The Atlantic magazine makes Santa Fe stop as part of its across America tour

SANTA FE — The Museum of Indian Arts and Culture would normally be closed by 6 p.m. But on Wednesday night, small groups were still examining contemporary silver bracelets depicting the night sky, a more than 1,000-year-old bowl decorated with a swallow, and the image of an astronaut on the moon woven in a blanket.

“Makowa: The Worlds Above Us,” an exhibit that explores Indigenous relationships with the sky, opened in June and won’t close until September. The exhibit was highlighted this week as part of The Atlantic magazine’s 50-state tour.

“What is it that made you want to do this exhibit, specifically the way that you all have curated it?” Andrea Valdez, the magazine’s managing editor, asked exhibit co-curators Marlon Magdalena and Elisabeth Stone.

Often, Indigenous ways of knowing are juxtaposed with Western ways of knowing, Stone said, and they wanted to do the opposite in this exhibit. The curators tried to bring those two ways of knowing into conversation, which is part of the reason the exhibit is organized by time of day rather than chronologically.

“We wanted to say, this is a conversation we all have, and we have it in Western science; we have it in Indigenous science. We have it in our stories and all of our cultures,” Stone said.

New Mexico was the third stop in a series of The Atlantic events meant to “surface and engage with the most urgent, complex, and distinctly American questions of the moment in the places where they are unfolding,” according to the event description.

And what is unfolding urgently in New Mexico?

Space, and how to explore it.

New Mexico does have a rich relationship to the stars. The Land of Enchantment is home to ancient astronomy, reflected in the architecture of sites like Chaco Canyon, and home to the largest collection of radio dishes listening to the stars — the Very Large Array in Socorro County. The man who discovered Pluto, astronomer Clyde Tombaugh, was a Las Cruces resident, a city near Spaceport America — a business that promises to be the future of space tourism.

Ross Andersen, one of the magazine’s staff writers, has been exploring a pressing space question in his reporting for the magazine: what kind of space exploration and space science is the United States government willing to pay for?

President Donald Trump’s proposed budget called for defunding 40 of NASA’s 124 science missions, including a mission to bring Mars’ rocks back to Earth, while simultaneously increasing funding for sending astronauts back to the moon. In a story for the magazine’s February edition, Andersen explored the effect layoffs and proposed funding cuts had on two of the agency’s densest institutions, the Jet Propulsion Lab in California and the Goddard Space Flight Center in Maryland. His story describes the change in funding priorities as an inward turn.

That pivot has a practical and spiritual effect, he said.

“On the practical dimension, the U.S. has been this kind of attractor for scientific talent, really since the Second World War, where you had refugees from Europe, of course, coming here and making it so our scientific institutions were stocked with the best talent in the world,” Andersen told the Journal.

It is also “a kind of shrinking of the American spirit,” he said.

One of the planetary scientists working on the mission to bring Mars rocks to Earth for further study, Nina Lanza, was interviewed by magazine staff at Wednesday’s event alongside Andersen. Mars is like “a museum of ancient rocks,” because the planet’s surface is much less dynamic than Earth’s, Lanza said. There’s one Mars rock in particular she’d like to bring home, because it appears to have signs of past microbial life. While the mission is zeroed out in the budget, the Mars rocks are still there, Lanza said.

“We can still change our mind. We can still go get them,” she said.