Religions
Taos Pueblo Religion
Polytheistic (Animist)
Citation Formats
General Reference
APA Style
BibTeX
The religion of Taos Pueblo in northern New Mexico, a community continuously inhabited for roughly a thousand years, whose ceremonial year is bound to places held sacred by the pueblo, among them the lake in the mountains above it. Taos Pueblo keeps its religious life deliberately private, and its ceremonial knowledge is not published. The return of that lake to the pueblo in 1970 was argued and won on religious grounds rather than on economic ones. The atlas records that the tradition is living and closed, and does not describe its ceremonies.
Facts
About This Record
Coverage NoteThis page is shorter than many others in the atlas, and that is a record artifact, not a judgment of how much Taos Pueblo Religion matters. Much of what Taos Pueblo Religion holds is kept in restricted custody, passed on through oral transmission among initiated or authorised practitioners, or both, in the way its restricted tradition note above already sets out, so there is less that outside, publishable sources can responsibly say. A short entry here does not mean Taos Pueblo Religion matters less than a tradition with a long one; it means the atlas can currently say only what it has been permitted to say. If you can point toward documented material the community has authorised for outside use, sign in and open a dispute on this page naming the source; it will be reviewed. 1 Status
Status TodayLiving tradition, practised today 1 Practice
Practice StatusClosed ceremonial knowledge, described but not reproduced 2 Taos Pueblo maintains one of the most consistently documented closed religious traditions in North America: its annual pilgrimage and rites at Blue Lake are private, no outsider is known to have taken part, and this closed stance was central to its decades-long, ultimately successful campaign to have Blue Lake and the surrounding land returned by the United States government in 1970 specifically to protect ceremonies that require it. Origins
Place of OriginTaos Pueblo, northern New Mexico, United States. 1 Taos Pueblo, in northern New Mexico, has been continuously inhabited for roughly a thousand years, and its religion belongs to that same place, its ceremonial year bound to sites the pueblo holds sacred. Cultural Restriction
Restricted TraditionTaos Pueblo keeps its religious life deliberately private and its ceremonial knowledge is not published, a privacy the pueblo has maintained through decades of public litigation over its sacred places. The atlas names that this religious life exists and sets out none of it. 1 Learn More
The Land Congress Returned on Religious Grounds Alone
Taos Pueblo religion is deliberately private. Its ceremonial calendar, its practices and the interior life of its kivas are not published, a privacy the Pueblo has maintained consistently for more than a century, and this article does not attempt to describe them. What is public, and remarkable as a matter of American legal history, is the fight the Pueblo waged to recover Blue Lake, a lake high in the Sangre de Cristo mountains that is the source of the Pueblo's water and the center of its religious life, after it was folded into Carson National Forest in 1906 without the Pueblo's consent.
Taos Pueblo spent more than sixty years pursuing the lake's return through Congress rather than through the courts, and it did so, as the historian R. C. Gordon-McCutchan documents, while consistently declining to argue the case on the economic or recreational grounds that might have made it easier to win, insisting instead that Blue Lake mattered because it was sacred. In 1970 Congress returned roughly forty eight thousand acres including Blue Lake to Taos Pueblo, the first return of federal land to a tribe made explicitly on religious grounds, a precedent cited since in debates over Indigenous religious freedom in the United States. Taos Pueblo religion remains as private today as it was throughout that fight, its central victory public even where its practice is not.
Cross-Tradition Connections
Associated With
Po'pay organized the revolt in secret from Taos Pueblo, and the pueblo's own religious leaders were central to planning it, though the rising was a pan-Pueblo action spanning many distinct communities and languages, not a Taos-specific one.
Objects and Practices of This Tradition
The lake above Taos Pueblo is central to the ceremonial life of the pueblo, and its return in 1970 was argued and won on religious grounds. It previously reached the restricted closure only through a related-to link to Bears Ears.
An outside-published account whose royalties are donated to the pueblo's own children's art center, documenting the Blue Lake land dispute rather than the pueblo's own ceremonial life.
Sources
Reader Challenges (0 open reader challenges)
No disputes yet. Spotted an error or a better source? Open the first one.
Sign in to dispute this or suggest a correction.
View At A Past Year
The atlas records no dated fact of its own for this entry, so there is no other year to choose.