Civilization

The Pueblo Peoples

The Pueblo peoples — the maize-farming, town-dwelling village nations of the North American Southwest, the Hopi of the Arizona mesas, the Zuni, and the Keres, Tewa, Tiwa, and Towa of the Rio Grande and the western pueblos, descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans, keepers of the kiva, the katsina, and one of the most carefully guarded ceremonial traditions on the continent.

At dawn on a mesa in northern Arizona, or above the cottonwoods of a river town in New Mexico, the shape is the same and unmistakable: flat-roofed rooms of stone and mud-plastered adobe stacked back from a plaza in terraces two and three and sometimes five stories high, ladders leaning against the upper walls, a few round-shouldered ovens standing in the open ground. The Spanish who came up from Mexico in the sixteenth century looked at these compact, vertical, town-dwelling settlements and reached for the ordinary word for a town. They called the people los indios de los pueblos — the Indians of the towns — and the name stuck to the settlements, to the architecture, and to the nations who keep them.

The word flattens what it names. There is no single Pueblo people and never has been. There are a set of related but distinct nations, sharing a way of building and farming and a deep common ancestry, who speak languages so far apart that a Hopi and a Zuni and a Keres farmer working neighboring fields once needed an interpreter to talk. What they share is older and harder to translate than language: the town itself, the maize in the field, and the round ceremonial chamber sunk into the plaza floor.

The village nations

The Pueblo nations are the living descendants of the Ancestral Puebloans, the farming culture that built the great houses of Chaco Canyon and the cliff towns of Mesa Verde across the high Four Corners country between roughly 100 and 1300 CE. When that northern heartland emptied in the thirteenth century under drought and upheaval, the people did not vanish — the old salvage literature’s “vanishing race” is a fiction the descendants are alive to correct. They moved south and east, to the Arizona mesas, to Zuni and Acoma, and in large numbers down into the Rio Grande valley, where the river-fed towns swelled in exactly the generations the north fell silent. The pueblos of today stand at the far, living end of that migration. They are not a memory of that civilization; they are it, moved and continuous, planting the same three crops and climbing in story from the worlds below.

Counted by their own governments, the Pueblo world today is some two dozen sovereign nations. New Mexico holds nineteen — Acoma, Cochiti, Isleta, Jemez, Laguna, Nambé, Ohkay Owingeh, Picuris, Pojoaque, Sandia, San Felipe, San Ildefonso, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo (Kewa), Taos, Tesuque, Zia, and Zuni — and the Hopi nation holds northern Arizona, its villages set on and below three high promontories the literature numbers as First, Second, and Third Mesa. Acoma’s mesa-top “Sky City” and Taos and the Hopi villages are among the longest continuously inhabited settlements anywhere in the United States, lived in without a break for the better part of a thousand years.

The languages are the surest sign that “Pueblo” is a description and not a tribe. The nations speak tongues from four families that are not related to one another at all. The Hopi speak a Uto-Aztecan language, a far northern cousin of Nahuatl, the tongue of the Aztecs. Zuni stands entirely alone, a language isolate with no demonstrated kin. The Keres language, spoken at Acoma, Laguna, Cochiti, Santo Domingo, San Felipe, Santa Ana, and Zia, is a second isolate. And the Tanoan family carries three of its own branches — Tiwa, spoken in the north at Taos and Picuris and in the south at Sandia and Isleta; Tewa, spoken across a cluster of towns above Santa Fe; and Towa, now spoken at a single pueblo, Jemez. Four unrelated families, a dozen mutually unintelligible languages, one shared form of town and field and rite: the unity of the Pueblo world is cultural and ceremonial, not linguistic, and the nations guard the distinctions among themselves as carefully as outsiders blur them. They are best named, where the record allows, by their own names. The history that follows is a shared history, but the peoples are several.

Entrada, mission, and revolt

The written record of the pueblos begins, as so much of the Southwest’s does, with men looking for gold. In 1539 an advance party sent north from Mexico glimpsed the Zuni town of Hawikuh and took its mud-and-stone walls, catching the sun, for one of the fabled golden Cities of Cíbola; the scout Esteban was killed there. The next year Francisco Vázquez de Coronado came in force — hundreds of Spanish soldiers, more than a thousand Indian allies from Mexico, Franciscan friars — and when the Zuni at Hawikuh refused to feed the starving column, he stormed the town. There was no gold. Pushing east to the Tiwa towns on the Rio Grande, the expedition seized food and shelter through the winter of 1540–41 and crushed the resistance that followed in the brutal Tiguex War. Coronado went home empty-handed, but the pattern of the next three centuries was set in that first season: the demand, the refusal, the violence.

Permanent colonization came in 1598, when Juan de Oñate led settlers and Franciscans north to plant a Spanish province on Pueblo land, with the conversion of the nations to Catholicism written into its charter as a holy duty. Missions rose against the plaza walls; Pueblo labor built them; Pueblo religion was driven underground. Friars seized and burned the painted prayer-sticks and the masked ceremonial objects, flogged and hanged the men they took for sorcerers, and forbade the dances on which the farming year turned. Under that pressure the Pueblo world did something that the patchwork of its languages should have made impossible: it coordinated.

In August 1680 nearly every pueblo from Taos to Hopi rose at once. The architect of the rising was a Tewa religious leader from Ohkay Owingeh remembered as Po’pay, who had been arrested and flogged years before for practicing the old religion. By the nations’ own account, runners carried knotted cords from town to town, a knot to be untied each morning so that pueblos speaking half a dozen languages would strike on the same day. They did. Some four hundred colonists and twenty-one of the thirty-three Franciscans were killed; the roughly two thousand survivors were driven down the river and out of New Mexico entirely. For a dozen years the province belonged again to the people who had always held it. The reconquest under Diego de Vargas, begun in 1692 and not complete until 1696, brought the Spanish back — but a chastened Spanish, who learned to leave the kivas alone and to tolerate, at the surface, the dances they could no longer stamp out. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 is often called the first successful war of independence fought against a European power in what is now the United States, and the nineteen Pueblos remember it not as a curiosity of colonial history but as the reason the old religion survived to be theirs.

The kiva

At the center of the Pueblo town, dug into the plaza or set among the room blocks, is the kiva — the round (in the eastern pueblos sometimes rectangular) ceremonial chamber that is the architectural signature of the whole tradition. It is the lineal descendant of the ancient pithouse, the roofed room dug into the earth in which the first Puebloan farmers lived; when the people came up to live in stacked masonry rooms above ground, the old sunken round room stayed below and became sacred. A kiva is entered from above, by a ladder through a hole in the roof. Inside are a bench around the wall, a central hearth, a ventilator shaft, and, set into the floor, a small shaped hole — the sipapu, in the Hopi word, the navel of emergence, marking the place where the people climbed up into this, the present world, from the worlds below. The kiva is therefore not a meeting hall with a religious use but a model of the layered cosmos: its floor the surface of the earth, its sipapu the opening to what lies beneath, its ladder the road to the sky.

What happens inside the kiva is another matter, and it is not one for outside telling. The kiva is the chamber of the religious societies, and the substance of what they do there — the songs, the initiations, the preparations — belongs to the nations who carry it and is closed by their own long-standing law. The chamber can be described as the form it is. Its interior life cannot, and the line is drawn here on purpose.

The katsina and the calendar

Across the western pueblos above all — Hopi and Zuni and the Keres towns — the public face of the ceremonial year is the katsina (the Spanish-spelled kachina; in Zuni, the koko). The katsinam, in the understanding the nations have made public, are the powers of the living world made visible — the clouds and the rain, the maize and the game, the mountains and the dead. The word is often glossed as life-bringer. In Hopi teaching, the ancestors who have died become cloud-spirits and dwell on the high San Francisco Peaks west of the mesas; as katsinam they return to the villages for half the year, bringing with them the rain on which a corn crop in a desert depends, and for the other half they withdraw to their mountain home. They come, in the public outline of the calendar, around the winter solstice and depart after the great ceremony of the summer, when the harvest is assured.

The katsina is known to the outside world in three guises the published record routinely confuses. There is the katsina as a power of the world; there is the katsina as it is embodied by an initiated man in a Pueblo ceremony, who in that hour is not a dancer wearing a mask but the being itself; and there is the small carved figure, the tithu in Hopi, given to children so that they may learn the powers by name. Only the last of these has ever properly belonged in the marketplace, and even that is contested. The ceremonies in which the katsinam appear are tuned, like the whole Pueblo year, to the farming calendar and the cycle of solstice and planting and rain — a calendar whose deep structure the Ancestral Puebloans already wrote into the alignments of their great houses, and whose flute-playing, seed-carrying spirit is met in the rock-art and the katsina pantheon as Kokopelli. The shape of the year can be named. The interior of the rite cannot, and the difference between the two is the whole point of what follows.

The line that is kept

The Pueblo nations restrict the publication of ceremonial knowledge as a matter of their own law, and the restriction is not a quaint reticence to be coaxed past but a position they have held, and fought for, across more than a century of intrusion. The Hopi have been the most explicit. In the early twentieth century Hopi dances were sold as tourist attractions and crowded with photographers; the elders protested, and for generations no cameras have been allowed at Hopi ceremonies at all. In 1994 the Hopi Tribal Council passed a formal resolution declaring the accumulated field notes, recordings, photographs, and films that depict esoteric Hopi ceremony to be restricted cultural property of the Hopi people, to be withheld from public access. Researchers seeking to work at Hopi pass through an approval process administered by the nation’s own Cultural Preservation Office. Zuni maintains comparable prohibitions on the recording and publication of its rites.

This places a clear and deliberate limit on any outside account, including this one. Much of what an older ethnography wrote down was taken without consent and against the understanding of the people it described — the most notorious case, the ethnographer Frank Hamilton Cushing’s publication of initiated Zuni material in the 1880s, stands in the literature as the founding lesson in what such extraction costs. A responsible account can describe the existence and the public meaning of the kiva, the katsina, and the calendar — that these things are, and roughly what they are for. It must not reconstruct the closed interior, and it must say plainly that it is not doing so. The pueblos drew this line themselves; the line is part of the tradition, and to respect it is to render the tradition accurately, not to leave a gap in it.

The pueblos today

The Pueblo nations are sovereign peoples with a living religion, and every part of that sentence is present-tense. Each is a self-governing nation under its own law, and the count of citizens runs to roughly seventy-five thousand across the pueblos, with the Hopi nation alone above nine thousand. The corn is still planted — dry-farmed on the Hopi and Zuni mesas, irrigated from the river by the eastern pueblos — and the dances still turn the year, some of them open to visitors on the nations’ own terms, many of them not. The black-on-black pottery of San Ildefonso, the Acoma and Zia wares, the silver and the weaving carry the towns’ names into the world’s museums while the substance of the ceremonial year stays home.

That survival was hard-won and recent in its legal protection. From the 1880s until 1978, federal policy made the open practice of Native religion effectively illegal, punishable by fines, imprisonment, and hard labor; the suppression of the Pueblo dances reached deep into the twentieth century, peaking again in the 1920s. It was not until the American Indian Religious Freedom Act, signed in August 1978, that the United States formally undertook to stop interfering in the free exercise of Native religion — a civil liberty the rest of the country had held since the founding, restored to Native peoples only within living memory. The endurance of the kiva religion through three centuries of mission, allotment, and boarding school, and the fact that the most intact ceremonial system in North America belongs to nations who simply refused to let it be photographed, is the reason the Pueblo world is so often called the best-kept of the continent’s traditions.

The pressures have not ended; they have changed register. The katsina, lifted out of its world and sold, has become a fixture of a Southwestern souvenir trade the Hopi did not authorize and do not control — the same commercial weather that turned the flute-player of the rock-art into a curio. Energy development presses on the ancestral landscape of the Greater Chaco region, and the All Pueblo Council of Governors speaks against it on the nations’ behalf. A daughter of Laguna Pueblo, Deb Haaland, served from 2021 as United States Secretary of the Interior, the first Native American to hold a seat in a presidential cabinet, with the federal management of much Pueblo sacred land under her department.

Set among the Native nations of the continent, the Pueblo world is distinct in kind. Where the Plains nations such as the Lakota built a mobile life of the buffalo and the pipe, and the Great Lakes Anishinaabe the woodland world of the manitou and the birchbark scroll, the pueblos are the settled town-builders of the desert: the maize in the irrigated field, the round room in the plaza, the masked powers who bring the rain to a country that gives it grudgingly. They have been farming the same valleys, and dancing the same calendar, since before the cathedrals of Europe were raised — and they intend, on their own terms and behind their own closed doors, to go on.

The adobe town of Taos Pueblo, New Mexico, photographed around 1902, showing the terraced multistory room blocks rising in tiers above the plaza. trialsanderrors, via Wikimedia Commons. CC BY 2.0.

The mesa-top town of Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, photographed around 1899, rising on its sheer sandstone rock above the desert plain. Foto von 1899 (oder früher) Fotograf nicht benannt, via Wikimedia Commons. Public domain.