Mexico.

Artifacts in the Pecos National Historical Park Museum

I absolutely love everything historical and cultural. I enjoyed the opportunity to witness these ancient artifacts.

Pecos: A Place Where Centuries Meet

Pecos National Historical Park was a natural destination for two people who wanted to understand more than the surface of the place they were visiting. The park protects thousands of years of human history in the Upper Pecos Valley, a landscape shaped by movement, trade, faith, conflict, survival, and cultural change.

Glorieta Pass made the area a gateway between the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and the plains, drawing Indigenous communities, Spanish colonists, Santa Fe Trail travelers, armies, ranchers, railroad tourists, and later highway travelers through the same corridor. The National Park Service notes that Route 66 and Interstate 25 follow these much older pathways through the region.

Long before European arrival, the P’aékish—Pecos People—built a powerful community in the Pecos River Valley. Their descendants call the pueblo site P’aékilâ, meaning “place above the water.” Its location near the Pecos River, Glorieta Creek, and the mountain pass placed the community at a crossroads between the agricultural pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley and the hunting peoples of the plains.

By the 1400s, smaller settlements had come together at Pecos Pueblo. Its great stone buildings rose four or five stories, roughly two dozen kivas provided sacred space, and an open area supported trade. The Pecos People farmed corn, beans, and squash and became skilled traders and diplomats.

Goods and ideas traveled through the pueblo from distant regions, including pottery, textiles, turquoise, buffalo hides, flint, shells, and macaw feathers. This was not an isolated ruin in an empty landscape. It was a sophisticated center of commerce, culture, language, spirituality, and human connection.

Pecos National Historical Park, New Mexico

Exploring Downtown Santa Fe, New Mexico: Historic Plaza, Adobe Architecture, Art, Culture, Faith, and Southwestern Charm (June 5, 2013)

Beauty, Faith, and the Complicated Record of Colonization

The mission church ruins tell another, more complicated chapter. Francisco Vázquez de Coronado’s expedition reached the Pecos People in 1541. Permanent Spanish colonization followed later, bringing missionaries, demands for labor and tribute, religious repression, and deep disruption. A large mission church was constructed under Fray Andrés Juárez in the seventeenth century.

During the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, Pueblo communities united to drive the Spanish from New Mexico, and the Pecos mission was destroyed. A smaller church was later constructed on the earlier foundation by 1717; its adobe remains still stand at the site.

The place refuses a shallow reading. It is beautiful, but its beauty does not erase conquest. It is sacred, but its religious history includes coercion. It represents cultural exchange, but also resistance, loss, endurance, and survival. The remaining Pecos community left the pueblo in 1838 to join Towa-speaking relatives at Jemez Pueblo, where descendants of the Pecos People live today and continue to maintain their connection to this place.

That kind of history asks visitors to slow down. It asks us to look carefully, to respect the people whose lives gave the landscape meaning, and to resist turning complicated human experience into a simple story about heroes and villains. History is often found in the tension between what powerful people claimed they were doing and what vulnerable people actually experienced.

Santa Fe, New Mexico: A History Lesson Through Its Most Iconic Landmarks (June 4, 2013)

The Santa Fe Trail and the Civil War in the West

Pecos also preserves part of the story of the Santa Fe Trail, the nineteenth-century trade route connecting Missouri and New Mexico. Near the park, today’s Highway 63 follows close to the old route. An adobe trading post built by Martin Kozlowski in 1858 served as a stage stop. During the Civil War, it was used by Union forces as a headquarters and as a hospital for soldiers wounded in the Battle of Glorieta Pass.

The Battle of Glorieta Pass took place March 26–28, 1862, in rugged terrain more than 7,000 feet above sea level. Confederate forces hoped to push north from Texas, capture the federal supply center at Fort Union, reach Colorado’s goldfields, and eventually secure western ports.

Although Confederate troops held the battlefield after fierce fighting, Union forces destroyed their supply train. Without those supplies, the Confederate campaign collapsed, and the Union retained control of the Southwest. The National Park Service records approximately 375 casualties across the three days of fighting.

Even the park’s later history is layered. Forked Lightning Ranch began as an upscale dude ranch in the 1920s and later became the part-time home of actress Greer Garson and her husband, rancher and oilman E.E. “Buddy” Fogelson. Before development could transform the property into a resort community, conservation efforts helped preserve it as part of the national historical park.

Cathedral Basilica of St. Francis: History, Art and Architecture, Santa Fe, New Mexico (June 4, 2013)

Keeping It Classy While Others Chose Chaos

That was the world my friend and I chose to engage with: centuries of history, Pueblo ingenuity, sacred spaces, colonial conflict, the Santa Fe Trail, Civil War strategy, Southwestern architecture, and an extraordinary landscape. We were curious. We were productive. We were present.

Meanwhile, other people appeared to be building a very different kind of itinerary—one centered on grievance, control, access, and what I believe became an effort to discredit and replace me. But I will no longer pretend the pattern was harmless simply because the people involved wrapped themselves in the language of advocacy. The contrast says everything.

We did not spend our New Mexico trip obsessing over who had suffered more. We did not treat another person’s boundaries as an insult. We did not need to sabotage anyone to make our own work matter. We supported survivors, fulfilled our responsibilities, and went out into the world to learn something.

That is what keeping it classy looked like: doing the work, honoring the cause, refusing the manufactured drama, and continuing to live.

If people were planning my demise while we stood beneath New Mexico’s immense blue sky, they failed at the most important part. They did not erase the trip. They did not own the memories. They did not get to reduce New Mexico to the ugliness they brought into it.

My photographs show something else. They show a friend and me making our time count. They show Albuquerque, Santa Fe, and Pecos. They show curiosity instead of cruelty, movement instead of control, and life continuing beyond the reach of people who wanted to dominate the story.

While they were planning, we were living.

And now I am the one documenting what happened.

More Photos of Pecos National Historical Park

Loretto Chapel: The Mystery of Santa Fe’s Miraculous Staircase in New Mexico (June 4, 2013)

Jennifer and Lee

Our Love, Our Freedom, Our Story