The Mountain People Rise Again

Picuris Pueblo charts a renewed path forward—restoring culture, land, language, and community with resilience and quiet strength

By Daniel Gibson | Photography by Kitty Leaken

“Resilient—that’s how I like to think of our people,” says Governor Wayne Yazza. “We’re fighters. We may be the smallest pueblo in New Mexico, but being small has allowed us to think creatively and to take care of our people.”

Picuris Pueblo, the smallest of New Mexico’s 19 Pueblo communities, was once among the mightiest. Located about 60 miles north of Santa Fe in a valley at the foot of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, it flourished during the same period as the world-renowned Chaco Canyon culture. Its trade routes stretched south into Central America, east onto the Great Plains, and west to the Pacific. When the Spanish explorer Gaspar Castaño de Sosa visited in 1591, he described adobe structures rising seven to nine stories high and estimated the population at 7,000.

Fields of corn, beans, and squash once sprawled across miles of ingeniously engineered hillside terraces designed to capture moisture and soil. These monumental works are believed to have required placing about 40 million pounds of rock along the slopes overlooking the Rio Pueblo and Rio Santa Barbara valleys. Game was abundant, art thrived, and tribal runners carried out rituals along raceways that tied the movement of the sun to communal prosperity.

The arrival of the Spanish in the 16th century brought disease, disruption, and cultural upheaval. American forces followed in the mid-19th century, tightening their hold on the region during the Mexican–American War. Together, these occupations devastated the Picuris. Parts of their lands were abandoned, and even the sacred site where they gathered micaceous clay for pottery was lost to a mining operation in the late 1900s. Poverty and dissolution eroded what had once been a vibrant community.

Yet the people who call themselves Pin, wel, ene—“mountain people”—have begun a remarkable resurgence. The roughly 300 members of Picuris are reclaiming cultural, economic, and environmental foundations long under threat. They have launched new enterprises, restocked their fishing pond, established a health clinic and youth-centered recreation complex, created a small but comprehensive museum, and built enough solar capacity to be energy self-sufficient. Tiwa, their traditional language, is taught in the elementary school. Ceremonial dances are thriving again, pottery is being fired once more, and access to micaceous clay has been restored through both traditional and newly discovered sources. The pueblo has also asserted its water rights and is the first federally recognized Native American Tribe or Pueblo in the U.S. to lead its own DNA analysis to deepen understanding of its origins and lineage. Picuris has even gained visibility as the owner and operator of Santa Fe’s only Native-led lodging, Hotel Santa Fe.

“Resilient—that’s how I like to think of our people,” says Governor Wayne Yazza. “We’re fighters. We may be the smallest pueblo in New Mexico, but being small has allowed us to think creatively and to take care of our people.”

Water remains central to this reemergence. On the flanks of sacred Jicarita Peak, in the Sangre de Cristos, Picuris people maintain shrines, while just below lies Serpent Lake, the headwaters of the Rio Pueblo that once watered expansive farmlands. Many of those fertile acres were lost beginning in the early 1700s, and today the pueblo finds itself fighting for even a small share of the watershed’s natural bounty. This is one of several complex challenges they face.

“It’s an ongoing battle,” Yazza says. “We like to say the Santa Fe Ring still lives,” referring to the long-entrenched network of politicians, land speculators, and attorneys who manipulated legal systems during the Territorial period, often to the detriment of Native communities.

Lt. Governor Craig Quanchello explains that after the 2022 Hermits Peak/Calf Canyon Fire, federal assistance directed to communities on the Mora side of the divide inadvertently strengthened efforts by some residents to divert water from the Rio Pueblo watershed eastward. “The headwaters have been completely diverted through a large concrete headgate high in the watershed,” he says. “There’s no decree spelling out the acre-feet they can take. It operates year-round, and sometimes it takes nearly all the water. The Rio Pueblo turns into puddles, and the fish are killed.”

If the issue ends up in court, the pueblo will need to quantify historical and potential water use—a significant challenge. “There’s an inherent difficulty in determining how much water was used in the past, how much is available now, and how much the pueblo might put to use,” Quanchello says.

The pueblo has encountered fewer obstacles in its pursuit of energy independence. “We’re on the final part of phase two of our solar project,” Yazza says. With assistance from the U.S. Department of Energy, the pueblo installed new solar arrays, upgraded inverters to transform collected electricity into usable current, and is completing a battery storage facility.

“It’s the end of a long dream,” Yazza says. “Being self-sufficient goes a long way toward putting money back into Tribal households and reducing or eliminating utility bills.” The system also ensures stable power for residents dependent on oxygen machines or other medical equipment. In recent years, outages lasting up to four days disrupted emergency communications, spoiled food, and left homes cold in winter. “We wanted redundancy—to keep the lights on—and now we have it.”

The COVID-19 pandemic hit Picuris particularly hard, with high infection rates and prolonged periods of isolation. During that time, officials recognized the need for more on-site recreational facilities, especially for children and teens. “We wanted to give the youth a head start, things we never had growing up, to keep them engaged and out of trouble,” Yazza says.

Using Tribal funds and grants, Picuris built a recreation center that now includes a skateboard park, basketball and volleyball courts, a BMX course, a trampoline area, hiking and walking trails, exercise equipment, and an indoor pool. “The pool is a great safety feature—now we can teach swimming and offer lifeguard certification, which could provide good summer jobs,” Yazza says. The facility is open to residents across the valley, including the nearby community of Peñasco. “We’re all in this valley together. We’re neighbors.”

The pueblo recently established an on-site health center, also open to valley residents. “This is an important step,” Yazza notes. “It means people don’t have to travel to Taos or Santa Fe, or even Albuquerque, which can be especially difficult in winter.”

Cultural preservation is advancing alongside infrastructure. In August 2025, Picuris opened a comprehensive museum that presents the pueblo’s history, values, and aspirations. Displays and photographs depict a once-mighty people reclaiming their heritage, resources, and identity. “It feels good to have a place where our people can learn about where we came from,” Yazza says. “And we can use it to educate visitors as well. We’re not a gaming tribe, so we need new sources of revenue.”

The museum features Chaco-style pottery that demonstrates ancient cultural ties, as well as micaceous pottery created over the past century. Apparel, tools, baskets, and other material objects illustrate a richly developed prehistoric past. Notably, the museum highlights the pueblo’s extensive permaculture farming history, including a settlement on a mesa called Crow Pile, dating back to at least 900 AD. There, 39 kilometers of rock terraces and about 100 pithouses formed one of the largest Upper Rio Grande communities of its time. As one interpretive sign notes, “The entire Picuris Valley was one giant, carefully managed garden.”

Many artifacts on display come from major archaeological excavations conducted in the 1960s in the oldest part of the existing pueblo—a collection unusually extensive for a Native community, given that many tribes forbid such work.

Plans are underway to expand the museum to include a cultural education center with state-of-the-art communications technology for Tiwa classes, pottery and regalia making, craft instruction, and conferences. A small on-site restaurant is a long-term goal.

Picuris also stands apart in the realm of genealogical research. While many tribes avoid DNA studies for fear of misuse, Picuris authorized a comprehensive project analyzing ancient DNA from 16 individuals buried at the pueblo 500 to 700 years ago, alongside genomes from 13 modern members. Comparing these with 590 ancient and modern genomes from the Americas and Siberia, researchers determined that Picuris descends from some of the earliest Indigenous peoples of North America, with genetic links to the 13,000-year-old Clovis culture and to individuals buried at Pueblo Bonito in Chaco Canyon between 800 and 1130 AD.

“Because of our DNA project, we now have a legal basis to be part of discussions about proposed oil and gas drilling around Chaco Canyon,” Quanchello says—a significant consideration as federal agencies debate protections in the surrounding buffer zone.

Across cultural, economic, environmental, and scientific domains, Picuris Pueblo is charting a path forward. Born of this land and shaped over millennia, the people of Picuris are overcoming past hardships and reclaiming their role as enduring contributors to New Mexico’s evolving story.

Every August 10, the pueblo celebrates San Lorenzo Feast Day with footraces, arts and crafts, food booths, ceremonial dances, and the traditional pole climb—an occasion that brings together Native and non-Native communities in a powerful affirmation of continuity, identity, and cultural resilience.

From the Summer 2026 issue