Ohkay Owingeh (San Juan)

Ohkay Owingeh Mission

In 2005 San Juan Pueblo officially changed its name back to the original name (before the Spanish arrived): Ohkay Owingeh (meaning: Place of the strong people). There are numerous ancient pueblos in the countryside around today's primary village of Ohkay Owingeh that have been archaeologically excavated and dated, but none of those excavations have yielded a date for the establishment of the village on the east side of the Rio Grande that was discovered by Don Juan de Oñaté in 1597.

The people of Ohkay Owingeh speak Tewa, and may have come to the Rio Grande area from southwestern Colorado or from the San Luis Valley in central Colorado. There is an archaeological record that possibly tracks their ancestors as they moved downstream through the valleys of the Ojo Caliente and Chama Rivers to the Rio Grande in the 1300 and 1400s. There is also an archaeological history showing there were Tanoan groups living in the area for hundreds of years before that.

Spanish conquistador Don Juan de Oñate took control of Ohkay Owingeh in 1598, renaming it San Juan de los Caballeros (after his patron saint, John the Baptist). He established the first Spanish capitol of Nuevo Mexico across the Rio Grande in the village of Yugue-Yunqué, an area he renamed San Gabriel. In 1608, the capitol was moved south to an uninhabited area that became the Santa Fe we know today.

After 80 years of progressively deteriorating living conditions under the Spanish, the tribe participated in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 (one of the revolt's ringleaders, Popé, was an Ohkay Owingeh shaman) and helped to expel the Spanish from Nuevo Mexico for 12 years. However, when the Spanish returned in 1692, Popé had died, that tribal unity had collapsed and the individual pueblos were relatively easy for the Spanish to reconquer.

Today, Ohkay Owingeh is the largest Tewa-speaking pueblo (in population and land) but few of the younger generations are interested in carrying on with many of the tribe's traditional arts and crafts (such as the making of pottery, weaving of baskets and knapping of flint). The pueblo is home to the Eight Northern Indian Pueblos Council, the Oke-Oweenge Arts Cooperative, the San Juan Lakes Recreation Area and the Ohkay Casino & Resort. The tribe's Tsay Corporation is one of northern New Mexico's largest private employers. With the tribe's modern foray into casino operations, the younger members of the tribe say it's much easier to make a living flipping burgers, dealing cards or working security jobs than pursuing the production of traditional arts and crafts. This has become a problem everywhere there are Indian casinos, no matter who the tribe is.