As a girl growing up in Connecticut, Carol Miller had no idea how a post-college trip would help shape her life. But after studying art and graduating from Wheaton College in 1969, she and a group of friends decided to head West to see the Rocky Mountains.
“I said I was never going back,” Miller said, regarding her trip. “It was so beautiful there.”
She and her three roommates planned the trip, which would include a visit to California, and after picking up a car and tent from her roommate’s parents, the group headed west. In addition to California, they intended to visit the Tetons and Canada and travel down the coast.
“We had saved up to do this big trip after graduation,” Miller said. “I got to Berkeley (Calif.) in 1969 and I stayed there. I lived there until ’77 and moved to New Mexico.”
Miller said she’d been coming to New Mexico for some time before she made the move. In 1971, she visited the Land of Enchantment while on a camping trip with friends from Connecticut.
“They said, ‘We’re going to go to Ojo Sarco,’” she said.
Miller said during that trip, they visited a commune on the Trampas River. They parked their cars and unbeknown to her at the time, the location on which she parked her car, would be the piece of property she would buy later on.
She said she was enrolled in public health school in Berkeley, when a friend of hers living in New Mexico called and asked if she wanted to lease a house, which she agreed to.
“I wanted to live in El Valle,” Miller said. “But my husband, a native Southern Californian, probably would have liked to have lived where there’s no snow.”
They settled on Ojo Sarco, where they still reside in what Miller describes as a “do-it-yourself house and farming project.” But before moving to New Mexico, Miller left her mark on Berkeley. She said in 1969, the peace movement was big there.
“In West Hartford Connecticut, there was a large Quaker presence,” Miller said. “I was very motivated by that.”
She said the Quakers would go out on the lake in canoes and protest nuclear weapons, which television stations would then broadcast. She said it was always meaningful to her because there would be politicians on the pier, drinking champagne, while the pacifists were in the water.
“I always had a feeling for that kind of courage, to stand up for your convictions,” she said. “I was, and am, a part of the peace movement, it was a big part of my life.”
Forming a
food co-op
Another big part of her life would be her involvement with the formation of the food co-op in Berkeley. Miller said during the late ’60s and ’70s, the natural food movement was born. She helped organize the Food Conspiracy, which was a group formed to help students, living in the city, with food. As a way to make student life easier, groups of five to eight neighbors got together and sent representatives to a weekly meeting. Every adult would pay a one-time, nonrefundable fee of $2 or more, which was used as “front” money to buy food items. During the meeting, the representatives took orders from each group for vegetables and fruit.
Once the orders were placed, a handful of people would travel to the San Francisco Farmers Market and buy boxes or crates of fresh fruits and vegetables, which were then disbursed at a central location.
That action is what spawned the food co-op movement, Miller said. Later, in New Mexico, Miller would establish buying clubs based on the same model.
“We were all learning from each other,” she said.
In addition to her interest in the food co-op, and as a public health school student enrolled at the University of California-Berkeley, Miller was also interested in health care. In fact, she helped establish the Berkeley Women’s Health Clinic, which is still in existence.
“A lot of things I started are still there,” she said.
She said during her time in California, the women’s health movement started and many of those interested in that issue went into medicine or nursing. She graduated from the University of California-Berkeley in 1978.
“That was the field we chose as careers, but it started as a self-help movement,” Miller said. “Now more women than men are in the health field. Sometimes it feels like I live in ancient times. So much has changed.”
Miller said so many people talk against things that happened in the ’60s and ’70s, but a lot of those things are mainstream today. She used yoga and natural food as examples.
Coming
to New Mexico
Following her graduation from the University of California, she and her husband moved to New Mexico. She was a VISTA volunteer from 1980-81 in Peñasco. She was also an instructor for the departments of Health Education and Continuing Education at the University of New Mexico from 1981-83 and got hired as the executive director for La Clinica del Pueblo in Tierra Amarilla in 1982, a position she held until 1985.
Miller described her first year at the clinic as a very “chaotic” time because of upheavals there stemming from the federal government threatening to close clinics in New Mexico.
“It was a very different time for rural healthcare in this country,” she said.
She said the clinic was receiving bills saying it owed a couple hundred-thousand dollars to the federal government because it was expected to reimburse the government for a “reasonable” share of the costs of the clinic’s personnel.
“We didn’t have any ideas of raising money and giving it to the federal government. It seemed wrong,” Miller said. “The Board at the clinic said, ‘We can’t pay back the money.’”
In an effort to help the cause, then U.S. representative Bill Richardson, and U.S. senators Jeff Bingaman and Pete Domenici stepped in and introduced a bill, drafted by Miller, to set up a waiver process that would allowed the clinic to not have to pay back the money.
“That was my first time in getting a bill introduced and passed,” Miller said. “I thought it was going to be a piece of cake.”
The piece of legislation Miller helped establish would be known as the Rural Healthcare Clinic Act of 1983.
Because of her effort in helping low-income, high poverty populations, she got the attention of the Rural Health Branch, a division of Primary Care Services based in Rockville, Md. She went to work for them as a public health analyst from 1985-87. “It might have been a career, but it was better to be at the community level,” she said.
The public health sector
Miller also has an EMT I license and utilized that for a couple of years, from 1985-1987, when she worked with National Disaster Medical Assistance. She continued as an EMT I in New Mexico until the mid-1990s.
In 1987, she also worked as a public health analyst for the Indian Healthcare Service in Rockville, Md. The director at the time was Gerald Ivey, from Alaska. Miller shared her memories of a Christmas party Ivey catered and hosted one year. The fare consisted of native Alaskan dishes such as moose stroganoff and a huge salmon.
“It was a very wonderful time to be a part of the health service,” she said.
Following her time in Maryland, Miller said she felt herself being pulled back to New Mexico, so in 1989, she went to work in Tierra Amarilla once again, for La Clinica del Pueblo, this time as an assistant director. She held that position until 1992, when she got a full-time job as an expert for the United States Department of Health and Human Services in Washington, D.C. She also received a presidential appointment to the White House Health Care Task Force during that time. However, her work with La Clinica lasted until 2000.
“I was one of the only ones that worked in healthcare,” she said.
She worked on the Clinton task force until her commission expired and the task force ran its course. After that, she lobbied for the National Rural Health Association in Washington.
“It became clear that congress wouldn’t pass it,” Miller said regarding the health coverage bill she lobbied for.
Helping the
frontier effort
Following her job as a lobbyist, she returned to New Mexico once again and became the executive director and founder of the National Center for Frontier Communities.
According to frontierus.org, the National Center for Frontier Communities “gives a voice to both people and programs based in remote rural communities. These communities are very diverse, but they share the common thread of being at a considerable distance from population centers. NCFC raises awareness of frontier issues to policy makers, agencies, and the public.”
Miller said Sen. Orrin Hatch-R, Utah, worked with the health planner in his state because Frontier needed “special consideration.” As a result, a policy was developed on Frontier and Miller became a National Rural Health Association Frontier representative and was elected to the Board. According to her profile on frontierus.org, Miller “was the founder of the Frontier Education Center, served as president from 1997-2001 and was executive director of the National Center for Frontier communities for ten years.” She is still involved with the Frontier movement.
Miller said since 1980, she’s been a leader and worked with some wonderful people, helping sparsely populated rural communities receive attention.
“It’s not easy getting anyone to work on your issue,” she said.
One of her former colleagues, Karen Sweeney, met Miller when she hired her to work on the staff of the National Center for Frontier Communities in October 2003.
“We worked together until April 2008 and have been friends ever since,” Sweeney said. “There are several things that stand out about Carol. In addition to great intellect, she has an unusual ability to grasp complex issues quickly and to decipher how proposed policies would affect individuals at the local level, particularly in rural and frontier America.”
Sweeney said Miller can “zero in on common interests among seemingly incompatible people and issues and thus move the discussion or the process forward.”
“For years, Carol has championed the health and economic needs of residents of rural and frontier America,” Sweeney said. “National policymakers often have little grasp of issues, let alone the geography of those parts of our nation. Carol has ceaselessly challenged inaccurate perceptions. Her expertise on rural health issues has been sought after by policymakers from both sides of the aisle.”
Sweeney said she has always wished that Miller would be elected to congress because she would be a “formidable” presence.
“She’s thoroughly informed on the issues, she might surprise even her foes with original thinking on how to move forward, benefit constituents and save face in the process,” Sweeney said.
However, Sweeney isn’t the only one Miller met through Frontier. Frank Popper met Miller in the mid-1980s via mail.
“She was interested in research I was doing on the American frontier and that I’ve done since, with my wife,” Frank Popper said.
Popper described Miller as a “wonderful person who does wonderful work: not the most common mix.”
“I can’t speak to her community and political work, which is evidently extraordinary,” Popper said. “But I know her through the organization she founded, the Frontier Education Center, which became the National Center for Frontier Communities. I’ve been on the Board of the organization since its beginning, and Deborah (his wife) has been on it for about a decade.”
Popper praised Miller’s work with the organization by saying, “Carol has done extraordinary work not just for New Mexico or the American West, but for the nation as a whole. Her contribution is not hard to notice. Better, it is hard not to notice.”
Deborah Popper met Miller through Frank Popper.
“He joined the Board of the National Center for Frontier Communities first, and so I’d heard about her work, met her briefly and then joined the Board myself and got to know her better over the last decade,” she said.
Deborah Popper said Miller is a “person of tremendous passion, commitment, ethics, energy and knowledge. She knows what she’s talking about, why she’s talking about it, what should be done, why it’s not getting done, how to get it done.”
Miller also got involved in a hot-button issue for the state of New Mexico in the 1990s. She protested against the proposed Waste Isolation Pilot Plant in Carlsbad. At the time, the president of the New Mexico Public Health Association was able to get a resolution drafted, opposing the Plant.
“I attended most of the meetings and spoke on behalf of the Health Council,” Miller said. “WIPP was a big issue in 1998. The whole thing has always been an accident waiting to happen.”
A simple theory
Miller has a theory she lives by.
“My open door theory is that if a door opens, and you walk through it, it can change your life,” she said.
That theory proved true for Miller throughout her career, as she has worked with a variety of groups, been a lobbyist, been appointed to the White House task force, and been a commissioned officer with the United States Public Health Service, for which she received an honorable discharge. Miller also worked as a health planner with Picuris Pueblo and helped start a community coalition in the late 1990s.
During her years in various capacities, she has met a large variety of diverse people. Among those are mayors from Palestine and Israel, whom she met during a talk on water issues in Santa Fe.
“I felt so privileged to be in the room with those leaders,” Miller said.
Through her career, Miller said she’s had many wonderful opportunities to do wonderful things, while having a supportive family.
“I’ve been able to go a lot of places in the world,” she said.
Her daughter, Sarah, is currently a medical student at the University of New Mexico.
When asked what her parents thought about her career, Miller said, “My mom thinks I spent my career going to meetings.”
Miller said she spent about six or seven years away from her husband Larry and daughter, while she was living in Washington, D.C., but she only lived there for four years. She did a lot of traveling between Washington and New Mexico while she was on assignment.
“It was hard for Sarah and it was hard for me to be away,” Miller said. “Now she kind of gets it. I came back every weekend (when she was working in Washington). She can see herself having that kind of career.”
Miller reflects on how politics were different when she was working in Washington.
“The ’80s were a time of the greatest bipartisanship. We didn’t have as much money and politics. (There weren’t any) incentives for anyone to work together. We were able to get a lot accomplished in that time period. Most people wanted to make things better.”
Running for office
Miller was one of those people trying to make a difference and she ran for office a few times to try and accomplish that.
In 1982, she ran for Rio Arriba County Treasurer on La Raza Unida’s ticket, but lost. La Raza Unida disbanded in 1986.
Miller then became a Democrat and decided to give the state senate a shot. She ran for a seat in 1996, but again, was unsuccessful.
Then in 1997 and 1998 and 2008, she launched campaign sand ran for congress. She ran twice on the Green Party ticket and most recently as an independent.
“I love being a candidate,” she said.
Miller’s friend Bruce Trigg takes credit for her getting involved with the Green movement.
“She became a national and international figure in the Green movement,” he said. “Carol has had a huge impact on politics. She’s an amazing woman and a very dear friend. Her friends and her neighbors love her. Politically, she’s not afraid to raise issues that are often uncomfortable, but nevertheless need to be raised.”
Miller said even though she did not win her political races, she did set some records. For example, in 1997, she had the largest voting percentage of a non-party candidate, with close to 40,000 votes.
“I learned about electoral reforms,” she said of her political bids. “I learned a lot about being in the Independent movement.”
Making a difference
In addition to her healthcare work, lobbying and various other issues she’s taken on throughout her career, she still finds time to write columns. In fact, she currently writes for the “Daily Yonder,” a website dedicated to providing multi-media news, features, commentary and research to people in the rural United States.
She has also had articles printed about her in an Italian magazine called Il Venardi and she has been a guest in the Okinawa Times.
Miller lives in Ojo Sarco and said when she decided to slow down, she made the decision to put her energy into her community.
“I was talking to one of my neighbors and she said, ‘Why don’t we make it better here?’”
That’s when Miller decided to try and form a community center for the village and its 300 residents.
“We voted in peoples’ homes,” Miller said, explaining how the community held meetings prior to the center being built.
The first step in the process was getting a building that could be turned into a community center. That was accomplished after she helped form a nonprofit group. After that, the group was able to procure a one-room school house, which was being used as a garage for the Volunteer Fire Department and was under the control of Rio Arriba County. The Fire Department was able to save some money and construct a new building for their use.
“We started bugging the county manager and commission in 2009 for help to fix the building,” Miller said.
She said the residents petitioned the County to give them a place to meet.
The group was able to get a legislative appropriation to help with repairs and so the construction began.
A group of volunteers began working on converting the outdated building into a usable community center. The work they did included: installing new windows, insulating the walls with foam to keep the building warm during the cold, winter months and laying sheet rock.
The building went from being a garage to housing a kitchen, dining area, restroom and library.
Miller said when the building was a one-room schoolhouse, there was no running water or electricity in it. She said some people from the village remember when there was nowhere for community members to meet.
“It’s just been great,” Miller said. “Everybody owns it. It’s really a busy place.”
She said 800 meals were served at the Center last year.
In addition to serving as a library for the community, the Center also serves as a place for the village’s youth to have lunch and play. There is a basketball goal on the property, as well as a play area. The children are allowed to draw on the outside walls with chalk and during the summer, field trips are planned.
“We talked about having some things for seniors here. We’re all volunteers,” Miller said. “We’re real proud of that.”
Miller said the Ojo Sarco Community Center is one of the smallest but busiest community centers in the County.
In addition to serving as a place for Ojo Sarco residents to have lunch and checkout books, the Center also serves as the hub for the food bank on Wednesdays, as well as acequia meetings. The Center is also rented to residents for $5 an hour, for events such as baby showers and parties.
“During the course of the year, 7,800 people came through here (last year),” Miller said. “It’s rented most weekends and it’s always been on the honor system.”
The Center is able to stay afloat with help from the United Way. Each year, $6,800 is given to the Center. Miller said there’s even a stipend for someone to do art everyday. She said all this is possible through donations from private donors as well as the Santa Fe Community Foundation.
“To keep a volunteer organization going, you have to have enough money,” Miller said. “But not too much because people fight over money.”