Joseph Aguilar

Where the Water Cuts Through

Pajarito Plateau, the ancestral homeland of many Pueblo communities, is situated along the western slopes of the Jemez Mountains in north-central New Mexico. The mesas and canyons of soft tuff (rock composed of volcanic ash) that comprise the plateau are younger, in stratigraphic terms, than the much harder igneous basalt formations over which they lie. A cap of river gravels atop the basalt mesa known as Tunyo, north of San Ildefonso Pueblo, has been interpreted to be the remnant of an ancient lake bed that encompassed much of the Española and Pojoaque Basins, where the Pueblos of Santa Clara and San Ildefonso are now located.

South of San Ildefonso, at the historic Otowi Bridge across the Rio Grande, and at the mouth of what is now known as White Rock Canyon, this lake is presumed to have been naturally dammed by hard basalt formations geologically similar to those at Tunyo. Over time, the dam was weakened by the mounting pressure of the lake, and eventually water cut through, creating the steep walls of the canyons south of San Ildefonso Pueblo.

Since that geological event millennia ago, the water of the ancient lake has settled, found its path, and helped shape the nature of the Rio Grande in this region. In more recent times, the people of San Ildefonso came to inhabit the Pajarito Plateau and eventually the valley that was created. Before San Ildefonso Pueblo was inhabited, our ancestors resided in a village named Perage, directly west of the Pueblo. The Rio Grande waters cut through the contemporary villages of San Ildefonso and Perage.

Many Pueblos today are known by the names imposed on them by early Spanish settlers in the Pueblo world. For example, the colonial name San Ildefonso Pueblo derives from the name of the seventh-century archbishop of Toledo, Ildephonsus. The term Pueblo (Spanish for “village” or “small town”) has itself become a universally accepted way to identify the Indigenous inhabitants of the North American Southwest. However, all Pueblos have a unique name for their respective communities in their own Indigenous languages—names that differ from those assigned to them by settlers. For Tewa of San Ildefonso, our community is, and always will be, P’o Woe-geh Owingeh: “Village Where the Water Cuts Through.”

Just as Pueblos are given names by outsiders, so too are Pueblo pottery pieces. Designations given to Pueblo pottery by outsiders, primarily by American anthropologists, are vague referents to regional or stylistic patterns observed in the material record, and do not usually reflect the nature of the pottery they claim to represent. Nonetheless, in the case of this beautiful ceramic, the designated name is an appropriate descriptor because the vessel is representative of the place and people of P’o Woe-geh Owingeh.