ONE DAY IN THE 1960S, four men with identical suits and haircuts walked into a house at Acoma Pueblo’s Sky City. Tour ambassador Brandon “Turtle” Valdo, whose family began guiding visitors around their ancestral village in the forties, says his great-grandmother complimented the foursome on their style as they signed the guest ledger. “You all look very handsome,” she said. One of the men replied, “You don’t know who we are?”
“Then they all kind of bowed down,” Valdo says, “and said, ‘We’re the Beatles!’ My great-grandmother just said, ‘Oh, okay, you’re the Beatles. Do you want to go on tour or not?’ ”
Everyone wants to tour Sky City, I learn from Valdo. He mentions similarly storied visits from John Wayne, who made a few movies there. On the sunny spring Friday Valdo shows me around the beautiful 367-foot mesa that’s home to one of the oldest continuously inhabited settlements in North America, we encounter another tour in progress. Asked how he’s liking his visit, one group member eagerly replies, “Best day of my life!”
The Sky City mesa offers stunning views.
Ninety-minute tours with Pueblo guides—who are trained by Valdo using knowledge gained from years of oral histories and research, along with his own tour guide DNA—immerse visitors in Acoma history, art, architecture, and lifeways, which date back to around AD 1150. It all starts an hour west of Albuquerque at the imposing Sky City Cultural Center & Haak’u Museum, which was built in 2006 to honor several aspects of Acoma architecture, including Chacoan masonry. Visitors ground themselves in museum displays that include the distinctive traditional Acoma pottery, featuring intricate geometric black and earth-toned designs that indicate flowers, corn, rain, and mountains, among other prizes of nature. Other museum items include sterling silver housewares, for which Acoma people began trading pottery after the advent of the railroad in the 1880s.
Vendors sell art, jewelry, and pottery in the courtyard outside the cultural center. There, I meet Tyanna/Donnie Willie, a seventh-generation Acoma potter and landscape photographer who etches prints with traditional designs. While studying photography in Oregon for high school and college, the gender-fluid artist explains, “I didn’t have a lot of access to pottery, but I didn’t want to forget any of the designs and the stories my mom was passing down to me.”
Guide Gail Toribio leads visitors through Old Acoma Village.
A quick van ride up the sandstone bluff where Old Acoma Village is perched begins the formal tour, which circles the 300-plus adobe and sandstone structures where about 50 tribe members, mostly elders, still live today. Many of them greet us along the route with exquisitely crafted pots and jewelry for sale. Inside the awe-inspiring San Estévan del Rey Mission Church, built between 1629 and 1641, Valdo tells the painful story of his enslaved Acoma ancestors who constructed the massive house of worship under the fierce leadership of Fray Juan Ramírez. The infamously abusive Spanish priest insisted the workers haul timbers from Mount Taylor, 40 miles north, for the viga beams. Valdo segues into the Acoma version of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, during which another resident priest was killed but the church survived.
Most visitors take the shuttle back down the mesa, but more intrepid (and agile) folks can steeply descend via the 300-step staircase hand-carved into a sheer sandstone wall, which provides a window into pre-car pueblo life. Back at the cultural center’s Yaak´a Café (named after the word for corn in Keres), Valdo—who doubles as the restaurant’s manager and talented chef—serves us delicious frybread tacos with red and green chile. While we eat, he reminisces about life growing up on the pueblo, catching jackrabbits with his friends and roasting them over a fire. “I’m a storyteller,” he admits.
DID YOU KNOW?
Acoma Pueblo’s Christmas dances, held from December 25–28, take place inside San Estévan del Rey Mission Church and are open to the public.
He pauses to reflect on just what that means. “You can go to Chaco Canyon or Aztec Ruins or any other place where a non-Native person is giving the tour. They can tell you what they researched, what they think this was. But then you come here, and that’s the beauty of it: We can tell you, That’s what this is for. This is how this is. That’s why we did it. We’re a part of living history.”
Read more: Learn from the people who shaped New Mexico on these guided tours.
The Sky City Cultural Center & Haak’u Museum, founded in 2006, displays traditional Acoma pottery and silverware, highlighting Acoma heritage.
