In the USA, we all are immigrants, all travelers from another land. But in the American Southwest, the past remains to remind us that we are the recent arrivals, that Native Americans arrived here long ago and adapted to living here.

In some places the Native Americans consciously protected their culture from the influence of the new immigrants from Europe. One such place is Acoma Pueblo, which is a village located atop a flat-topped tower of stone called a mesa. The word pueblo comes from the Pueblo Indians, Native American peoples, including the Hopi, Zuñi, and Taos, descendants of the cliff-dwelling Anasazi peoples. These people developed unique village communities to which they lent their name: pueblo. Typically those villages consist of flat-roofed adobe, a sun-dried brick of clay and straw or stone apartment dwellings in groups sometimes several stories high. Such as those at Acoma Pueblo.

Acoma Pueblo has been continuously inhabited by Pueblo Indians since ancient times. On top of the mesa, the adobe apartments stand today as they have for centuries. A more recent addition is a church, now hundreds of years old, but without a resident priest. There is a priest who visits by invitation. After years of struggle with the Church, the people finally accepted the Catholic faith, but never gave up their own beliefs. To protect their culture, they limit the visits of outsiders. Their church on top of the mesa incorporates their own spiritual symbols. Outside its doors is a cemetery 40 feet deep with layers of ancestors 'replanted', as the Acoma say, in earth hauled up from below on the backs of Acoma women, basketful by basketful.

The mesa upon which the village stands has sheer rock cliffs. Standing on the edge with the wind and sun equally strong on your face, you look across the flat landscape to where other mesas rise in the distance. There is safety here, in being able to see the approach of enemies, and having a position atop the stone tower, making it difficult to attack and easy to defend. But it is a difficult place, too, exposed to the elements and requiring a lot of effort to supply. There is a way up and down, and we climbed down it, down the stone steps with handholds carved into the rock walls, carved so long ago and used by generations of this tribe. Climbing with the ghosts of the ancients, on the stones rounded from their footsteps, down to the semi-arid grassland below, punctuated with cottonwood trees dressed in golden foliage aglow in the afternoon sun. Down to a road with the occasional adobe house, like the ones on the mesa. Rising from this floor were other amazing rock formations. Smaller, fractured towers of stone, smoothed and rounded by the wind.

Part 2: An infinite variety of forever vistas

this travelogue is part of the subside travelzine
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