More fails by New Mexico magazine

Both of these in the "service" of pseudoscience, in its March issue.

First, in the story "Ancient Enigmas," about pueblitos (of which I'd already read plenty by David Roberts), there's:

“We emerged as one people,” says (Timothy C. Begay, cultural specialist with the Navajo Nation Heritage and Historic Preservation Department) of all the tribes that occupied the Four Corners. “We were one culture until Chaco fell. It was one voice, one people, one belief. We have sacred places that we still visit all over this area. If we came across the Bering Strait, why don’t we have sacred places in Canada and Asia?”

OK, I know any traditionalist Indian is going to say that. No need for the author to abet with this:

The story melds with the tribe’s longer-lived sense of its history in the area, a history centuries older than archaeologists can prove. The scientific research points to Athabaskan people (Diné and N’dé, or Apache) traveling across the Bering Strait and working their way down to the Southwest around the 1400s. The Diné say they were here far earlier, emerging near a lake in southwestern Colorado, and that First Man and First Woman settled at Gobernador Knob, a sacred mountain south of Navajo Lake. Begay says his people have always been here, something that future archaeology may yet confirm.

Oy.

Begay is wrong in two ways. First, the Diné have not always been there, and as far as sacred sites, I'm sure your "cousins" in northern Alberta and northeastern British Columbia have them in plenty. He's also wrong in that, no, the Navajos didn't emerge with other peoples. This, to go woke on the woke, is just another installment in Navajo cultural appropriation of Pueblo traditions and religion. 

Then, in the piece "Abiquiu State of Mind," we have the tagline of author Molly Boyle:

Molly Boyle thinks even the truest atheist can have a spiritual encounter in Abiquiu ...

Tied to the end of the third-to-last paragraph of the body copy:

I’ve had metaphysical experiences during fireside suppers in campgrounds that line the Río Chama along Forest Road 151, and while winding through the wooden Stations of the Cross on an alternate path toward the Monastery of Christ in the Desert.

Kind of like the "To the Atheist" chapter in the AA book, eh?

Ms. Boyle may be an atheist in the narrow sense, like countless millions of Theravada Buddhists. But, as it's usually used in the modern West, to imply rejection of metaphyiscal entities? She isn't, if she's claiming to be one, and if she thinks a "spiritual encounter" should include metaphysics, even for atheists, like the AA chapter, she's patronizing as hell.

That goes along with encouraging neoliberal environmental Karens to illegally walk dogs off-leash in federal wilderness.

I only read because I have a gift subscription.