Tewa Erotic

The Tewa are a Pueblo people of the northern Rio Grande, holding the stretch of valley between Santa Fe and Española that carries their name. Six villages sit there: Ohkay Owingeh, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Nambé, Pojoaque and Tesuque. A seventh, Hano, stands on the Hopi First Mesa in Arizona, some three hundred miles west, founded by Tewa families who left the Galisteo Basin around 1696 and did not return. Their descendants still speak Tewa there, inside a Hopi village, three centuries later. That is the first thing to understand about the Tewa: they hold, and they do it deliberately.

Their language belongs to the Tanoan branch of Kiowa-Tanoan, a cousin of the Tiwa spoken at Taos and Isleta, the Towa of Jemez, and at a greater distance the Kiowa language of the southern Plains. It is essentially unwritten, and that is a decision rather than an accident. Several Tewa communities have declined to develop an orthography or to license outside linguistic work, on the view that a language set down on paper is a language that can be carried off and used by people it does not belong to. It is taught at home and in the kiva.

Each village is divided into two halves, Summer People and Winter People, each with its own cacique, and authority passes between them at set points in the year. Catholicism sits on top of that arrangement without dissolving it. The saint's day feasts are genuine and well attended, and the dances held on them answer to an older calendar. Cameras are not permitted, and the rule is enforced.

Two events anchor the modern history. In 1680 Po'pay, a Tewa religious leader from Ohkay Owingeh, coordinated the Pueblo Revolt and drove the Spanish out of New Mexico for twelve years; his statue is one of the two representing the state in the US Capitol. In 1943 the government put Los Alamos on the Pajarito Plateau, ancestral Tewa ground overlooking Santa Clara and San Ildefonso, and the pueblos have been arguing with that neighbor over land, water and contamination ever since. Running alongside both, the pottery: Maria and Julian Martinez of San Ildefonso worked out the black-on-black finish around 1920 and made the pueblo's name worldwide, while Santa Clara built its reputation on deeply carved black and red ware. It remains a working trade rather than a heritage demonstration, and the good pieces are expensive for a reason.