The Land Congress Returned on Religious Grounds Alone

Taos Pueblo religion is deliberately private. Its ceremonial calendar, its practices and the interior life of its kivas are not published, a privacy the Pueblo has maintained consistently for more than a century, and this article does not attempt to describe them. What is public, and remarkable as a matter of American legal history, is the fight the Pueblo waged to recover Blue Lake, a lake high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains that is the source of the Pueblo's water and the center of its religious life, after it was folded into Carson National Forest in 1906 without the Pueblo's consent.

Taos Pueblo spent more than sixty years pursuing the lake's return through Congress rather than through the courts, and it did so, as the historian R. C. Gordon-McCutchan documents, while consistently declining to argue the case on the economic or recreational grounds that might have made it easier to win, insisting instead that Blue Lake mattered because it was sacred. In 1970 Congress returned roughly forty eight thousand acres including Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo, the first return of federal land to a tribe made explicitly on religious grounds, a precedent cited since in debates over Indigenous religious freedom in the United States. Taos Pueblo religion remains as private today as it was throughout that fight, its central victory public even where its practice is not.