Puebloans

  • Puebloans
  • Pueblo people
Total population
c. 75,000[1]
Regions with significant populations
Southwestern United States
Particularly: New Mexico and Arizona
Languages
English, Spanish, Hopi, Tanoan languages, Keresan, Keresan Pueblo Sign Language, Zuni
Religion
Kachina religion, Roman Catholicism,[2] minority Protestantism
Pueblos in New Mexico, among other Indigenous lands

The Puebloans, or Pueblo peoples, are Native Americans in the Southwestern United States who share common agricultural, material, and religious practices. Among the currently inhabited Pueblos, Taos, San Ildefonso, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi are some of the most commonly known. Pueblo people speak languages from four different language families, and each Pueblo is further divided culturally by kinship systems and agricultural practices, although all cultivate varieties of corn (maize).

Pueblo peoples have lived in the American Southwest for millennia and descend from the ancestral Puebloans.[3] The term Anasazi is sometimes used to refer to ancestral Pueblo people, but it is now largely avoided. Anasazi is a Navajo word that means Ancient Ones or Ancient Enemy, hence Pueblo peoples' rejection of it (see exonym).[4]

Pueblo is a Spanish term for "village". When Spanish conquest of the Americas began in the 16th-century with the founding of Nuevo México, they came across complex, multistory villages built of adobe, stone and other local materials. New Mexico contains the largest number of federally recognized Pueblo communities, though some Pueblo communities also live in Arizona and Texas and along the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers and their tributaries.

Pueblo nations have maintained much of their traditional cultures, which center around agricultural practices, a tight-knit community revolving around family clans, and respect for tradition. Puebloans have been remarkably adept at preserving their culture and core religious beliefs, including developing syncretic Pueblo Christianity.[5] Exact numbers of Pueblo peoples are unknown but, in the 21st century, some 75,000 Pueblo people live predominantly in New Mexico and Arizona, but also in Texas and elsewhere.[1]

  1. ^ a b "Pueblo Indians – History & Facts". Encyclopedia Britannica. Retrieved 3 June 2021.
  2. ^ "Rio Grande Pueblos". American National History Museum. Retrieved 6 August 2022.
  3. ^ McGuire, Randall H. (2011). Glowacki, Donna M.; Van Keuren, Scott (eds.). Religious Transformation in the Late Pre-Hispanic Pueblo World. Tucson: University of Arizona Press. ISBN 9780816503988.
  4. ^ Cordell, Linda (1994). Ancient Pueblo Peoples. St. Remy Press and Smithsonian Institution. pp. 18–19. ISBN 0-89599-038-5.
  5. ^ Sando, Joe S. (1992). Pueblo nations : eight centuries of Pueblo Indian history (1st ed.). Santa Fe, New Mexico: Clear Light. ISBN 0940666170. OCLC 24174245.