I am writing today to announce the closure of the New Mexico Independent. After three and a half years of operation in New Mexico, the board of the American Independent News Network, has decided to shift publication of its news…
While environmental activists played their part yesterday during demonstrations at the capitol building, going so far as to dress up as solar panels and to sing the tune of “You Are My Sunshine,” their counterparts, the anti-cap-and-trade contingency who has…
Roughly one quarter of University of New Mexico students are unimpressed with the state’s flagship public school, according to a survey that questioned college students about their higher education experiences.
Dartmouth undergrad and Stanford Law School Grad, Eric Treisman is with us no longer.
A few days after his second divorce was finalized, he had a massive heart attack, went into a coma for four days, and cat scans and MRI’s showed little cerebral activity.
But with his sardonic humor, scathing wit, and uncannily high intelligence,Treisman touched many lives as a most untypical lawyer.
Treisman was well known in many circles, especially the supporters of Tibetan political causes and in the Democratic Party for those who remember his 1996 primary run for the United States Senate nomination, which he lost to Art Trujillo, who then lost to incumbent Sen. Pete Domenici.
Treisman was a very early campaigner for the Space Port in southern New Mexico. He was the personal lawyer for Paljor Thondup, founder of Project Tibet on Canyon Road, and for many years, Eric had his law office there at Project Tibet.
Before coming to Santa Fe in the late 70′s, after finishing at Stanford, he served as legal aide working for Dine Legal Services in Window Rock Arizona, and he also worked in Alaska to help set up the Native Alaskan
Corporation, a tribal entity that benefits Eskimos and Innuit people.
He took on immigration cases for Tibetans, many times on a pro bono basis, did commercial litigation, and had one very long case that took almost twenty years against the BIA for misuse of Tribal Education funds, a case he shared with his friend and colleague, Mike Gross.
Treisman’s literary efforts included a stint at being contributing editor at Harper’s starting when he was about thirty.
Treisman was the most serious traveler and dedicated polyglot I have ever known; he had a working knowledge of Russian, Navajo, Tibetan, Hindi, Nepali, Chinese, and several European languages. He once hitch-hiked from the farthest outpost in western China, Chengdu, overland to the capitol of Tibet, Lhasa, arriving right in the middle of the 1992 “crackdown” instigated by the present President of China, Hu Jin Tao.
He said that journey was something like a”1500 mile stretch resembling Upper Cerro Gordo Road” in Santa Fe; he filmed that adventure and many others, like to Japan, to the Copper Canyon in Mexico, mountain climbing all over the world (I believe he had made ascents of the highest peaks in 5 out of 7 continents). I saw the video and slide show of his circumambulation of Annapurna in Nepal.
The Tibetan community lost a deep and important friend last year in the tragic death by inebriated hit and run driver, with the passing of Lobsang Lhalungpa. Almost a year later, we have lost another literally towering figure in the struggle to help Tibet: Eric Treisman, who left his birth faith of Judaism to help another afflicted people, the Tibetans, suffering from the same kind of genocide, yet much quieter and perhaps more insidious, at the hands of China.
Treisman had several personal audiences with His Holiness the Dalai Lama in Santa Fe during his visit in 1992, and in Dharamsala
Treisman was the kind of lawyer, and there are few indeed, who would take off from work to go for a ten mile run, or a nightly climb up Atalaya and back, or if he felt like it, a flight with a Dutch prince in a biplane from
St. Petersburg, Russia all the way across 7,000 miles of Russia, 200 miles a day, in a primitive biplane, all the way to Vladivostock.
He was proud of his cameo appearance in Robert Redford’s Milagro Beanfield War, his one stint at
acting.
He was raised as a liberal Jew, delved deeply into Tibetan Buddhism, and yet still remained a member of Leonard Helman’s Congregation and Synagogue.
His memory will not soon be forgotten.
Stephen Fox is the contributing editor of the New Mexico Sun News.
