October 2019 - Parks & Recreation - 50

N R PA U P DAT E

Member Spotlight: Rafael Payan, Ph.D.
By Lindsay Collins

afael Payan, Ph.D., is general manager of Monterey Peninsula Regional Park District. Under his leadership, the park district recently
acquired the Rancho Cañada golf course, one of the premier courses
on the planet. " With the purchase, our goal is not to keep the golf course in operation, the reason being is that there's some water issues in California and on
top of that, golf is starting to have less of a usership, " says Dr. Payan. " We're
going to be restoring the 36-hole golf course back into native habitat. We've
retired the use of about 185-acre-feet of water that we're putting back into the
Carmel River. And, since we're so close to the ocean, we also have less of a
chance of fertilizers and other chemicals transferred by runoff into the ocean. "
This is only one of the many
conservation- and social equity-focused projects that Dr. Payan has
spearheaded throughout his career.
Parks & Recreation spoke with Dr.
Payan to learn how he developed
his passions and how those, along
with his life experiences, have contributed to his work. An excerpt of
that conversation follows:

Parks & Recreation: Before moving
to Monterey, you were in Arizona,
where you were heavily involved
with education and advocacy
on Native American reservations
in the area. Can you tell us a bit
about this experience and how it
has informed your current work?
Dr. Rafael Payan: My father is San
Carlos Apache. Ever since I was
a child, I was exposed to Apache
culture. When I was in Arizona,
I started volunteering for a whole
bunch of projects. This is part of
my background in landscape architecture. I master planned every
state park in the Arizona state park
system. I also noticed that on a lot
of reservations, the kids were suffering for several different reasons.
Part of it is that Native Americans
are almost invisible in our culture.
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Native American kids see a lot of
other folks of other races and ethnicities on television, movies, etc.,
but they don't see themselves represented, or they don't see themselves
represented positively when they
are. I wanted to help reverse that,
so I started volunteering by designing parks for various tribes.
Presently, I'm working with the
White Mountain Apache tribe on
a historic site - it's where the U.S.
Army was stationed in the mid1800s to the early 1900s. Eventually, it was what opened up the West
for settlement by American settlers,
because Arizona, New Mexico and
West Texas were very difficult to
cross for the settlers who wanted to
move to California. The U.S. Army
occupied this area and constructed
numerous buildings, really beautiful buildings, for housing their officers and staff, as well as for the
function of the military base that's
now part of the reservation. We're
adaptively reusing that property
to create a park for what will be
the Theodore Roosevelt School,
the last Indian boarding school
operated by the Bureau of Indian
Affairs in the United States. Since
these kids are away from their fam-

| O C T O B E R 2 0 1 9 | W W W. PA R K S A N D R E C R E AT I O N . O R G

Dr. Rafael Payan, pictured right, attending
an Apache tribal ceremony.

ilies, we want to keep them occupied,
so we're taking part of the parade
grounds from the historic military fort
and creating soccer fields, baseball
fields, a splash park, etc. In partnership
with Johns Hopkins University, and
through its business school, we've established a café. Visitors come down
to the café, and we employ native kids
so they can develop marketable skills.
P&R: Do you feel that conservation
and social equity intersect? If yes,
how so?
Dr. Payan: Sure, they absolutely do.
I look at it this way: Access to conservation and Access to knowledge is
incredibly important because...if we
don't teach our kids how to love this
land, when they're adults, they're not
going to support our organizations
- whether they're urban or natural
areas. We want to create a knowledgeable voter, somebody who is environmentally literate.
Read the interview in its entirety online at
www.nrpa.org/parks-recreation-mag
azine/2019/october/member-spot
light-dr-Rafael-Payan.
- Lindsay Collins, Associate Editor
for Parks & Recreation magazine

October 2019 - Parks & Recreation

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