Zuni Pueblo

Zuni is the place the Spanish were looking for. The pueblos of the Zuni valley — Hawikuh and the others — were the Cíbola of the legend, the Seven Cities of Gold that Esteban's account had promised and Coronado came north to conquer in 1540. The Zuni were living in the valley when the expedition arrived — the six or seven large pueblos on the floodplain, hundreds of rooms of sandstone and adobe, the trade hub that connected the Southwest to Mesoamerica. Coronado took Hawikuh and made it his headquarters; the gold wasn't there, but the Zuni were.

The pueblos the Spanish found are the ancestors of the one that's there — the Zuni moved to the present site after the 1680 revolt, when the people fortified on the mesa and then came down to rebuild on the river. Hawikuh's ruins are on the ridge where Coronado's men first saw it; the mission church's walls are still in the rubble. The Zuni who live in the valley now are the descendants of the people the Spanish conquered and couldn't hold — the pueblo that has been continuously occupied since before the contact, on the ground the archaeology says has been Zuni since the thirteenth century.

The Zuni kept the language and the religion — the pueblo is one of the most conservative of the Southwest, the ceremonies and the kivas and the lifeways maintained through the mission period and the American one. The Zuni fetish carvings and the inlay jewelry are the living art; the Shalako ceremony is the annual renewal the outside world has been allowed to see. The pueblo is a sovereign nation on the land it has always been on.

Zuni is the archive's Cíbola file — the place that was the myth the Spanish chased, the valley where the Seven Cities turned out to be real pueblos that outlasted the empire that conquered them, the community that is still the Zuni homeland after five hundred years of contact.