Keres Erotic

Keres is less a single tribe than a shared tongue. Seven pueblos in New Mexico speak Keresan, a language with no proven relatives anywhere, and each of those pueblos is a sovereign nation with its own government and patron saint. What binds them is speech, a common account of emergence into this world, and a way of organizing village life that has outlasted more than four centuries of Spanish, Mexican and American rule. The pueblos fall into two branches. The western Keres are Acoma, whose old town on a sandstone mesa has stood for more than 800 years, and Laguna, a cluster of villages along the Rio San José. The eastern Keres live on the Rio Grande at Cochiti, San Felipe and Santo Domingo, also called Kewa, and along the Jemez River at Zia and at Santa Ana, which calls itself Tamaya. The neighbors speak Tewa, Tiwa, Towa, Zuni, Navajo or Apache, and none of those is related to Keresan. Its western and eastern forms differ enough that some linguists count them as two languages. Several pueblos keep it an oral language and discourage outsiders from recording it, while an immersion school at Cochiti teaches it to young children.

History here has sharp edges. In 1599 Juan de Oñate's soldiers stormed Acoma to avenge the deaths of his nephew and several of his men. They killed hundreds and sentenced the survivors to servitude, and men over 25 were condemned to lose a foot. Keres towns joined the 1680 Pueblo Revolt that drove the Spanish out for twelve years, and Laguna was formally founded around 1699 by refugees who regrouped after the Spanish returned. The silver-capped canes Abraham Lincoln gave pueblo governors in 1863 still pass from one governor to the next. The twentieth century brought the Jackpile uranium mine to Laguna land and a federal dam whose seepage waterlogged Cochiti fields. Through all of it, religion has run on two tracks. Each pueblo keeps its Catholic saint's day with public dances, and the corn dance at Santo Domingo on August 4 draws hundreds of dancers. Beneath that runs an older ceremonial life of matrilineal clans, curing societies and, in the eastern pueblos, paired Turquoise and Squash kiva groups. Much of it is closed to outsiders, and photography is barred at most dances. Craft carries the identity outward: thin-walled Acoma pottery with fine painted designs, Cochiti drums, the storyteller figures Helen Cordero first shaped in 1964, and Santo Domingo heishi beadwork. Laguna raised the novelist Leslie Marmon Silko and Deb Haaland, the first Native American cabinet secretary.