Tamaya: The People of Santa Ana Pueblo

You are passing through the lands of the Tamayame, the people of Santa Ana Pueblo, one of New Mexico's nineteen pueblos and one of seven Keresan-speaking communities. In their own language, the village is simply called Tamaya, which translates roughly as "The People", and the Tamayame have lived here, at the edge of the Rio Jemez where it bends toward the Rio Grande, for more than four centuries.

Their ancestors traveled a long road to reach this spot. Archaeological evidence and pueblo oral history both point to the Mesa Verde region as a place of origin, with a great migration southward during the twelve hundreds. After farming for generations at the confluence of the Rio Grande and Rio Jemez, a group of Tamayame crossed to the south bank of the Rio Jemez and founded the village beneath a broad mesa that would become their permanent home.

When Spanish colonizers arrived, the pueblo was assigned a Catholic patron saint and renamed Santa Ana. In fifteen ninety-eight, the Tamayame formally submitted to Spanish rule, and for the next eight decades they endured the encomienda system, forced labor, and the suppression of their ceremonial life. In sixteen eighty, they joined the Pueblo Revolt, the most successful Indigenous uprising against European colonizers in North American history. Led by the Ohkay Owingeh leader Pope, the combined pueblos drove every Spaniard out of New Mexico. The village of Santa Ana was destroyed in the fighting that followed the revolt.

When the Spanish returned under Diego de Vargas in sixteen ninety-three, the Tamayame were forced off their village site and took refuge in the Jemez Mountains. Eventually they returned to the river and rebuilt. The ceremonial center of old Tamaya still stands, maintained and occupied only during feast days, most notably on July twenty-sixth when the corn dance is performed in the plaza before an open mass and communal feast.

In recent decades the Tamayame have rebuilt their nation's land base in remarkable ways. After sixty thousand acres of ancestral grassland known as Tamya Kwii Kee Nee Puu went on the open market in two thousand sixteen, tribal leaders spent eight years working through the federal trust-land process to reacquire it. The transfer was finalized in two thousand twenty-four, returning land that had been out of Pueblo hands for generations. Today the pueblo manages over one hundred forty thousand acres using both traditional ecological knowledge and modern geospatial monitoring. The Tamayame are not a people of the past. They are a sovereign nation in full operation, farming, ranching, governing, and reviving a language and a set of ceremonies that their ancestors refused to surrender.