CHAPTER 1The Turquoise Clan
My mother always said I was born in the middle of a snowstorm. She had gone home to be with my grandparents in Winslow, Arizona, because the Marine Corps had shipped off my dad on a military mission somewhere, and she thought it would be good for her and my older sisters to spend time with her parents. Having given birth to my sisters Zoe, who was one year ahead of me, and Denise, who was one year ahead of Zoe, my mom knew when it was time to go to the hospital. My grandpa drove her there at four in the morning, his windshield wipers a-blazing.
The way my mom told the story, my grandfather was so caught up in the moment that he forgot to put on his trousers. He came in from starting the truck wearing his fedora, a winter coat, and his white flannel long johns. My mother told me she laughed despite her labor pains, and I imagine it must have been the genuine laugh that deepened the dimples in her cheeks and forced her eyes nearly shut. Grandpa looked down and went to retrieve his pants from the back of the house. I must have been born around six in the morning. My mother could not quite remember, and my birth certificate doesn’t specify the time. Regardless, when my mother left the hospital with me, we returned to my grandparents’ home.
I am an enrolled member of the Laguna Pueblo, and home to me is my grandmother’s small rock house beneath the deep red sandstone mesa in the village of Mesita in central New Mexico. I know the whistle of the train below the village like the sound of my own voice. Any time of the year, cedar smoke from outdoor mud ovens lingers in the air as Pueblo women extend the legacy of their mothers through the methodical act of baking bread in traditional ovens.
In Keres, the language of the Laguna Pueblo people, my name means “Crushed Turquoise,” and like my mother and grandmother, I belong to the Turquoise Clan. We are a matrilineal society, so at birth we take our mother’s clan name, and we learn from the women in our families what it means to be Pueblo. For me, those women were Grandma Helen, Auntie Ann, and my mother, Mary Elizabeth, God rest all their souls.
My maternal grandmother, Helen Steele, came from the Laguna Pueblo, about forty miles west of Albuquerque. In my earliest memories of traveling from Albuquerque to Mesita Village, Route 66 was still a two-lane road. You had to cross a narrow metal truss bridge that traversed the Rio Puerco, where a Stuckey’s travel store sat lonely in a gravel parking lot scattered with tufts of high desert grass and tumbleweed. We rarely, if ever, stopped at the Stuckey’s, but when we passed it, I always imagined that my parents would buy me ice cream or candy, not the Indian trinkets it was known for, which reminded tourists they were in Indian country. The trinkets usually consisted of miniature teepees, cardboard drums, and colorful feather headdresses, although the Pueblo Indians live in rock houses and do not wear feather headdresses.
Laguna is one of the handful of Indian pueblos in New Mexico that survived the Spanish and US governments’ attempts at colonization. At one time, hundreds of pueblos dotted New Mexico; today, just nineteen remain. The pueblos were once Spanish Land Grants, and today some of our neighbors are descended from the original Spanish families who came to New Mexico all those centuries ago. Our communities have lived next to each other for hundreds of years, and in many instances people from neighboring villages fell in love and married, mixing our Indian and Spanish blood.
Laguna has six distinct villages. Some are remote, but Route 66, which my grandma called “the road to California,” runs past three of them, including Mesita. Compared to the red sandstone mesa atop gypsum hills to its north, Mesita is a little mesa made of basalt rock. To the west, Mount Taylor looms majestically. Once a mighty volcano, it gave rise and purpose to the lands where my ancestors built their first basalt walls after migrating to the Rio Grande Valley in the late 1200s from places like Chaco Canyon, Bears Ears, Mesa Verde, and other ancient Pueblo villages across the Southwest. Between the village and the big red mesa lie the Rio San Jose, the railroad tracks, and fields of fruit trees, corn, beans, squash, and chile.
My grandma told me that when the railroad tracks were being laid through Laguna land in the late 1800s, her grandmother and aunties sold the workers homemade sheep cheese and home-baked bread. They were some of the pueblo’s first entrepreneurs. My grandma also spoke of her horse named John. After a paved road was built between Mesita and the village of Laguna, John pulled her and her father in a wagon along the smooth, new hardtop.
Laguna Pueblo became a waypoint for people moving west, especially during the Depression. Over the years, people would come through, down on their luck and looking for a better way of life in California, but the Lagunas never felt the Depression because they were farmers and still lived in a bartering economy with no cars, no house payments, and no utilities to speak of. Laguna would not move to a cash economy until the Jackpile Uranium Mine opened in 1950 near the village of Paguate. That mine operated for thirty years; with nine underground and three open-pit mines, it was one of the largest open-pit uranium operations in the world.
For many people, working at the Jackpile Mine was an opportunity to earn a solid paycheck while staying close to home. For others, it was a source of physical hardship and sickness. My cousin lost the hearing in one of his ears from the dynamite they blasted three times a day. Those blasts created the web of underground mines but also cracked the walls of many traditional rock homes in Paguate. During thirty years of dynamite blasts that gouged out vast pieces of land, Laguna’s “progress” came with devastating trade-offs. After the mining company closed its doors and the earth movers and drilling rigs moved on, uranium tailings remained in every gust of wind. It would be more than two decades before the company began repairing the damage.
My maternal grandfather, Tony Toya, came from Jemez Pueblo, which is north and west of Albuquerque. I always knew we were approaching Jemez by the deep red rock mesas in the distance. My grandfather’s ancestors joined Jemez from Pecos Pueblo, now a National Historical Park, in 1838. To visit that pueblo is to realize that centuries ago, it was a thriving Indigenous community and a center of immense trade. The colonization of Pecos Pueblo began in the mid-1500s, and it ultimately forced my grandfather’s ancestors to leave their land for good.
Because it was combined with Pecos Pueblo, Jemez has two Catholic feast days each year—August 2 for the Feast of Saint Persingula, the Catholic patron saint of Pecos, and November 12 for Saint Diego, the patron saint of Jemez. As the story goes, Spanish soldiers were pursuing a group of Jemez men one day in the summer of 1694 when they came to the edge of a mesa. The men had to choose between being captured by the Spanish soldiers or falling to their deaths. They decided to jump off the cliff, and as they did, an image of Saint Diego appeared on the cliff wall, and the men floated down to safety.
Each feast day, the people move in procession with the saint statues from the church and place them in a lavishly decorated shrine in the village plaza. Members of the pueblo dance and sing in honor of the Catholic saints. The women cook rich red and green chile stews, bake bread, make pans of Jemez enchiladas, and open their homes to all visitors. It’s likely one of the few places in America where you can walk into the home of someone you’ve never met and sit down to a traditional Pueblo meal.
Even though we spent more of my childhood days at Mesita Village, some of my most cherished memories were made in Jemez. My great-grandfather Jose Ray Toya lived there in a small rock house close to the plaza. On feast days, we would visit him before things accelerated. Great-grandpa Toya had long black hair that he wore in a ponytail. Sometimes he would let me brush his hair with a hairbrush the circumference of a juice glass that he’d made from many strands of straw bound together with a strip of leather.
When we worked in his cornfield together, Grandpa Toya would talk about the rain and why we pray for it. Watching water from the irrigation ditch fill the rows of corn was like watching a miracle unfold. I didn’t quite make the connection between the water in my grandfather’s field and our traditional ceremonies, but I eventually realized how our songs and dances contributed to the natural cycles and the blessings we received from the earth.
One Saturday early in the morning, my mom packed us all into our black-and-white Buick station wagon for a dance on the Hopi reservation. My grandma called out from the front door for my mom to take the umbrellas. My mother looked up at the sky and replied, “It isn’t going to rain.”
We arrived at one of the mesa-top villages on the Hopi Reservation and put out the folding chairs and stools my mom had brought. Then we all sat watching the dancers and singers beseech the sky for rain. It isn’t easy for a young child to sit for hours, sometimes under the hot sun, as an observer with no active role other than to take in the blessings of ceremonial activity, but I learned patience early, and it has stayed with me.
On that day, it seemed that every observer was there for the same purpose: to pray in unison for the rain that corn needs to grow and thrive in summertime in the desert Southwest. Thick black clouds soon darkened the wide, clear blue sky we’d traveled under, and it began to rain. It rained harder than I had ever felt, and by the time we splashed back to the car on the top of that giant rock, we were soaked with the blessings of Creator. On the way down the mesa, with the rain outpacing our windshield wipers, I saw the grandest waterfalls pouring off the sides of all the mesas we passed. My sisters and I were quiet, almost in disbelief, until my sister Zoe cried out, “Mah-me Koch!” which roughly translates to “Boy! It sure is raining!” My mother laughed, and we all joined her, reveling in the joy of a summer downpour in the high desert.
In Mesita, I would spend hours and hours in the desert, at the river, and climbing the enormous red mesa. My cousins and I hiked almost daily. We could have encountered rattlesnakes or any other danger, but we were kids out to explore the desert. Once, on our way home from the top of the mesa, my cousin Terence got caught in quicksand at the river. We pulled him out with sticks, entirely failing to understand the urgency of the challenge.
Terence and his brother, Paully, were gifted athletes who ran and played baseball through every phase of school. Sometimes, when we were driving here or there with their dad, my uncle Paul, Terence and Paully would challenge each other to a footrace. Uncle Paul would stop the car, and the boys would get out and run to my grandma’s house, my uncle and I cheering them on through the open car window. Although I was inspired at the time, I didn’t start running until I was forty.
I was born into a culture that requires me to give myself over to many obligations. Being Native American is difficult. Once you begin a ceremony, you can’t quit until it’s finished, even if it takes several days. The work isn’t done until the last pot is washed and the floor swept. As a result, I was a teenager when I learned to go without sleep. This has served me well in every campaign job I’ve ever had.
I came into the world as a descendant of the first inhabitants of the North American continent and as the daughter of an immigrant family. My dad is a third-generation Norwegian American, and my middle name is Anne, meant to be pronounced ANN-ah, after my Norwegian great-grandmother. Both that and my last name, Haaland (originally spelled Håland), were Americanized when my Norwegian forebears immigrated to the United States in the late 1800s.
I didn’t grow up debating politics at the dinner table or interning at my dad’s office; my parents never took me to rallies or speeches. I didn’t even know they were Republicans until I started paying attention and voting myself. But I watched them wake up every morning to serve our country, regardless of who worked in the White House, and I knew no other way.
The beauty of working from the ground up is the experience you gain along the way. As your experience builds, it gets easier to know how to instruct and, thus, to lead. I led by example. I learned that from my family—from my father’s marine career and from my mother’s Pueblo culture. I wouldn’t be who I am today without the people who raised me.
CHAPTER 2“Kill the Indian”
My grandmother told me that her father was the first in her family to be sent to an Indian Boarding School. The schools were part of the US government’s policy of forcing Indigenous children to leave their families and cultures to “kill the Indian in him, but save the man,” as army officer Richard Henry Pratt, who founded the Carlisle Indian School, put it in 1892. Grandma said that her dad was put on a train as a child and sent east to Carlisle, the first Native American boarding school in the United States. When my great-grandfather came home, the school administrators had given him a new name: Gaylord Steele.
My mother often repeated that story, so I grew up believing it. Much later, I searched for “Gaylord Steele” in the Carlisle Indian School Digital Resource Center at Dickinson College. Dickinson is in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, about a mile and a half from the site of the Carlisle Indian School, where the US Army War College now stands. Because of its proximity to the school site, and with the help of Native Americans who wanted to ensure that Carlisle’s students were not forgotten, Dickinson created the digital archive, which continues to grow. But I never found “Gaylord Steele” or anyone who fit my great-grandfather’s description in those records. I realized that regardless of where he was sent and what the school had taken from him, he returned to Mesita and his people because he wanted to serve them. He did so by becoming a federal civil servant with the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In addition to farming, he worked as a BIA policeman.
A generation later, the Catholic Church took both my grandparents from their families and communities as eight-year-old children. My grandmother told me that a priest came around to the houses to “gather the children and to put them on the train.” I tried to imagine what that had been like. What would a priest tell a mother to convince her to give up her children? Or did they take the children without their parents’ knowledge or consent? I know that in many communities across the country, priests and city folk were sent out to do the federal government’s bidding, taking children against their parents’ will. Some families hid their children when the authorities came around. The loneliness, physical and mental abuse, foreign surroundings, and foreign food would change a child forever. It created a great rift within families, between those who were forced to leave and those who stayed behind.
In many cases, boarding school survivors returned to their communities unable to speak their native languages. If they were lucky, they had opportunities to relearn and reacquire what they had lost—or, rather, what the federal government, the boarding schools, and the teachers had stolen from them—thereby defying the odds. My grandparents both spoke their native languages fluently, and after their marriage, my grandfather became a fluent Keres speaker out of respect for my grandmother.
My grandma talked about the boarding school—about the loneliness she endured and about how she and the other girls cleaned the church, peeled potatoes, sewed, and ironed. The boys, she said, farmed, built, and fixed things. It was clear from her stories that the schools were not meant to help Indigenous children succeed academically, but rather to train them as servants. The impacts of this education changed Native communities for generations, keeping Indigenous families in the lower tiers of society and inflicting deep and lasting pain. In some cases, after the children were taken away, their families never saw them again; there are school cemeteries to prove it.
The reverence with which the people of my pueblo view our mission churches was centuries in the making. During the assimilation era, many of our country’s religious denominations inflicted cruelty in keeping with the federal policy to beat the culture, traditions, and Native languages out of Indigenous children. Regardless of the heartache the Church inflicted, many Laguna people are deeply religious. My grandmother prayed every bead on her rosary before bed, and responsibilities to the Church didn’t end at home.
When I was in sixth grade at Laguna Elementary School, a big yellow school bus would drop us all off at church about once a week. Nuns, all in gray habits, would greet us, standing like a gauntlet with their arms outstretched to nab any kids who tried to run away before leading us into church for catechism. We learned how people become saints and the names of the patron saints of the Laguna Pueblo churches. They taught us about Jesus dying on the cross and why we receive Communion wafers during church services. I still remember Sister Mariam, who had a gentle smile and a calm, mellifluous voice. In contrast with another sister who once kicked our beloved dog Queenie out from under the pew with her pointed black shoes, Sister Mariam was kind to us and seemed to enjoy the Catholic lessons she taught.
We have elected or appointed officials in our tribal governments who are responsible for the upkeep of the Catholic churches in each of our villages. “Happy Feast Day” resonates in our villages on the saints’ days the Franciscan priests designated centuries ago, and we observe those saints’ days by dancing, singing, cooking, and opening our homes to visitors.
It was at St. Catherine’s Catholic Indian School, located near the Veterans National Cemetery off Highway 84 in Santa Fe, that my grandparents met as children. When they attended in the early 1900s, the school may have been on the outskirts of town, with nary another building or house for miles. My grandmother told me that she came back to Mesita around 1921, when she was thirteen. She would wake at dawn to herd sheep for her father. She learned how to tend her dad’s field and preserve the food they grew, and she cooked while indulging in the joys of pueblo life and spending time with her mother.
My grandfather went back to Jemez, where I suspect he returned to farming, hunting, and ceremonial obligations, although I never had the chance to speak with him about that time in his life.
In the mid-1920s, my grandmother went to Winslow, Arizona, about three and a half hours west of Mesita Village. Her sister had moved there with her husband, and she asked my grandmother to come live with them and help care for their children. When my grandfather learned that my grandmother was relocating to Winslow, he went to Laguna Feast to see her.
In those days, men from the Atchison, Topeka, and Santa Fe Railroad, known as the AT&SF, often came to the pueblo to recruit workers as part of an agreement they’d made in the late 1800s, when the transcontinental railroad began laying track through New Mexico. They needed the Laguna Pueblo’s permission to lay track through Indian land, and they negotiated the easement by promising jobs to any Laguna member who wanted one, women included. The company used feast days and other community gatherings to sign people up to work in various towns along the train route. Many Lagunas worked on the railroad in New Mexico, Arizona, and California, joining thousands of Pueblo people who were part of massive relocation programs that pushed them away from their homes to become plumbers, electricians, clerk typists, and other blue-collar workers. The general view at the time was that if Indians were taken off their lands and separated from their communities, they would essentially become white people. The politicians and others who held this view underestimated people like my grandparents.
On the spot, my grandfather signed up to work for the railroad in Winslow. He and my grandmother were married there and lived in a compound of old boxcars arranged in rows and surrounded by a fence adjacent to the railroad yard. The Pueblo people who worked at the railroad had only a short walk to their shifts, which was good, because many did not own cars.
According to my mother, the compound had community bathrooms and communal outdoor mud ovens; there was a plaza in the middle where people would dance for feast days, and the Laguna people built themselves a Laguna Pueblo village there. The Laguna Pueblo government referred to all the railroad boxcar communities as Laguna Colonies, but my mother always called the place where she grew up the Indian Camp.
She was born there in a boxcar in 1935, the youngest of four children. Old photos of their home show a wooden porch and a woodpile outside the door of the boxcar. My grandma made it nice for them by sewing curtains and keeping the place clean. My grandfather fixed anything that broke and kept the outside of the house in good order. When my mother was old enough to wield an ax, it became her job to chop wood so my grandmother could cook on the wood-burning stove.
My grandfather and other men from the Indian Camp must have worked hard and creatively to bring traditional ceremonies to the Laguna people in Winslow. I was about three years old when I watched my first dance at the Indian Camp. The people also celebrated Laguna Pueblo feast days, honoring the Catholic saints of our respective six villages. That in itself must have been a challenge, considering that the Indian Camp did not have a Catholic saint dedicated to it, or even a church. I don’t know what it took to bring traditional feast days to Winslow, but their arrival ensured that the people of the Laguna Pueblo Indian Camp could continue their traditions.
Grandpa Toya was a stocky man with thick forearms. I mostly saw him in work clothes, although he wore a suit when someone got married and a clean white shirt when my grandmother scheduled a photographer to come to the house every once in a while to take portraits. At other times, he wore cuffed khaki trousers and a denim or flannel button-down shirt with the sleeves rolled up. He had a zippered jacket or hooded sweatshirt and wore a fedora or a railroad cap atop his short, thick black hair.
Whenever we were in Winslow as kids, my mother would take me to the railroad yard to collect my grandfather after his shift. I clearly remember him coming toward us, crossing the web of train tracks with his jacket slung across his back. I would relieve him of his lunchbox and immediately open it to see what leftovers he had. Only when I was much older did I realize that he always saved me part of his lunch on purpose—a deep-red apple or a few saltine crackers. Grandpa had nicknames for all of us. He called my sister Zoe Norske because we were Norwegian and me Twister because, thanks to Elvis Presley, I incessantly danced the twist. Grandpa painted “TWISTER” in red paint on the back of my yellow chair.
Before her children were born, my grandmother also went to work for the railroad. Grandma cleaned diesel train engines, and she managed a night shift of women who scrubbed the engines clean with buckets of kerosene and a brush. I have an old black-and-white photo of my grandmother in her denim work overalls and blue collared shirt staring into the camera—a serious woman with a serious job navigating a colonized world.
Grandma would labor through the night ridding the diesel engines of the gunk and debris that accumulated over time and sending the trains out on time early in the morning, a great service to our country in the midst of industrialization. Then she would return to the family’s boxcar home to make breakfast and get my mom and her siblings off to school. She eventually was able to quit the railroad job and work at home, and when I say “work,” I mean it. My grandma worked from sunup to sundown. She took pride in the way she cleaned, cooked, and ran her household, and she had very high standards for how she cared for the houses we lived in and the people she loved.
Watching my grandmother clean and organize the house and us, I eventually came to realize that she had learned her obsessive housekeeping skills at boarding school. The nuns must have drilled cleanliness into the children, because Indians were thought to be dirty. My grandmother woke before sunrise every morning and cleaned her house from top to bottom. When we stayed with her, we were sent outside to play from morning until bedtime, and even my grandfather never sat on the furniture, to avoid getting it dirty; in Winslow, he watched TV lying on the floor with his head propped up on interlaced fingers. I remember this fondly because I would emulate him. My aunt told me that she once found my grandfather brushing his teeth outside because my grandma had already cleaned the bathroom, and he didn’t want to mess it up.
Beyond the boarding schools, anti-Indian stigma persisted. My mother spoke candidly about being beaten on the hands with a section of green rubber garden hose whenever a Keres word came out of her mouth at the public school she attended in Winslow. My mother’s kindergarten graduation photo shows most of her classmates smiling, but I see anger and sadness on her face.
She spoke once of a time at school when the Indian children were given sour milk instead of the fresh milk given to the white children. She didn’t know whether it was intended to save the school money or to punish the Native kids. She went home and complained to her dad. My grandfather was a natural-born leader who always believed that he and the Pueblo people he lived and worked alongside deserved the same things white folks had. The next day, he stormed into the school, berating the leadership and reminding them that he, too, paid his taxes and that his children, like the others, deserved unspoiled milk.
Grandpa Toya was an athlete, an artist, and a musician. By the time my mother was in high school, he had taught her to play softball, keep score at a baseball game, read music, and play the snare drum. Long before Rosetta Stone and Google Translate, Grandpa could speak Towa, Keres, and English fluently, as well as some Spanish, Hopi, and Navajo. When I consider my grandfather’s many talents and what he was capable of, I often think that he would have thrived at an educational institution worthy of his brilliant mind and spirit, but such institutions were closed to men like him. Instead, he became a diesel train mechanic. He would drive “the wrecker,” a vehicle with all the tools and supplies needed to fix trains, out to the middle of the Arizona desert where stranded trains lay dead on the tracks, and wherever the trains were, he would work to get them moving again. Sometimes he stayed out for days at a time.
My grandparents built a life in Winslow, where they bought a three-bedroom home on Navajo Drive in the Desert View subdivision. The two guest rooms had a Jack-and-Jill closet, which was my favorite thing about the house. I’d go in and out of the closet, from one room to the next, until Grandma got annoyed and sent us outside to play. A chain-link fence surrounded the front yard, and a tall redwood picket fence surrounded the back, separating it from an alley that ran behind the house.
Grandpa always had many goals and worked to achieve them. When my grandmother needed a bedroom added to the house in Mesita, he built it. When my auntie Ann started a new position at the Indian Health Service hospital in Shiprock, he made a nameplate for her desk in the shape of Shiprock, that extraordinary New Mexico geologic formation that the Navajo people called “Winged Rock.” And when he realized that the boys from the Indian Camp needed to play baseball, he started a team.
He involved the whole family in all his endeavors, but baseball was his favorite. My uncles played on the team, my cousin was a batboy, my mom kept score, and my grandma and auntie Ann ran the concession stand. Grandpa would pay my cousins and me a nickel for every foul ball we retrieved. He called the team the Winslow Redskins. Names like that are now viewed as racist, but it’s almost as if he took the name away from our antagonists. The team won regional and state championships, and there were always tall trophies on the fireplace mantel at the house on Navajo Drive.
I loved being with my grandparents, and when my dad was sent for his first tour of duty in Okinawa, we moved in with them at the house on Navajo Drive along with our beagle puppy, Queenie. One early morning, something terrible happened. My sisters and I were still in our pajamas and Queenie was in the front yard, inside the chain-link fence, when my mom saw a dog catcher stop his vehicle, get out, and shoot Queenie with a tranquilizer gun before speeding off down the street. Queenie, terrified, hopped the fence and fled. A great commotion ensued, and my mom ran down the street to find our beloved dog.
My sisters and I cried and hugged for what seemed like hours. When my mom returned without Queenie, we went out to the backyard. The back gate was open, and when we looked left down the alley, we saw my grandpa carrying Queenie, one of her eyes dangling from its socket. That image is seared into my mind as I write this. To me, it is what heroism looks like.
My mother rushed Queenie to the vet, but the dog catcher’s tranquilizer gun cost her an eye. That day, Queenie became my grandfather’s dog.
CHAPTER 3Soul Food
It was on Navajo Drive that I learned to cook by watching my grandmother. When Grandma was in the kitchen, she worked fast and wasn’t one to make room for kids, so I spied on her from my perch on the redwood picnic table under the back porch, cupping my eyes with my hands at the kitchen window. My grandmother, in cotton stockings secured just above her knees, cotton dress, cross-stitch apron, and permed jet-black hair, moved with grace and purpose from kitchen table to stove to sink. She cooked every single day, making either that day’s meals or corn and other foods for the days to come. My grandfather generally grew both blue and white corn in his field at Mesita, and Grandma processed both kinds, boiling the dried corn with ashes, which separated the outer shell of each kernel from the germ. She would drain the cooked corn in a yucca basket in the backyard, steam rising like a plume, before turning the white corn into posole, or hominy, and the blue into tortillas. While I watched, she sometimes forcefully kicked open the screen door with the back of her right foot and exited with a pot of boiling white corn. Other times, she’d bring out trays and trays of round, yeast-risen loaves that jiggled delicately as she walked to the mud oven.
To make tortillas, Grandma would spread the freshly cooked blue kernels between white cotton tea towels on the kitchen table to cool. I would lift the towels when she wasn’t looking and nibble several kernels of the warm, soft corn. The rich, earthy smell of corn will always bring back memories of my grandmother simmering, grinding, and then patting soft, warm ground corn into fresh, thick tortillas. To accompany them, she would make a big pot of ground beef and red chile. She would shred cheese and lettuce and chop tomatoes and onions. My mom would assemble our blue corn enchiladas like open-faced sandwiches with all the toppings. We always ate together as a family, and dinner was the best time of the day.
A bright line separates male and female roles in traditional Pueblo societies. My grandfather provided. He earned the paycheck, chopped the wood, hunted the deer, grew the food, and carried out his part of our customs and traditions. My grandmother ensured that they lived within their means. She processed the food Grandpa brought home, cleaned and polished the house and all its contents, and met his every need for nourishing food, loving companionship, and laundered and pressed clothing. Once, Grandma sent us a photo of my grandfather sitting at the kitchen table with a three-tiered, chocolate-frosted birthday cake with candles on the top. The caption on the back of the photo read, “I baked Dad a three-story cake for his birthday.” Grandma’s food went beyond sustenance; it fed our souls, too.
Grandpa built a mud oven for my grandmother in the backyard in Winslow, and the first time she started a fire to bake bread, a neighbor called the fire department, and a fire truck came screaming down the street and parked in front of her house. After that, the local newspaper, the Winslow Reminder, printed a notice saying that if anyone saw smoke coming from the vicinity of Helen Toya’s house, there was no cause for alarm; it was probably just a fire in her mud oven.
Sometimes Grandma would use the mud oven to roast corn my grandfather harvested from his field in Mesita. He would often take me down to his cornfield, where I helped him to irrigate, hoe weeds, and pick worms off the corn. I would rather have been with my older sisters and cousins, but they would sneak out of the house without telling me. I was the youngest girl, and I was often left behind.
The agricultural fields at Mesita are below and to the north of the village. We often walked there, hoes and rakes in hand, but if Grandpa had a harvest to bring up to the house, we’d ride the short half mile or so on the dirt road in his blue Chevy pickup. Many fields were laid out there in the mineral-rich soil, the product of long-ago volcanos. To the north of those fields is the Rio San José, and north of that, the railroad tracks, and then the mesa. Standing in the field with the red mesa looming over everything was humbling. Next to it, the trains seemed like tiny toys making their way to some unknown destination.
Once while we were in the field, my grandfather made me eat one of the green worms I’d picked off the corn. He told me I would never have stomach problems if I ate it. Out of respect, I did as he said, with no argument. I’ve never had stomach problems, but whether that’s because I ate that worm as a child I’ll never really know. I give the credit to my grandfather, even if he was playing a trick on me.
Corn is a foundational crop of the Pueblo Indians, and my ancestors were some of our country’s first agriculturalists, planting the “three sisters,” corn, beans, and squash, in the quiet valleys and subtle canyons of places like Gran Quivira, Chaco Canyon, and Pecos Pueblo in New Mexico and Bears Ears in Utah. When planted together, the three sisters are complementary, supplying and absorbing important minerals from the soil so that all three thrive. When eaten together, they provide the balance of protein and nutrients our bodies need to be healthy. Our songs, dances, images, and rituals have always sought to preserve the land and the Pueblo way of life for future generations, and that meant ensuring sustenance with every passing year.
Historically, various types of corn yielded different ingredients for stews and bread. When the Spanish came to the Southwest in the mid-1500s, they brought livestock, the conical outdoor hornos we call mud ovens, and wheat, which the Pueblo Indians quickly began using in their staple foods. Now our Pueblos are known for our oven bread. But our songs, traditions, and art involve corn. We pray with ground corn; corn has been and always will be a part of us.
Roasting whole sweet corn in a mud oven requires that the husks stay intact when a harvest of corn is placed on the red embers of a cedarwood fire. We’d work quickly to toss the corn all at once into the domed oven, and then Grandma would pour a bucket of water through the hole in the top. She had mud ready in the wheelbarrow, and she would place a flat rock on the top hole and seal the edges of the oven with mud before covering the opening at the front and sealing that with mud, too. We would then circle the oven and cake mud over any gaps where we saw steam emanating. This process usually took place in the evening; in the early morning, we would go outside, break the seal, and see our beautiful prize. Warm, roasted sweet corn is one of the best things in the world to eat. The flavor of the corn, harvested at the peak of its sweetness, intertwines with the smoky aroma of cedar and makes all the work worthwhile.
We’d pull the roasted corn from the still-warm oven and spread the ears to cool in large metal tubs. We would peel back the husks and use them to tie two ears of corn together so we could hang them to dry under the porch. After several days or a week, Grandma and I would rub two of the whole ears together over the big metal tub to dislodge the kernels. Grandma stored the kernels in cloth flour sacks and took a cup or two out when she cooked sweet corn stew. She and my mother often made a stew with the roasted sweet corn, beef cubes, and roasted and peeled green chile.
“Chili” is short for chili con carne, which originated near the Texas-Mexico border, but New Mexico is known for its red and green chile, pronounced the same way but spelled with an e. Chile plants, an important part of our Pueblo agricultural tradition, blossom and produce green fruits that are six to eight inches long and pointed. When the green peppers are left on the plant to ripen in the sun, the chile turn from green to yellow, orange, and finally red. Green chile is generally roasted and peeled, while red chile is dried and crushed, ground, or blended into a puree. The flavors are completely different, and a person may develop a taste for one or the other, hence New Mexico’s state question: “Red or green?”
After the Spanish brought wheat, Pueblo farmers became adept at growing, harvesting, and grinding it, and my grandmother’s ancestors baked wheat bread to perfection. When baking bread, Grandma would begin by building a fire in the mud oven. I loved the smell of cedar smoke as the oven heated. When the fire was reduced to embers, she’d remove them with a long wooden pole to which she had attached a rag with wire. She would dip the rag into a bucket of water and swirl it around the hearth to clean out the embers and ashes. Once the oven was clean, she’d test it with dry oatmeal. I never timed how long it took for the oatmeal to burn or knew what temperature Grandma found acceptable before she placed the risen dough carefully on the hearth, but through the years, I have done the oatmeal test on the hearth myself, and my bread hasn’t burned or been undercooked.
My grandpa and uncles would go deer hunting during the season, and once, on a Sunday night in Winslow when I was about four years old, I stood at the window waiting for them to come home until my mom finally made me go to bed. I awoke early the next morning and searched every room for my grandpa, but I couldn’t find him. Grandma was in the kitchen, dressed and ready for the day even though it was still dark, making coffee and breakfast. I asked for Grandpa, and she said he was out in the garage.
I opened the door slowly to find four deer lying on the garage floor on blankets. They were lined up facing the same direction, and Grandpa was sleeping on a cot by their heads. He sat up as soon as I turned on the light. Even as a child, I knew enough about my grandfather to know that he had slept near the deer out of respect. The hunters had gotten in late and had not performed a ceremony to welcome the deer to our home or to properly send their spirits off. Grandpa had an obligation to stay with the deer until then.
After breakfast, we brought the deer inside. My grandma and mother laid woven kilts and belts across the animals’ torsos. They placed rings and bracelets on their antlers and laid turquoise beads across their necks and moccasins near their feet. We all prayed with cornmeal, sprinkling it near the animals’ mouths and rubbing it onto their antlers.
My grandpa and uncles took the deer outside and skinned and quartered them. My grandma and mom cut off pieces of meat, meticulously thinning large segments of deer thigh and leg with sharp knives. They salted and hung the pieces to dry, along with the ribs, on cotton rope they’d strung taut between the beams of the back porch.
An abundance of sun and a dry climate gave the Pueblo Indians a perfect way to preserve food: through dehydration. Drying meat, corn, and other foods is how my ancestors stored nourishment for the winter. I learned much later that when the Spanish settlers arrived, the people of Pecos Pueblo in Northern New Mexico, where my grandfather’s family originated, had five years’ worth of food stores for a population of two thousand people. My grandparents’ industriousness has stayed with me since I was that child peering through the kitchen window in Winslow.
Drying deer meat is a time-intensive endeavor; fresh meat is heavy, and there is so much of it. My grandma would hang the meat in the mornings and take it down before it got dark outside. A week or so later, once the meat had dried, we’d take it down for good. Some was stored for future meals, while some of the jerky and ribs were made into deer stew. “You must make the stew with things that deer like to eat,” my grandma told me, like dried sweet corn, hominy, and the local pine nuts known as piñons.
When a member of the community brings home a deer, it is customary to host a deer supper to share the abundance. Women prepare large pots of deer stew and bake bread, and family members drive around the village honking their horns and yelling out their car windows, “Deer supper!” We would take along cupcakes or a can of peaches for the host, and the men would be on hand to tell tales of the hunt. Antlers usually protruded from the steaming pot as the skinned head cooked. Deer head was a prized delicacy reserved for the hunters’ aunties.
For eons, our sustenance depended on the food my ancestors grew, hunted, and preserved. Stew is still our traditional food, but the methods of cooking and obtaining ingredients have changed. When the Spanish brought seven thousand head of livestock to the Southwest in the early 1500s, beef became a stand-in for deer. Today, we don’t always grow our own corn, beans, and squash or even hunt, but the food my grandma taught me to cook will always be considered traditional in Laguna, regardless of whether I grow the ingredients or purchase them at the store.
My grandmother was dedicated to ensuring that our traditions continued, so she cooked stew and baked bread for all our ceremonies. She shared with me the intricacies of her deer stew and the prayers she recited while it cooked. I learned from her both a profound respect for the animals who give their lives so that we can live and the practice of giving something in return for the earth’s daily gifts.
One clear, warm morning when I was eleven, Grandma took me to visit her brother Grandpa Manuel, who lived under the blue blanket of sky with six dogs and dozens of sheep. Perhaps he hadn’t chosen to become a shepherd, but he lived up to an inheritance that was hard to shun. Growing up, Manuel and my grandmother had cared for sheep and knew them as family. Perhaps it was the way the soft lambs looked at birth and how much they needed the guidance of a skillful and compassionate human being.
Manuel might have been lonely and frightened as a visitor in the animals’ domain, but he chose to live away from the village from an early age and knew nothing else. Tsiyuiyea (si-u-E-ye) was his Indian name, and he herded sheep almost all his life. His secluded and demanding existence allowed him to come in only for supplies, feast days, and the sacred ceremonies held twice a year, and he enjoyed a place of high honor where aspects of our Indian culture were concerned. I heard a story that once, he came into the village complaining of a sore leg. He lifted his trousers to reveal a leg swollen with pus from a snakebite. He could survive anything: harsh winters, brutal summers, the pangs of raw nature.
His house stood between two small mesas and a vast expanse of flat, high desert dotted with cedar trees, grama grass, and basalt flows. We called it the Sheep Camp. Back then, Grandma drove a big blue GMC truck with a white top that she used to get places fast and to brush up on her swearing. In this case, I knew I would be safe, because the road to Grandpa Manuel’s was dirt and deserted.
Copyright © 2026 by Debra Anne Haaland
