TIWA

The Taos Pueblo stands where it has stood for more than six centuries. Its two multistoried house groupings, North Town and South Town buildings, constructed of adobe brick, represent an ancient configuration. Doors and glass windows have been added, but not electricity or running water. Taos, or Ilahai, for “red willow place,” has become a popular tourist stop, but many of the Tiwa Indians who live there, although they count on tourism for income, live by ancient ways, planting nearby fields, holding traditional ceremonies in their underground sacred chambers known as kivas, and working in ancient crafts.

The Tiwa—their name pronounced TI-wah and also appearing as Tiwan, Tihua, Tigua, Tiguex—along with the TEWA and TOWA (JEMEZ), were a Kiowa-Tanoan-speaking people of the Southwest Culture Area (see PUEBLO INDIANS and SOUTHWEST INDIANS). The pueblos of the Tiwa are discussed as three geographic groupings: Taos and Picuris, on the upper Rio Grande in present-day northern New Mexico; Sandia and Isleta, north and south of present-day Albuquerque; and Ysleta del Sur, in the limits of present-day El Paso, in southwestern Texas, and other pueblos across the Rio Grande in present-day Chihuahua, Mexico. Perhaps as many as 40 other Tiwa pueblos were scattered throughout these three areas, the villagers proficient in farming. By the time the Spanish arrived in the region with the 1540 expedition of Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, many villages had been abandoned, in large part due to attacks by raiding tribes such as the APACHE and NAVAJO. Some Tiwa were relocated to missions by the Spanish to serve as a workforce. Some fled to other tribes during the period following the Pueblo Rebellion against the Spanish in 1680, led by Pope of the Tewa, which drove the Spanish from the region until their reconquest in 1692. The Indians of Isleta hid among the HOPI, returning to reestablish their town by 1718. Sandia Indians who also fled west were led back to their homeland by Spanish missionaries and settled at a site near their original pueblo.

The Tiwa and other Pueblo Indians remained under Spanish rule until 1821, the year of Mexico’s independence from Spain. During the U. S.-Mexican War of 1845—48, the Taos Indians, fed up with the kidnapping of their women and their crops and livestock, rebelled against the new occupiers of their homeland, killing the first American governor of New Mexico who was visiting the pueblo, the former trader Charles Bent. Troops under Colonel Sterling Price stormed the pueblo and killed some 200 insurgents; 15 more were executed after a trial.

To the north of Taos is situated Blue Lake, or Ba Whyea, considered a sacred site to the Tiwa. In 1906, the federal government gave control of the lake and the surrounding watershed to the Forest Service. In 1970, after years of protest, lobbying, and legal maneuvering by the Tiwa, the Taos Pueblo regained title to the lake, the first such return of land to Native Americans.

In addition to Taos, Picuris, Isleta, and Sandia are still active and vital pueblos in New Mexico. In Texas the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo has people who claim Tigua (an alternate spelling of Tiwa) ancestry and Piro ancestry, another once populous Tiwa people on both sides of the border, as well as Apache ancestry. Another community, known as Tortugas, in nearby Las Cruces, New Mexico, also consists of Tiwa people.