Pueblo Peoples

Pueblo religion is village religion. Each pueblo holds its own ceremonies, its own societies and its own account of emergence into this world from those below, and of arrival at a middle place where the people were told to stay. The kiva, a chamber usually entered from above, is where much of the work is done, and the small opening in its floor marks the place of emergence.

The ceremonial year is divided between the seasons and, at many pueblos, between moieties or societies, with responsibility for particular ceremonies held by named groups rather than by the village at large. Rain is the constant subject, in a country where the difference between a harvest and a failure is a few weeks of weather.

Almost every pueblo restricts what may be recorded, photographed or repeated, and several close their villages to visitors on ceremonial days. That restriction is not uniform and it is not the atlas's to interpret, so what is described here is the institutions rather than any ceremonial detail. It is worth stating why the restriction exists. Spanish suppression in the seventeenth century, followed by American administrative bans on ceremonies well into the twentieth, taught these communities that what is written down can be used against them.

The Pueblo peoples of the Rio Grande and of the western mesas descend from the ancestral communities archaeologists trace at Chaco Canyon, Mesa Verde and elsewhere, and the collection edited by David Grant Noble sets out that long occupation, its great houses, its roads and the thirteenth century depopulation of the northern San Juan.

Spanish colonisation from 1598 brought missions, forced labour and the public punishment of religious leaders. In 1680, under Pope of Ohkay Owingeh, the pueblos coordinated a revolt across a hundred and fifty miles of country and expelled the Spanish from New Mexico for twelve years. It is the most successful indigenous uprising in North American history, and the reconquest that followed was negotiated as much as imposed, which is part of why so much survived here.

Land and access remain the live religious questions. Taos Pueblo recovered Blue Lake, the source of its emergence account, by act of Congress in 1970 after a campaign of sixty four years, the first occasion on which land rather than money was returned on religious grounds. Pueblo governments have since joined the Bears Ears Inter-Tribal Coalition over that landscape, and have objected repeatedly to oil and gas leasing around Chaco Canyon, which they regard as an ancestral centre and not a ruin.