The Poeh Cultural Center: Tallest Adobe, Living Memory

Just ahead on your left is the Poeh Cultural Center and Museum, operated by the Pueblo of Pojoaque. The name "Poeh" is a Tewa word meaning "path" or "road," and the center was built as exactly that , a pathway back to a culture that was almost completely erased.

Pojoaque Pueblo's history is one of the most dramatic stories of near-extinction and revival among any Native American community in the country. The pueblo was hit by a smallpox epidemic around nineteen hundred and was completely abandoned by nineteen twelve. No one was left. The land sat empty for more than two decades while outsiders moved in and occupied the fields.

In nineteen thirty-four, the call went out: come back. About twelve survivors and their descendants returned, fenced the pueblo's lands, evicted the squatters, and began the work of reconstitution. Pojoaque became a federally recognized reservation in nineteen thirty-six. The challenge was that the community had been so dispersed for so long that most of the ceremonial knowledge, language, and artistic traditions had been fractured.

The Poeh Cultural Center was established in nineteen eighty-seven specifically to address that loss. With a primary focus on the six Tewa-speaking pueblos of northern New Mexico, the museum curates a permanent collection of Pueblo material culture, a photograph archive of historic and contemporary images, and exhibitions that present Pueblo history from within the Pueblo worldview rather than through an outside lens. Its flagship permanent exhibition, "Nah Poeh Meng," uses art, oral tradition, and historical objects to trace an unbroken thread from pre-contact times to the present.

The Poeh Tower, the tallest adobe structure in New Mexico, rises from the center's campus. Adobe is one of the oldest building materials in the Southwest, and the sheer scale of this tower , built with the same sun-dried mud brick used for a thousand years , makes the point quietly but unmistakably: this is not a relic culture. It is a living one, and it is building.

Pojoaque today has a population of roughly two thousand people. The pueblo's enterprises include the Buffalo Thunder Resort and the Cities of Gold Casino, revenue that funds the cultural programs and tribal services the Poeh Center represents.