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Magazine Articles
By Betram Gabriel
November 26, 1979
Sports Illustrated
When Andy Martinez came down from Sky City after the four-day summer rain ceremonies, he was lucky to have a weekend off to catch his breath. The ceremonies had been held at ancient Acoma Pueblo, called Sky City first by tourists and now by the Acoma Indians, too, because of its location atop a sheer rock molar that juts 357 feet above the desert floor in north central New Mexico. It was mid-July and the rains had not yet come. Dressed in jeans and old red T shirt, Martinez lay about his parents house. In one sense he was getting acclimatized, for on Monday his descent would continue even further, when he returned to work 9900 feet below ground in the uranium mines. But in another sense Martinez had already hit bottom. Once among the most promising young long-distance runners in the United States, he had not entered a race since his graduation in 1977 from Grants (N. Mex.) High School. When he first burst onto the running scene it was almost unbelievable how good he was; he broke the state two-mile record and ran a 4:17.9 mile while still a high school freshman. As a junior he was a national AAU age-group cross-country champion. With the right college coaching, he might have become one of the Americans top distance men. But instead of going to college, Martinez went to work in one of the local mines that employ most of his people.
Figure 1: Indian youngsters growing up in the shadows of ancient pueblos like New Mexicos Sky City reflect age-old traditions by exhibiting a precocious talent for distance running. But after racing brilliantly in high school, they almost invariably drop the sport, descending figuratively and literally, to the depths of the uranium mines.
Former highs school hotshots who never made the big time are legion, and the botched running career of Andy Martinez would arouse little more than passing interest but for a remarkable fact: running is a gift he inherited from his Pueblo ancestors and one he shared with a whole wave of Pueblo Indians his age. It would be hard to find any region in the U.S. that spawns more natural-born long-distance runners than the Pueblo reservation of the Southwest.
There has not been a running boom among the Pueblos. There never had to be. The Indians have always run. One of the few outsiders who understand this is Jerry Tuckwin, the running coach at Haskell Junior College, the all-Indian institution in Lawrence, Kansas. Tuckwin, a Potawatomi Indian (as was Jim Thorpe) swings through the pueblos each spring to scout talent, and each spring he see what hes looking for. Its amazing, he says. I find 14- and 15- year old kids who could be on practically any college team in the country. Theyre so tuned in to running that they arent even aware of how good they are.
One man who is aware is Emmett Hunt, a native of Laguna Pueblo and now the cross-country and track coach at Laguna-Acoma High School in New Mexico, which draws its students from the Laguna and Acoma tribes. Hunt claims the competitive appetite of his runners is piqued in direct proportion to the increasing length of a race. In Albuquerque schools they get 10 kids out for the 100 and 220 and here everyone wants to be a miler, everyone wants to be a two-miler. Theres not a kid in his school who cant do the distance. Even the heaviest, chunkiest one can do three miles without hesitation.
Figure 2: Meldon Sanchez, a three-time New Mexico state champion, left college after only one semester.
Hunt has the record to prove it. Since 1969 his Hawks have won 11 consecutive state cross-country titles, more than any other U.S. high school. And the talent isnt just at Laguna-Acoma; it is spread like stardust all over the Pueblo Indian world, which today includes the 19 discrete pueblos of northern New Mexico, from Taos in the east to Zuni in the west, as well as the Hopi reservation in Arizona. With both Hopi and Navajo runners, Tuba City (Ariz.) High has won nine state cross-country championships in the last 11 years. Just since 1975, Martinez, Gary Louis and Meldon Sanchez from Acoma Pueblo, James Waquie from Jemez Pueblo and Herman Sahneyah from Tuba City have been high school All-Americas. Another Indian, Kenny Bobelu, now a senior at Zuni High, ran a 4:12 mile shortly after finishing his sophomore year.
And then there is Al Waquie, a two-time All-America at Haskell before he returned home to Jemez to work as a forest-fire fighter. Waquie (no direct relation to James) is something of a legend in the Southwest because he still trains fanatically, yet shows little gusto for a race that doesnt feature a mountain in it. He is thus in the tradition of another Jemez hill climber, Steve Gachupin, who won the 28-mile Pikes Peak road race six times in the 1960s. Waquie has had three back-to-back wins in Albuquerques La Luz Trail Run, a punishing race that grinds nine miles up a 12% grade to the 10,600-foot summit of Sandia Crest.
Al Waquie is an exception among Pueblo runners because he completed two years of college track a formidable accomplishment compared to the dashed careers of most Indian runners. Of the five high school All-Americas mentioned above, three dropped out of college during their first year, while one, Martinez, never went at all. (Only Sahneyah, now a sophomore at Illinois State, has stayed in school.) Other promising runners who received less notice in high school share the same fate after graduation. That so many have forfeited their futures is a tragedy, says Tuckwin. Theres no other word for it. Not all have stopped as abruptly as Martinez, but each in his own way has made a similar descent from Sky City into the mines.
Figure 3: These kids arent like other kids, says Coach Emmett Hunt. Off the reservation, theyre lost.
The Pueblo Indians are heirs to the oldest settled civilization in North America, unwarlike and agricultural by tradition, the cradle of dauntingly complex religion that often involved long-distance running. In the world around race, nearly naked Taos braves used to run 15 or 20 miles through the snowy Sangre de Cristo Mountains shortly after the winter solstice. In modern times that ritual has been supplanted by semiannual relay races, which are also held at the Picuris and Isleta Pueblos. Like the suns path, relay tracks run east - west through the pueblo plaza. Young men wear tufts of eagle down to lighten their steps, but it is not uncommon to see an Indian in his 70s outrace his grandson.
Among many Pueblo traditions that have given way before the onslaught of the 20th century are the hellish long-distance kicking races once held at all western pueblos and Hopi towns. Long ago, barefoot runners used their toes to flick a short stick, a rock or a clay ball dozens of yards ahead of them as they raced across the desert. In the late 19th century the first white anthropologists saw kick-stick and kick-ball races as long as 40 miles. By the 1930s the distances had decreased to eight or 10 miles, and today only vestiges of the rites remain.
The 16-day Hopi Snake-Antelope ceremony still includes two dawn races of about five miles each. Once even Hopi women ran in the Flute Ceremony. And the Zuni had a six--month racing calendar, for which men were in constant training. The season was inaugurated just before spring planting with a scared kick-stick race of 20 to 30 miles. Later in the summer, less formal races were held between clans, against Navajos, and even against U.S. Soldiers from Fort Wingate. With huge piles of food, clothing and jewelry wagered on these events, the anxious betters, 200 to 300 strong, would follow their teams around the course on horseback. The ethnologist F.H. Cushing, who watched a kick-stick race in the 1880s, reported that all 12 runners completed the 25-mile course in less than 2 hours.
All this was and is mimetic magic, the setting of human examples for nature to imitate. Kicking a stick or ball across arid land would induce rain to fill the dry arroyos. Races held between the winter and summer solstices would control the course of the sun, ensuring its return. In a religious context, the object was not to win but to push your body to exhaustion; only then would lifes vitality be lent to the recalcitrant forces of nature.
Next year marks the tricentennial of an epic Pueblo run that, in a more perfect world, would have had its place in the history books beside the famous jaunt from Marathon to Athens. In the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 sometimes called the first American revolution the temporarily united Pueblos rose up and drove all Spanish colonists out of New Mexico for 12 years. The initial coordinated Indian attack, which had been secretly planned for Aug. 11, 1680, had to be advanced suddenly when the Spanish governor in Santa Fe learned of the plot on Aug. 9. So the uprising began the morning of the 10th, after Indian runners fanning out from Tesuque Pueblo and carried the message in a single day as far north as Taos and as far west as Acoma distances many times greater than 26 miles, 385 yards.
Even though most of the age-old races have been discontinued, other rites that remain a vital part of Pueblo life put an equal premium on forcing the limits of human endurance. At a conservative pueblo like Acoma, initiation into a battery of esoteric societies requires all boys and girls to undergo a long and secret ordeal at about the age of puberty.
Just about every Indian custom stresses stamina, says Coach Hunt. In everything we do we talk about enduring pain, no matter what. The summer rain ceremony held at Sky City last July offer a fair example of this, although it was confined to the 20-acre mesa top and closed to all but male Acomas. Martinez, who took part, says, The men and boys run back and forth from house to house, up the ladders of the kivas, down the ladders, all day and almost all night. Its sort of like helping out. Youre helping the corn to grow faster and to make it rain. Its worse than running a marathon.
Figure 4: Andy Martinez, who ran a sensational 4:17 mile as a high school freshman, quit later to work in the mines.
Despite such traditions, when Martinez first began competing he was recognized as something of a prodigy. His two older brothers, Vernon and Galen, preceded him at Grants High, where each took a turn pacing the cross-country team. Once during the hunting season, Galen had tagged a deer by running it into the ground, and for years after, it was a joke at Grants High that anyone who couldnt catch a deer had no business on the cross-country team. But in 1972, while still an eight-grader, Andy nearly ran Vernon into the ground at the state cross-country finals, where he finished a close second to his older brother. When he was in high school, Andy swept four state cross-country titles in a row, a feat performed only once before by a U.S. teen-ager.
Because of the religious status give endurance, many Pueblo runners in their early teens are years ahead of non-Indian kids. The measure of Martinezs potential was once taken by the late Steve Prefontaine, who saw Andy run at an Albuquerque track meet and pronounced him further along as a high school sophomore than he himself had been. Prefontaine, who had blossomed in the best middle-distance prospect in the world by the time he entered the University of Oregon in 1969, had turned in a 4:32 mile and a 9:42.5 two-mile as a 10th-grader. By comparison, Martinez ran his precocious 4:17.9 mile and his New Mexico two-mile record of 9:29.1 during his freshman year. College recruiters, assuming, not surprisingly, that he was a senior, flooded his mailbox with letters of introduction. There was no guarantee, of course that Martinez would develop into Americas next track sensation, but Jerry Tuckwin made some excited calculations at the time and his projections indicated that Andy would be capable of a four-minute mile his first year in college, and in three more years would be world-class at 5,000 m.
Only two runners challenged Andys supremacy in high school: Gary Louis and Meldon Sanchez, both Acomas and both a year behind him. Louis, who also ran for Grants High, finished a maddening second in cross-country meets all over New Mexico, although it was a different story on a flat track, where he held the state two-mile title as a sophomore, junior and senior. Sanchez, who attended Laguna-Acoma High, became a three-year state Class AA champion in cross-country, mile and two-mile.
True, the best times of the three Acomas are only mediocre compared to what the swiftest high school runners in other states have done. Sanchez best mile was 4:23, his best two-mile 9:35. Louis, who broke Martinezs state two-mile record with a 9:29 in 1977, would have been outclassed by Prefontaine in 1969, when Steve set his still-unbroken national high school two-mile record of 8:41.5. What has to be understood is that all three Acomas so far outclassed their in-state competition that they never had to work for their laurels. Even more telling, Sanchez and Martinez produced their best times as ninth-graders, while Louis, a high school All-America in his sophomore and junior years, had only a middling senior season. The colossal loss of ambition that would lead all three to turn down opportunities to run in college had begun eve in the flush of their earliest successes.
Nonetheless, on a few occasions they were capable of electrifying efforts. In one race, when Andy was a junior and Gary a sophomore, the two were the youngest entrants in a field of college runners. Pressed by the older competition Martinez won and Louis was second, both finishing the three-mile cross-country race in under 14 minutes. So impressive were the times that the coach who laid out the course had to swear up and down that the distance was correct.
Later that same year, in November 1975, the three Acomas were part of an all-star Indian team that entered the AAU cross-country nationals for boys 16 to 17 at Annapolis, Md., a rare chance to compare their skills with those of high school runners from across the country. Running with red war paint streaked on their cheeks, Martinez finished first, Louis second, Sanchez eighth and James Waquie ninth. The team finished first. A year later, when Martinez was too old to enter and Sanchez was hobbled by shin splints, Louis carried the Acoma banner alone in to the AAU nations in Raleigh, N.C. That time he surprised no one by leading the parade at the finish line.
Figure 5: Al Waquie is exceptional in that he had two years of college before returning home to work.
Yet something went seriously awry when it came time for the youngsters to take the next logical step. In a sport whose stars dont peak until their 20s, four years of college running are all but a necessity. But Martinez never applied to college, Sanchez dropped out after a single semester at Eastern New Mexico State, and Louis last barely a month a Haskell. The state of New Mexicos most recent analysis of Pueblo Indians pursuing higher education is depressing: only 2% of all high school graduates matriculate at college and only 3% of those go on to earn degrees. That works out to one college diploma for every1,666 Pueblo students completing high school. Because tribal funds and government grants are readily available to Indian students, lack of money does not explain the dismal figures. Nor, in the case of talented runners, have colleges been tight with scholarship offers.
The resistance to college is cultural, and the most often cited cultural barrier is the inviolability of the Pueblo family, which can make it impossible for even grown men and women to leave the reservation. The traditional Indian family just doesnt stress the importance of education, says Hunt. Kids today still feel obligated to help out their families. In the family if someone is sick, everybody is there. If you have to get off work, you get off work. If you lose your job, you lose it, but youre there. All the people I grew up with are still in Laguna.
Figure 6: Laboring in the uranium mines has become a Pueblo tradition.
There is a certain unsentimental logic to Louis claim that he left Haskell in order to help care for the maiden aunt who raised him from the age of 13, after his father, a deputy county sheriff, died in an accidental shooting. I owed my aunt a lot for taking care of me, he says. Almost all Indians feel that way; half the money we make when were out of school goes to our mothers.
Also, over the years, a self-enforced isolation from the non-Indian world has calcified into a Pueblo reflex. Sky City has not occupied the same mesa top for eight centuries by accommodating the mightier waves of Apache, Navajo, Spanish, Mexican and Anglo-American invaders. Acomas, who grew up with English as a second language, still face a profound culture shock away from home. For this reason, when Hunt guided Meldon Sanchez into college in 1978, he favored Eastern New Mexico State because it was blessed with a sympathetic coach. Meldon had an offer from Villanova, but if he had gone there, he would have been back in a week, Hunt says. I told the Eastern New Mexico coach that these kids arent like other kids. You take them off the reservation and theyre lost. Suddenly they have to do everything for themselves, instead of relying on their family and tribe. A lot of times people have to do things for them that would be common knowledge for an Anglo of black. An Indian who needs a pair of pants will go into a store and wont know how to explain to the salesperson exactly what he wants. Hed rather buy something and be dissatisified with it later than ask for help. Its the same way with education. If he were flunking out, he wouldnt ask for help, simply because hed be afraid or ashamed.
At Eastern New Mexico, Sanchez was the top man on the cross-country team for a few months and then he came home, undone by everything Hunt had feared: the strangeness of an unknown world, the rival attraction of a $9-an-hour job in a Grants uranium mill, the responsibility of caring for a steady girlfriend and a son born when he was 16. Sanchez didnt give up running. The trails he blazed long ago up Flower Mountain, behind his mothers home in the reservation town of Acomita, are being worn deeper every day. He thinks a lot of the 1984 Olympics 10,000 meters, but he also thinks about the payments on his 1979 LTD. He has no coach, no training plan and only the dimmest insight into what it takes to be a world-class runner.
As for Andy Martinez, around Acoma there is a popular story to explain why he quit running even before he finished high school. He had been undefeated until the spring of his junior year, when Louis, one year younger, blew by him in the stretch of a two-mile. Right there, to me, is where Andy went down, says Louis. He couldnt take the pressure of me beating him. The story cuts close to the bone. Martinez barely made it through his senor year, winning a fourth cross-country title almost by habit and then hanging up his track shoes midway through track season.
But the story also seems too pat. Some thing else was hammering away at Martinez ambition, for which this one defeat was merely the coup de grace. After all, it had been two years earlier that he ran his best times. The problem with all Indian runners, says Louis, is that they hang around with the wrong kind of people. They want to be with their peers and its hard to say no to the kind of things that take away your interest in running. The peer pressure not to succeed is the most debilitating of all the conflicting allegiances that inhibit the Pueblo runner who would make a name for himself. Andy got holding hands with the wrong kind of people his last year here, says Grants High Track and Cross-country Coach Jodie Wallace.
Gary Louis is most convincing on this score, because he has been through the mill himself. Recently he joined the Marines to escape a six-month tailspin he went into after dropping out of Haskell: a time of working in the mines, sporadic training, too much alcohol and more than one night in jail. His story reads like a testimonial to the power of the Marine Corps to save souls. Self-questioning and self-assured, Louis now says, Some of our own people get kind of jealous of anybody whos really achieving something. They cut you down a lot. I dont blame them for the trouble I had; I blame nobody but myself. But everywhere I used to go people knew me and Andy and they told me I was going to end up just like him. These were my own people and they made fun of Andy because he ended up in the mines.
Louis turning point came at an all-Indian training camp in Colorado, where he heard a lecture by Billy Mills, the South Dakota Sioux who won Americas first gold medal ever at 10,000 meters in the 1964 Tokyo Games. Mills spoke about the setbacks he too had had as a young Indian runner. Mills told how friends taunted him, arguing, If you dont drink, then youre not an Indian.
What he said made me think twice, says Louis. I started looking at myself, and I said, This job in the mines cant be for me. I knew that pretty soon people would be asking, Hows Gary Louis? and the answer would be, Gary who?
Figure 7: Gary Louis is an exception. He joined the marines and still runs.
Louis was aware that Mills had been a Marine lieutenant when he rain in the Olympics. So last May, Gary presented himself front and center at the Albuquerque enlistment center. He says he responded well to the discipline and found he hadnt lost his speed either. During the last week of recruit training at Camp Pendleton, he set a camp record for the running three miles in the combat boots.
Ive thought a lot about why Indian athletes dont go on, he says. Theres Jim Thorpe and Billy Mills, period. Indians make a name for themselves in high school and the next thing you know theyre pumping gas. I joined the Marines to start all over again. Right now Im hoping and praying to stay serious about running and shoot for the 1984 Olympics
And indeed, Louis may have the most auspicious prospects among a group of runners whose futures dont always include even hopes and prayers. I know I never worked very hard in high school, he says, and I still came out the top contender. But I dont like to get my hopes up too high. In a race, some people always seem to know Im going to win. Im the one who doubts that.
Cited Reference: Gabriel, B. 1979 Running to Nowhere, Sports Illustrated 51(22), 46-60.
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