Ancient Cities

Abó, Quarai, Gran Quivira – even the names of these ancient pueblo cities evoke a sense of the mysterious unknown. On Saturday, I had the opportunity to visit them with the Unity Explorers on a day-long church outing. The three communities are about sixty miles southeast of Albuquerque on the other side of the Sandia and Manzano Mountains at an elevation of 6400’ (Albuquerque is 5000’ above sea level). Red sandstone walls rise up from scrub brush in the middle of nowhere at Quarai. Part of the Salinas Pueblo Missions National Monument, which preserves the remnants of three ancient Indian villages, these pueblos were major trade centers for centuries prior to the arrival of Spanish explorers 400 years ago. Gran Quivira was established as a national monument in 1909, making it one of the oldest sites in the National Park System.

In the distant past, New Mexico was beneath the ocean. Signs of habitatation extend back 10,000 – 12,000 years, making California’s history seem paltry by comparison. Salt taken from nearby dry salt lakes, named las salinas by the Spanish (sal is salt), was an important commodity traded between the people living in these communities and the Pueblo Indians to the west along the Rio Grande, for cotton and pottery, and the nomadic Plains Indians to the east, for bison meat and hides, crucial for their survival. In 1583, an explorer reported this area had “eleven pueblos with a great many people, over 40,000.” Until recently, I thought Pueblo Indians were a tribe rather than a group of tribes named after their style housing. Now I know “Pueblo” includes the Sandia Pueblo, Isleta Pueblo, Acoma Pueblo, Santa Ana Pueblo and many others with their own individual cultural traditions and languages.

What intrigues me about the Salinas Pueblo people is how we currently find ourselves in the same situation they did when their circumstances forced them to change or perish. The French have a saying, “Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.”* “The more things change, the more they stay the same.” I’m also reminded those who do not learn from history are destined to repeat it. It is ironic to me to see how the people of the Salinas Pueblo Missions were faced then with the same choices we face today. There’s only one. When we look beneath the surface, we discover how we are the same.

Gran Quivira’s 800-year history is layered and complex. The people lived on the edge of survival, far from other pueblos and in a town with no permanent water source nearby. They learned to adapt to their environment by hollowing out shallow basins in the ground to catch the runoff of sporadic rains to supplement their wells and roof-fed cisterns. They had a flexible diet that included seasonal wild foods such as piñon nuts, yucca, prickly pears, jackrabbits, deer, pronghorns and bison. Salt from the nearby lakes preserved game meat. They cultivated drought-resistant varieties of corn, beans and squash using dryland farming techniques. Historical documents indicate that drought was one of the leading factors in the abandonment of the pueblo in 1672. When the rains stopped falling in the 1660s, the water-poor pueblo was in mortal danger. Famine quickly followed the drought. A mass grave, for 480 people who starved to death in a single winter, was found. The Franciscans transferred tons of grain, beans and livestock from other missions in armed convoys, but bad roads, Apache raiders and sheer distance made it impossible to feed the Salinas missions. Crops failed year after year. In 1670 the people fled to Abó. Theirs was the first pueblo to move. Within seven years, all three communities were abandoned for the still-flowing waters of the Rio Grande south and west of the mountains. In 1669, Friar Juan Bernal wrote, “For three years no crop has been harvested. In the past year, a great many Indians perished of hunger, lying dead along the roads, in the ravines and in their huts.”

So, why did some of these resilient people, who were able to adapt to so many changes, not change soon enough, not move soon enough, to survive? Some did. Their descendents, now living in the Isleta Pueblo, still speak their Tiwa language. Famine from three years of no harvested crops, and they still did not move to neighboring pueblos? These were people who preserved their cultural heritage by establishing hidden kivas, or ceremonial rooms, in their pueblos when the friars changed church policy and vigorously suppressed native religious practices. People who rebuilt their pueblo of concentric circles surrounding the grand kiva with a square-room pueblo atop earlier construction, who adopted cremation over earlier flexed-position burial practices, who evolved from living in partially-underground pit houses, to jacals of woven wicker walls plastered with mud, to above-ground stone pueblos. Their challenges were not so different from ours today. The “Living” section of yesterday’s Albuquerque Journal featured changing climate zone maps showing new cultivation zones for plants due to higher temperatures. The cover story of Discover magazine (December 2011) is “Water Wars: The Coming Battle Over Earth’s Most Precious Resource.”

Change is uncomfortable. Releasing the familiar and known is difficult. Venturing forth into the unknown is challenging, both individually and collectively. Letting go of what no longer works, to discover what does, requires courage. Both historically and currently that proves to be so. That is what we are facing now. Will we survive, thrive, or not? Who will? Will you? The third year of the famine is here.
*Alphonse Karr, Les Guêpes 1849