The Taos Indians and the Battle for Blue Lake

R. C. Gordon-McCutchan is a historian, and this Red Crane Books study is the standard scholarly history of the roughly sixty-year campaign by Taos Pueblo to recover Blue Lake, a site of central ceremonial importance, from federal control, culminating in its return in 1970. Its strength is that it documents both the political and legal campaign and Taos Pueblo's own deliberate decision, maintained throughout, not to describe its ceremonial life or the sacred significance of Blue Lake in support of that campaign, choosing legal and political argument instead. Its limit is that the book stops at the historical campaign, so a claim about the site's ceremonial use today needs a source Taos Pueblo has itself sanctioned, given that same standing reticence.