El Morro Valley and the Zuni Mountains, Cibola County

Zuni is a language isolate.

Current Population: 10,000

Language: Zuni (language isolate)

Current Location: 450,000 acres in McKinley & Cibola Counties plus land holdings in Catron County & Apache County, AZ

Early Societal Structure: Exogamous matrilineal clans; multiple kivas; The numbers four and seven are ritual numbers.

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Zuni Traditional Homelands

Tribal member Esther Barela Bemis wrote this piece about her experience as an indigenous woman.

Zuni traditions are rooted in deep and close ties to the mountains, river ways, forests, and deserts. Farming knowledge is integral to the long-term sustainability of Zuni culture and economy. Archaeology suggests that the A:shiwi have been farmers in the general area for 3,000 to 4,000 years. It is now thought that the Ancestral Zuni people have inhabited th

Their religion is a complex ceremonial system base on a belief in the ancestors. There are six specialized esoteric groups, each with restricted membership and its own priesthood, devoted to the worship of a particular group of supernaturals. One way the Zuni people express these cultural traditions is through their art: in painting, pottery, jewelry, and fetish carving. These things have significant meaning, and, to the Zuni, serve to help unite the past with the present.

Garden with Zuni “waffle garden” flood irrigation method

The A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center houses a prized 5-panel mural depicting scenes from the emergence and migration of the A:shiwi to Halona:wa. They also have a map collection, currently on tour. “We have maps in songs and prayers, painted on ceramics, and etched in stone. Our maps aid our memories and give reference to our places of origin – places we have visited, and places we hope to go. Names of places within our territory have been passed down from generation to generation, but in the past 500 years we have been re-mapped."

First Contact

The Zuni people were the first to be contacted by Spanish colonizers. In 1539, Friar Marcos De Niza was seaking the Seven Cities of Gold. He sent the Moorish former-slave Estevanico ahead to scout and preach the word of God to the natives. The Zuni killed Estevanico and De Niza tuned back. He told false tales of the Cities of Gold which led to the arrival of Francisco Vázquez de Coronado.

Stolen Land

With New Mexico statehood in 1848, the United States Government assumed control of Zuni territory. However, continual appropriation and abuse of Zuni lands by the Government and unscrupulous land grabbers led to the shrinkage of Zuni's aboriginal territories and confinement to a reservation a small fraction of the original size of Zuni's original land-use areas.

In 1978, the United States returned ownership of the sacred Salt Lake to Zuni. Located 60 miles south of Zuni Pueblo in Catron County, the Salt Lake is the home of the Zuni’s Salt Mother deity. When water evaporates in the summer, it leaves a layer of salt on the lake bottom, which is harvested by pilgrims, including medicine men coming from Zuni and other neighboring tribes.

In the late 1980's, a successful litigation against the US Government by the Zuni people resulted in partial restitution for lands lost as well as damaged under Governmental administration.