The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee

by David Treuer

  * * *

  —

  “ACOMA IS CONSIDERED one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America,” Brian Vallo of Acoma Pueblo says, as we visit in what is perhaps one of the most beautiful offices in America, on the campus of the School for Advanced Research in Santa Fe. Brian is quick to laugh, self-effacing, with a magical way of mixing modesty, humor, shyness, and power. At fifty, he is well-built, with black hair, a large face, and a strength and delicacy to both his words and his movements that I think of as fundamentally “Pueblo.” Sitting west of Albuquerque off Interstate 40, the village was settled around 1100 CE, on a sandstone mesa that rises 350 feet from the valley floor. “One of the landmarks on the mesa top is the symbol of contact that has had significant impact on our lifeway,” continues Vallo, “and that’s the mission church. It’s the largest earthen structure in North America. Completed in 1629. There was an obscene amount of materials, sand and stone, carried on the backs of Acoma men, women, and children to the mesa top to build the church. Not willing labor. The interesting thing about it is that it is sitting on top of a ceremonial structure that was part of the original village.”

  Acoma has been populated for more than a thousand years, but in the last three hundred or so, most of the community moved to Acomita, sixteen miles north of the old Pueblo. Acomita has a more reliable source of surface water and is better for crops and grazing and village life. Acoma continues to serve as the cultural and social home of close to six thousand tribal members, but only fifteen families live there year-round. By choice of the community it has no running water and no electricity. “We want to retain the integrity of the site,” Vallo says. “It’s occupied, but not full-time by the entire community.”

  He tells me about his upbringing. “I am born into my mother’s clan, the Sun Clan, which is very large. My father’s clan is Eagle, that’s my small clan.” He jokes that the only time his small clan is relevant is at birth, when his paternal aunts washed him, and again at death, when they will wash him again. And yet he was raised and influenced by his paternal grandparents. “My father was in the Air Force, so he, my mom, and I were traveling around the country. Upon our return to Acoma I spent a great amount of time in the home of my grandparents, tending to the sheep herd and farming.” As a result of his upbringing, Vallo says, “I found myself listening to conversations among old people most kids my age didn’t experience.” Vallo’s grandfather had gone to the Indian school, but after fourth grade, he ran away and came back home. He became a traditional leader who raised sheep. “It was very clear that my paternal grandfather was concerned about me being introduced into our cultural lifeways in preparation for the responsibilities I would eventually have as an Acoma man.”

  At the time Vallo was coming up, in the 1970s, the Bureau of Indian Affairs had a strong presence in the community, but it was a time of big change. “There was a BIA day school in Acomita, but a new elementary school was being constructed, and a new hospital. I had this fear of having to leave the day school to go to this giant new school,” Vallo remembers. He spoke Acoma fluently. “It was a first language. It’s all we spoke. So communicating with my peers in school was in Acoma. We joked around. It was the best way we knew how to communicate with each other. And you got home and it was all you heard. I had a hard time with English. But I eventually picked it up. I think I enjoyed my elementary school years in the old day school, where my parents had also attended school. And this transition to the new school was freaking me out! My mother’s side of the family was huge and I have tons of cousins. Never a shortage of playmates.” The cousins helped with the animals as much as they played together. “My grandfather had close to eight hundred sheep at the time. Raising that herd involved the entire family, other community members, and Native sheepherders. Even those of us who were children at the time.”

  Vallo’s father eventually quit the military and came back to New Mexico, but he went to work for the BIA and was always on the road. The family remained rooted in Acoma. Brian went to the public school on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation ten miles east of Acoma. He survived the transition to a different school and a different community, but he hated high school. “I thought it was a waste of time.” For Brian, as for a lot of Indian kids, there wasn’t so much a split between “old ways” and “new ways.” There was just . . . life. “By then we were still raising sheep. Still planting. Nothing really changed. My grandparents were getting older. The herd was reduced by half. It wasn’t as much work, but it was still involved.”

  Both of the houses Vallo lived in growing up were constructed by his grandfathers of sandstone and mud. “My maternal grandmother’s house was a four-room house. We had an outhouse, it wasn’t until later we had indoor plumbing.” That way of life was changing, too. “Eventually some of my classmates and their families, as a result of HUD housing, were detaching themselves from the extended family unit. Moving into their own homes.” Vallo remembers looking at them and thinking how lucky they were—“their own bedrooms, a toilet.” His grandparents moved into HUD housing when he was in high school. “You could get a HUD home if you were within a certain income range. Low-income housing. My father, thankfully, had a good job with the government, my mother was working for the tribe, and they exceeded the requirements for housing. So we ended up living next door to my grandmother’s house in a mobile home. We thought it was so awesome! We had our own rooms. We had the avocado-green carpeting in the living room. We thought, ‘This is great.’” His cousins continued to live nearby. “It was a good life. I think my parents made a lot of sacrifices and worked really hard.” His father, now retired, was still living much as his own father had. “He was involved in the community. Still going out to sheep camp. Still cutting wood. Still planting. I was in awe of it even when I was in high school. He gets things done. He doesn’t bullshit about anything.”

  The childhood Brian describes is different from that of many Indian kids I knew, including mine and Sammy’s, and I can’t help being a little jealous. As hard as it was, it didn’t seem to bear the marks of violence or despair so familiar to so many Indians. When change did come to Acoma, the community weathered it. “There’s no real ownership of land for grazing, but we have communal areas. When I was growing up in the early years my grandfather and other sheep owners were all really respectful of each other and the land resources and they would inform one another which parcels they would use, they talked about it.” Over time, the community shifted from sheep to mostly cattle. There was a bigger market for beef, and the younger generation didn’t know as much about shearing, butchering, and caring for sheep, or managing the land and water resources for them. “All of those things are becoming missing parts of our society, our community. Sign of the times,” Vallo reflects. Still, cattle owners did “a relatively good job at maintaining the historic connection to land. So it’s good there are some who are raising cattle and familiarizing themselves with the land base, know the grasses, think about erosion control, know the fence lines. There is a brain trust of people from many generations still who are familiar with the Acoma land base.”

  Continuity, connection. These things were possible in Acoma in ways not possible elsewhere in large part because of the continuity of their political and religious traditions. Yet Vallo, like many Pueblo people, is incredibly circumspect about the exact nature and content of their foundational myths and totally silent on the subject of ceremony. It’s like the first rule of Fight Club: You don’t talk about Fight Club.

  “So, our creation stories and our emergence stories are where our government begins,” he says cautiously. “Each Pueblo has a version of the creation, emergence, and migration stories. They aren’t terribly different, but they do differ. At the time of emergence there were symbols presented to the people in a basket. There were different things in this basket. One represented leadership and protection of the people. It was foretold during this time of emergence that there would be a time, some
thing would happen, that would cause the people to create this leadership structure. So the Acoma version of this is that at Mesa Verde, somewhere in Mesa Verde, we’re not sure which location, there was this event that caused the larger community to identify the hierarchy of the clan system. There was somewhat of a crisis that caused a need for this action. The story is so powerful and moving.” He pauses, and I can see, in Brian’s face, his mind going over the story, and then filing it away.

  He continues:

  “The hierarchy of the clans was established at this time at that place. The Antelope Clan, Deer, Moss clan, and Evergreen clan. These already existed, but they came together to identify leadership, hierarchy. The symbol was clear. And everyone knew what to do. So the Pueblos have what are called war chiefs and they represent these deities. The hierarchy then also accepted the responsibility to appoint the men from the larger community to serve in the capacity of war chief, their key role being providing protection for the people and guiding the migration. At that time there was a particular cycle they were following—a process of monitoring the sun and moon, the solar and lunar cycles. This process of monitoring was just evolving at that time. At the end of each cycle that core group of clans would convene to identity the next group of war chiefs. There were three war chiefs. That process continued as the migration continued. And so it was those war chiefs met with other leaders and laid out the path to make sure the migration would be safe and would be in line with what was prescribed at the time of emergence. This process of selecting leadership still exists today.”

  From Chaco, the groups dispersed. The Acoma and other groups continued southward, and the Acoma reached the site to which they gave their name. “When Acoma was discovered they purified the site, before people ascended the mesa top. The hierarchy met each clan group that ascended the mesa, each who offered their purpose and contribution. In other words, they had to justify their stay at Acoma. So Sun Clan leaders asked if they could stay and named their contribution, which satisfied the hierarchy, who told them they were welcome. Each clan who was welcomed was assigned an area where they would build their dwellings. This followed for each clan group.” There were around thirty-two clans who settled Acoma, Vallo believes. “Today we are down to thirteen. Of the core clan groups we only have the Antelope left.”

  I’m fascinated by the way in which the Pueblos’ own brand of political and civil government is rooted in the very real myth of their migration, just as America’s founding documents are vested in the myths of its own migratory story. First contact, needless to say, complicated the Pueblo story.

  “So when the Spanish arrived, and the terrible experience that came with them—the Church, Catholicism was introduced, the next thing that came with that was the demand that we needed to establish a government. And so a Spanish style of government was introduced. The king of Spain sent each of the Pueblos three silver-capped wooden canes, representing staffs of authority.” These wooden staffs continue to be used today, and are similar, symbolically, to the war chiefs’ canes. The Acoma people resisted Spanish rule and their paternalistic governance system, creating their own form of government that combined the indigenous and Spanish styles. Or perhaps it is more accurate to say that Spanish impositions were transformed by the Pueblos’ preexisting ways.

  That system required that the Pueblos appoint a governor, a lieutenant governor, and three fiscales, or sheriffs. “Initially, there was no relevance to the people, of course,” Vallo notes. “So what it took was our community and others to really make sense of what this new form of government was going to look like. And its place within the cultural context. So at Acoma what happened was the religious leaders said, ‘We have the Antelope Clan already appointing the war chiefs, let’s give them the task of appointing the governor and other officials, including a twelve-member tribal council.’ So that stuck at Acoma. And the Antelope Clan agreed to having that responsibility. This is how our government and officials and war chiefs are selected. Both rooted in our old ways and a response to the Spanish.”

  So, deeper cultural practices persisted, even while they remained hidden from the resident Franciscan friars and the Spanish—just as the canes in the Pueblos’ myths and the cultural practice of appointing leaders adapted to the framework imposed upon them, and survived it. The canes lasted through Mexico’s control of the Southwest, and in 1863 President Abraham Lincoln provided new canes for the Pueblos. For well over four hundred years, their political practice has remained largely the same, though different clans perform the leadership duties at different Pueblos. And in some places there are now more officials with specific roles.

  “Over time, Pueblo communities have adopted constitutions—IRA government—that impacted some of the Pueblos,” Vallo notes. Of the nineteen Pueblos, six now elect their officials. “They have a more democratic process. Some even select war chiefs this way. It’s very controversial,” says Vallo, delicately. “At Acoma we now have a governor, first lieutenant governor, second lieutenant governor, three fiscales, twelve-member council, tribal writer, and tribal interpreter. Appointments happen every year. Antelope Clan convenes, consults with other leaders, and appoints the new officials.” The same individuals generally serve multiple terms. “I think the Antelope Clan recognizes that continuity and consistency and ability to see initiatives through are very important,” says Vallo. Looked at from their perspective, the government at Acoma seems more stable and enduring than the string of colonial powers who have exerted, or tried to exert, control over the Pueblos. Brian has an answer for this. “We’ve been able to sustain ourselves into the twenty-first century because our process is rooted in this indigenous idea of governance and leadership. The Spanish form of government doesn’t exist in the original form: it transitioned to accommodate the cultural needs. So we maintain the older ways, even the Spanish ways.”

  The fact that some Pueblos adopted IRA constitutions in the 1930s makes coordinating lobbying and other efforts on the federal and state level difficult. “There are some traditional Pueblo people who will say, ‘Well, the government at Laguna was elected so it’s not for real,’” Vallo notes. “At some point because of all the significant effects resulting from the impact of the Spanish on the pueblos, all tribes came together to establish what is known today as the All Pueblo Council of Governors.” The older organization, the All Indian Pueblo Council, was established in 1598, and Vallo claims it is the oldest all-Indian multicommunity council in North America. “It’s a complex thing, our way of doing things. But it’s highly respected.”

  Vallo himself served three consecutive terms as lieutenant governor. He was twenty-two and at New Mexico State University. It was Christmas break and he had been out partying with friends in Albuquerque. The next morning at six, the phone rang. “It’s my dad and he says, ‘You need to come home. Where are you?’” Panicked, Vallo assumed something was wrong. And then he remembered: “Oh man, it’s appointment day.” Vallo’s father has served in many posts—as a councilman, tribal writer, as fiscal, and as governor, a post he held until 2017—a total of thirty-nine years in tribal government. His maternal great-grandfather had been a key player in a big land-claims settlement and served for seventy-two years of his hundred-year life “in every position you can serve in,” including war chief. “I always thought, ‘My uncles served, as did my father and grandfather, they will leave me alone!’” Vallo assumed his father had been appointed again. “So I got up, told my friends I guess I got to go home. I hopped in my truck and stopped at Denny’s because I thought maybe I should eat first. I went into the restaurant and I thought, ‘Get your ass home, this is your dad.’ So I turned around and got some coffee at McDonald’s.” When he arrived home, there were a lot of cars parked at his house. He got scared again. “I thought, ‘Fuck! Someone passed away!’” All his relatives and clan elders were there. “I walk in and my mom starts crying. Everyone is there—grandmothers, aunts. And my mom comes up to me and says in Acoma, �
��I’m so sorry, son.’ I’m still trying to figure out what’s going on. My uncle, the hardline uncle, tells me to sit down. And he tells me, ‘You’ve been appointed to serve the community. So you need to go to Acoma to accept this appointment.’”

  Vallo was in shock. “My response was, ‘I can’t do this. I have to go back to school. I don’t know anything. I don’t know anything about tribal government.’ I was very defensive.” But his uncle pulled him to his feet and said, “You will go and accept this for all the people in this room and for all our relatives.” “Aren’t you guys coming along with me?” Vallo asked. And the uncle said, “You’ll know what to do. You’ll be fine.”

  Vallo went to Acoma to accept the appointment, and at the end of the day he received his cane. The governor’s cane was the Lincoln cane, and the old Spanish and Mexican canes were presented to the lieutenant governors. “When you take those canes home they are treated as though they are living things: they are fed, they are given water.” This is a crucial role, performed by women of the household. Then Vallo contacted his roommates to tell them they’d have to find someone to replace him for a year.

  He didn’t go back for three years; he was reappointed twice. And the experience shifted the focus of his education. After going back to college for a year, Brian was appointed as a cultural-religious leader and realized that he needed to be able to get home quickly when he was needed. He transferred from New Mexico State in southern New Mexico to the University of New Mexico in Albuquerque. And he pursued a new major, anthropology. He continued to be deeply involved with the All Pueblo Council. His upbringing had given him an essential grounding. “The fact I was surrounded by a bunch of old men most of the time, I learned the migration and emergence and creation stories and spoke the language. Today, I’m very much a part of the maintenance of culture at home.”