KERES

Sky City, as Acoma Pueblo is sometimes called, located on a 357-foot-high mesa west of Albuquerque and the Rio Grande in New Mexico, is one of the oldest continually inhabited villages in the United States. There live PUEBLO INDIANS known as Keres (pronounced KAY-res), or Keresan. Other current Keres pueblos are

Laguna, also west of Albuquerque, and Cochiti, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Santo Domingo, and Zia (Sia), north of Albuquerque along the Rio Grande and the Jemez River. The Keres are divided dialectically into a western group (Queres), comprising Acoma and Laguna, and an eastern (Sitsime or Kawaiko) group along the Rio Grande. Keresan is a language isolate of an undetermined phylum, that is, with no other known linguistic family members.

Agriculture was central to the Keres way of life, complemented by hunting and gathering. In contrast to the HOPI and ZUNI, who had pueblos to the west, the Keres and other Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande region inhabited adobe, rather than stone, houses and built circular, rather than rectangular, kivas. Each of the main pueblos, along with a number of politically related satellite pueblos, formed an economic and political unit and had its own variations of Keres traditions. Knowledge of complex mythologies was preserved by societies. The member of longest standing in the Flint Society was next in line to be the cacique, or headman, of the village.

Keres painted olla

According to the Keres creation myth, E-yet-e-co, the Mother of All Life, called the people from the underworld to live on Earth. The first humans emerged from sipapu, considered by Pueblo Indians to be the entrance to the underworld and spirit world, thus the place where the dead would again journey. Keres beliefs, as was the case with all Pueblo Indians, were celebrated in elaborate dances, such as the Corn Dance and Rain Dance.

As both tribal tradition and archaeological evidence indicate, the Keres drifted from the north and settled along Rio de los Frijoles (Bean River), known to the Indians as

Tyuonyi, where they made homes in the cliffs on the Paja-rito Plateau in the 12th and 13 th centuries (see SOUTH WEST cultures). Before the coming of Europeans, the Keres had moved farther to the south, settling in their present-day pueblo locations. The arrival of the Spanish in the region changed the life of the Pueblo Indians. An expedition under Francisco Vasquez de Coronado explored the

Keres shell pendant with turquoise, jet, and white shell inlays

Region in 1540. Antonio de Espejo had contact with the Acoma and other Pueblo Indians in 1582. In 1598, Juan de Onate ordered an attack on Acoma after the killing of Spanish emissaries, slaughtering many of the inhabitants and sending others into slavery to demonstrate the harsh terms of Spanish rule. Keres of Cochiti and San Felipe plotted a revolt in 1650 along with TIWA and TOWA (JEMEZ), but the plan was disclosed and nine leaders were hanged. In 1680, the successful revolt known as the Pueblo Rebellion, or Great Pueblo Revolt, in which Keres and other tribes participated, temporarily won the Southwest back for Native Americans until reconquest by the Spanish in 1692. Yet the Keres identity and those of its seven ancient pueblos endured through the subsequent Spanish period, then through the Mexican and American periods as well.

The ancient sun symbol of the Zia as drawn on a pot by an anonymous potter—a red ring on white with three rays emanating from each of the four cardinal directions with two triangular eyes and a rectangular mouth in black—was altered to a red sun against a field of gold without the eyes and mouth to serve as the state of New Mexico’s flag, starting in 1925. The Zia Indians use the sun symbol against a field of white and without the eyes and mouth for their own flag.