Funding for Colores was provided in part by: New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KMNE-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation, McCune Charitable Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers Like You Drawing on Ribbons of Grain The Rio Grande and the Making of Modern Albuquerque, coauthored with Robert Barrons John Fleck explores 21st century Albuquerque's relationship with the Rio Grande.

>> Fleck: There was a substantial amount of irrigation water still flowing onto Pueblo land.

Because of this bargain that the Pueblos and the non-Indians agreed to a century ago.

It's still holding and it still plays -- Honored with a 2025 New Mexico Governor's Award for Excellence in the Arts.

Sculptor Kevin Box explores how a blank page can reveal a soul and inspire creative possibilities.

It's all ahead on Colores Fleck: We're dug in the 1950s by the Bureau of Reclamations -- RIBBONS OF GREEN Faith: So, you've said that solving water problems is part of how people become a community.

So how does Albuquerque's relationship with the Rio Grande tell that story?

>> Fleck: So when Albuquerque made it█s transition from a series of separate villages and pueblos scattered up and down the valley to the big metropolitan area that we know today, it happened over a long period of time.

And it required people who wanted to become a city, who had a vision of becoming a metropolitan area, to solve the problem of flood control and drainage.

It was kind of a swampy valley, and the river kept flooding.

And to do that, people had to come together and act collectively at scale to put up levees and to dig ditches, to drain the swamps.

And doing that became a community.

In doing that, they became a community.

They came together to solve these problems.

And in so doing that became what we think of as modern Albuquerque.

>> Faith: Yeah, and I found it interesting, too at the beginning of the book is three major characters coming together to solve this problem of flooding and drainage.

Can you talk a little bit about that?

>> Fleck: One of them is a guy named Pablo Abeita, who was a leader in Isleta Pueblo.

Pueblo communities were confronted by this wave of modernity, sweeping over them and struggling to maintain their sovereignty over their land and water.

And the second one is this guy named Max Gutierrez who is absolutely my favorite character in the book.

Max came from Hispanic sheep -- and ranch family of stockmen and farmers who were civic activists, community leaders, politically active, and all the important political movements of the day.

Trying to help his community negotiate this transition from village life and small scale sheep herding, or even large scale sheep herding to an urban metropolis.

And then the third character is Aldo Leopold, the famous 20th Century environmental thinker and writer and philosopher, but began his career as a Forest Service guy in Albuquerque, and then became the -- first director of the Albuquerque Chamber of Commerce who helped lead the crusade for flood control and drainage.

And they all came together.

And there's this particular meeting in 1919 was a big community drainage congress, where they all came together and the community said, “we need to act collectively to solve the problem of the menace.” Because the river was a menace.

>> Faith: If we could stand beside the river before modern flood control and drainage, what would the valley look like and what challenges would people living there face?

So one of the interesting things, if you look at the historical development pattern in the valley, is if you look at where the Pueblo communities today sit, and these are communities that have been in place roughly where they are for, we like to say, time immemorial for many, many centuries, long before colonizers came.

The Pueblo communities tended to build on high ground right next to the river, but on an elevated platform, plain, above the floor of the river, so that you could live safely above the floodplain and then engage in agricultural practices down in the floodplain and in surrounding areas.

The places where we live now, where Second Street and Fourth Street, the big urban corridors, those were floodplains, in high flow years, the river didn't have a single channel that it lived in.

It lived all the way across the flat bottom of the valley floor as it rose out of -- as its banks, in snowmelt.

And so people would live in these high spots, they would try to farm, they would get flooded out sometimes in the high spots, because the Pueblo people had the best high spots, they would get flooded out.

And then when the railroad arrived, Albuquerque -- for whatever reason, its a long story involving real estate, located what we now think of as downtown in one of the low spots because the land was cheap.

So you now had this attempt at a growing urban conglomeration in the absolute worst place they could have put it.

>> Faith: I want to go a little bit farther into Max Gutierrez, because that is your favorite character.

Why did he go from supporting the water district to fighting against it?

>> Fleck: So, Max is a super interesting guy.

It was a time of dramatic change.

Max saw the change coming and wanted, on behalf of the community that he represented the old Hispanic Farming village community to help those people navigate this change.

And he felt like in order to do that, helping this community become a city was the goal.

Max was therefore a strong advocate of flood control and drainage -- of building this big system and the pursuit of federal tax dollars to do it.

Max was one of the leaders of the attempt to get federal money to pay for it.

This is classic Western water project development.

Other people's money greases the skids for this stuff over and over again.

When the federal taxes -- the federal, excuse me -- when the federal money to pay for this evaporated in the 1920s, Max realized that the alternative, which was to tax the small farmers on the valley floor to pay for it all, wouldn█t work, and would essentially force them to be dispossessed of their land an lose their land.

So Max went from an ardent supporter because he believed in city building to an opponent, not because he didn't believe in city building.

He didn't believe the way they were going about it was in the best interests of the community -- that he represented.

And so he ended up leading a long legal and political struggle against the very systems that he had originally been an advocate to help build, lost his litigation, lost the political fight -- ended up being vindicated.

He was right.

The financial structure kept collapsing and kept collapsing until we finally got federal money.

We finally got the other people's money, which we still depend on today to manage the river.

But in the process, Max kind of disappeared and wandered away from the scene.

>> Faith: Wow.

Why is it that -- the -- I guess, people he was trying to protect, the people that were going to be dispossessed by the taxation, why were they the ones that were being taxed?

>> Fleck: So, the idea behind the financial structure, the conservancy district, once we didn't get federal money for it, was to pay for it with local taxes.

And the business model developed by the engineers who designed it, who were not very good economists, was that all these small farmers on the valley floor would see great improvements in the value of their land.

They would become successful commercial farmers.

They would be able to generate the tax revenue to pay for the work that was being done.

>> Faith: Oh.

>> Fleck That was the racket.

Max, and the other people actually farmed on the valley floor, knew that that was an unrealistic proposition.

The entire structure was unrealistic and were absolutely proven right.

These people couldn't pay the taxes.

They suffered the threat of losing their land, although they -- we kept doing things to prevent them from actually losing their land, federal bailouts, protecting them from foreclosure over time, and eventually federal bailouts that largely prevented the actual dispossession of land.

But these people lived with a sort of Damocles over their head, the risk of losing their land for decades as a result.

But it was just this mistaken notion that commercial agriculture was going to be the savior of the valley and provide the revenue to pay for all the flood control and drainage work that was needed.

So this is a really expensive stuff.

>> Faith: Yeah, that's like, not really realistic.

>> Fleck: Not really realistic.

>> Faith: So, how did Pueblo communities assert their sovereignty and shape the agreements that still influence how the river's water is shared today?

>> Fleck: So, this is a really important piece of the story.

And I think this is something that that Bob Barons, my coauthor, and I feel really strongly is an important contribution to this of the book that helped the community understand the history of the Pueblo's role in the making of Albuquerque through the management of flood control and drainage.

This was at a time period when the 1920s, when the -- sort of political engineers were designing this system, when the sovereignty of Native American communities was under threat, the loss of land, the disposition of water, the lost of sort of cultural sovereignty, the the ability to govern and be a community in and of themselves, separate from the colonizers.

The folks in Albuquerque realized that because of the physical nature of the river, you needed an integrated, flood control and drainage and irrigation system that crossed both Pueblo land and non Pueblo land.

You can't just build levees in parts of a river.

You have to do the whole thing.

You can't just build drainage in part of it.

You have to do the whole thing.

This required the cooperation of the Pueblos.

The Pueblos were involved in some really -- difficult, bitter, legal and political structures at the same time, to preserve their land base and their water rights and their cultural sovereignty.

And what emerged in the 1920s was this really interesting sort of grand bargain, a quid pro quo.

The Pueblo people said, “we will support your desire for this integrated flood control and drainage system in return for -- your support, the colonizing community█s support of preservation of their sovereignty.

And it played out in a couple of really important national political battles over federal legislation that the Pueblo people felt threatened their sovereignty over their land, in their cultures, and in the agreement, the non-native communities supported the Pueblos in killing a couple of critical pieces of federal legislation that threatened their sovereignty in return for the Pueblo's help in building this flood control and drainage system.

It was a flat out bargain, and I think that's one of the undertow stories, or maybe untold stories that that our book tries to bring to light, because it matters today, right?

So we have today -- a system that has preserved in many ways, and I don█t want to make it seem like preservation of sovereignty was easy or is over, right.

The Pueblo still struggle to maintain sovereignty over their cultural and political, and in their land, in their water.

But this important bargain that was struck a century ago, lingers today, so that as we manage water in the middle of Ali, we continue today to recognize the Pueblo's sovereign senior rights to water in times of scarcities.

And so in a year like 2026, when the Rio Grande was going dry, and non-Indian irrigators were cut off for large portions of the year, there was a substantial amount of irrigation water still flowing onto Pueblo land.

Because of this bargain that the Pueblos and the non-Indians agreed to a century ago, it's still holding, and it still plays an important role in how we manage water today in the Valley.

And I think this is a really important piece of understanding the story.

And when we talk about Albuquerque.

We sometimes talk about only the non-Indian part of the community, the metro area between the Pueblos in the North and in the South.

But if we look at this broader structure of community, it is a community that includes Pueblos, and we are all integrated.

>> Faith: How did efforts to control flooding, and draining the valley help create the Ribbons of Green we cherish today?

>> Fleck: So, I live up in the Heights.

but I█m down by the river all the time.

I'm a bike rider and I can ride my bike down to the river in 20 minutes.

And I love the Bosque.

It is a community treasure.

It also is largely an artificial creation of the project of flood control and drainage.

And that's not to say that there wasn't a rich and diverse ecosystem across the valley floor in the time before we had levees and drains, but the -- the gallery forest, the Cottonwood forest, this 150 mile-long strip of cottonwood forest is something that emerged after we placed the levees and began to control flooding, to create the perfect habitat for happy little baby Cottonwood seedlings to grow.

And so this amazing forest that we have is, in part, a product of the flood control and drainage system that we built.

Before, it would have been patches of Cottonwoods, and it would have been salt grass meadows spread across the valley floor.

So it was a beautiful ecosystem, but a very different kind of an ecosystem than the one we value today.

The other thing is that with the irrigation system persisting with all the diversion dams, that the MRGCD, the Middle Rio Grande Conservancy District manages and diverts water out across the valley floor.

We artificially spread green in a very managed and controlled way in the area that was the old floodplain.

And so it's green.

And if you go out on a hot -- summer afternoon, which I did a lot this summer because it was hot and you walk up and down or ride your bike up and down the ditch banks, we have these sort of little artificial tributaries, these artificial rivers, many of which are actually older than the main channel sections of the main channel, were dug in the 1950s by the Bureau of Reclamation.

So you have older streams, human dug, that are older than the the main river channel, and they're lined with trees and they're this beautiful, rich, complex, human-coupled natural system that is a ribbon of green.

And if you look at satellite images, and I love the the way satellite data can help us visualize things.

And you look at where the green spaces are in the valley and there's this long narrow strip.

>> Faith: What can this history teach us about coming together for the futures or for the river's future as water becomes scarcer?

>> Fleck: So, one of the things that we talk about, Bob, Bob Berrens, my coauthor, and I, we teach together in the University of New Mexico Water Resources program, will teach a graduate course for future water managers.

And one of the things that Bob and I talk about, we've been talking about it this way for years, is the importance of the necessity of what we call big, messy conversations, spaces in processes by which members of the community come together and hash out their views about competing and conflicting desires and values for what we want to hand off to the future, what our obligations to the future are, the desired future conditions.

And we went back a hundred years and tried to, as obsessively as to nerdy academics, could do, chronicle how the big, messy conversation emerged conflicting, competing values people butting heads, not all in agreement.

It can be unpleasant at times, but coming together to create a framework to move forward as a community.

The challenge we face today is that we've got less water, we have more people, we have a changing nature and structure of our community.

We have changing values.

And what we can learn from the past is these big, messy conversations are difficult, but they're necessary, and that's what we need to have going forward.

And I don't have a magic recipe for what the messy conversation is.

But I think one of the important things about the book and the lesson that Bob and I did, Bob and I learned by going deep into how they did this is when you start this process to try to identify a desired future condition and how to get to it.

You don't know how it's going to end up.

There's no map.

There's no map of the territory, there's no clear route.

And where you can say, “oh, well, if we just do that and that and that and that and that, then we'll be there.” It's like this big, messy, chaotic conversation.

But the bottom line is going forward is there is less water, there will be less green.

We use water to make a bunch of stuff green.

We love our Bosque.

We love our irrigated fields in the -- agricultural heritage that we try to embrace with public open spaces that we irrigate.

We love the ditches with their lines of trees.

We love our yards and our lawns.

We love our golf courses, I don█t play golf.

But some people play golf and they love that, right?

And the nature of the conversation -- often gets stuck with, “well, yeah, but I want the thing that I value the most.” And so those other people, they are the ones that they should give it up.

That doesn't work.

What we have to do is come to this discussion with some generosity about everybody's different values and uses about water, and think about how we all go through the process of sharing the reduction in water that's going to be necessary so that we can come out the other side as a as a community that we value.

We could blow this, right?

This could end up being a disastrous mess, where some subset of the population uses its wealth or political power to cling to their portion of the water and other parts of the city become completely brown, or we preserve water in some places and decide the Bosque should die.

I don't want that to happen.

I value the Bosque, but I recognize my own personal values are less important here than the process by which we come to the conclusion of understanding what these broad community values are.

Super messy process, super messy conversations.

I'm -- I'm an old guy At this point, I doubt that I will be here to see their outcomes.

But I hope that -- by writing this book and by talking about it the way Bob and I do and by teaching about it, we can help these processes get underway in a way that will lead us to good outcomes.

TO BE INSPIRED >>Kevin: Well, I recently had to fill out my new passport application and it says what's your profession?

And I put Sculpture Gardener.

I create sculpture and I install them in major botanical gardens around the country.

And I also have a sculpture garden that is one of my greatest passions, is building this public garden and working with public gardens.

So those two things have sort of come together.

In 6000 years of history of bronze.

Nobody thought, I'm going to make an original out of paper and cast in bronze.

And so I pioneered this technique and this idea I had of casting and capturing the delicate nature of paper in museum quality of metal.

Now, the first piece that I created successfully is made out of a square because my last name is box, and I folded these geometric designs into a of shape because I wanted the work to describe the architecture of the soul.

Like, what does a self-portrait look like of my soul?

If I close my eyes and imagine what I look like in here, I see flickering light.

So for me, that early work had that quality of just a square mandala of light being a white piece of paper.

And then when people started seeing the work and getting excited about it, they started asking me about, wow, that's like origami.

And I was like, what's a word?

Or game was a new thing to me.

And so I immediately dismissed it to some degree of like, well, that's a kid's game.

Or, you know, that's something from Asia, you know, this is the architecture of the soul.

But somebody gave me a white origami crane, and I recognized it from art history as this archetypal symbol that many cultures see a white dove and acknowledge that it has a relationship to the soul.

But like, why would I make this?

Who am I?

This guy from Oklahoma, that's like casting paper in bronze.

So with that question, I began to disassemble and unfold the origami crane.

And when I did that, I discovered that inside was this beautiful star that the paper had a memory for every choice and every crease, and that we could describe what we see with our eyes, with a folded piece of paper to look like a bird.

But when it unfolded, you could see its soul.

And that was the “aha!” moment for me.

After that moment I realized I needed to embrace origami to some degree, or at least this image, because I felt like people recognized it from culture.

We'd seen it in the landscape.

And so we have three circuses that we sort of manage within the studio program that we've developed, and one is fine art for galleries and for sale to collectors and clients.

And the second thing that we have is this place, this beautiful studio and sculpture garden that we open to the public seasonally.

And then we have traveling exhibits.

3.5 million visitors around the country have seen our work.

And, you know, the foundry that I've worked with for 17 years, the artists that I've worked with for 17 years, my wife, who I've worked with for 17 years, it took time to build up the momentum to get to that point.

But now we have been on a roll for a long time, and it's the most satisfying thing I could ever, ever be grateful for.

You know, the mission statement of our company is to inspire and be inspired, not necessarily in that order.

And so I'm inspired by the artists and the work and the world that I've encountered, and I hope that my work might also inspire.

My passion to this day is the subject matter of the blank slate.

Everything that you've seen in my work, they're all a different way of expressing a square piece of paper, sometimes a rectangle, but a blank page.

The blank page is the archetypal symbol of the creative process.

What are you going to make out of nothing?

And to me, that's the ultimate story that I'm telling.

Funding for Colores was provided in part by: New Mexico PBS Great Southwestern Arts & Education Endowment Fund, and the Nellita E. Walker Fund for KNME-TV at the Albuquerque Community Foundation McCune Charitable Foundation, New Mexico Arts, a division of the Department of Cultural Affairs, and by the National Endowment for the Arts and Viewers like You