Pueblo Stories--in Tewa--Digitized at the University of New Mexico

When I was a kid growing up on our reservation in the 1960s, I'd sometimes go to the tribal office complex where "Mr. Speirs" was holding a language class. I'm currently doing some research on him, but for now, I want to point you to the materials developed in some of those classes. The materials are stories that have been digitized at the University of New Mexico. They are viewable online.

Illustration in Pehtisye Ay

Pehtsiye Ay - Three Stories in Tewa. (1969), Summer Institute of Linguistics, Santa Ana, California. The three stories are:

• Pho Ts'ay Povi-adi In Poeyeh - Goldilocks and the Three Bears, in the Tewa dialect used at Ohkay Owengeh (San Juan Pueblo)
• To P'f Povi - Little Red Riding Hood, in the Tewa dialect used at Santa Clara Pueblo
• In Pojeh Pehtsude ay - The Three Little Pigs, in the Tewa dialect used at Santa Clara Pueblo.  

The illustration from Pehtsiye Ay is terrific! See the ceiling beams and the deeply inset window? That is what our adobe homes look like. The elk on the wall and the rug on the floor reflect the decor of our homes, and baby bear's clothing and the rocking chair reflect some of the non-Pueblo things we incorporate into our lives. 



The second Pueblo item in the collection is T'owa Vi Hae Panyu I, written by Teresa V. Gutierrez, illustrated by Eloy Suazo. The book is not dated. It was published through the Title VII Project at Santa Clara Pueblo.


The digitized collection includes (as of this writing) 80 different items. The majority are Navajo stories and readers. Here's the title page of Ch'at which is a basal reader in the Dine (Navajo) language developed in cooperation with Rock Point Community School in Chinle, Arizona:

A special thanks here, to Paulita Aguilar at UNM, for sending the link about this collection. She is the curator for the Indigenous Nations Library Program at UNM.

Nora Naranjo-Morse

Last weekend I watched Nora Naranjo-Morse's lecture, given at the National Museum of the American Indian, in 2007. She was there that summer working on the pieces for the "Always Becoming" installation.

Her lecture was part of the Vine Deloria, Jr. Native Writers Series. It is archived on the NMAI website and is about an hour long. She read several poems, including one that especially struck me--for its imagery, for its emotion, for its power. It is called "A Telegram." Prior to reading it, she talked about writing that poem when she was a teenager, and finishing it last year.

"A Telegram" is about learning that her brother had been wounded in Vietnam. The poem she read at NMAI has not yet been published, but an earlier version of it is in Hirschfelder and Singer's Rising Voices: Writing of Young Native Americans, published in 1992.

Nora is working on a documentary about Always Becoming. She is blogging about it, too. You can follow the project at her blog, also called Always Becoming. She's a poet, a sculptor, a filmmaker. Studying her work, in an art, lit, or film class, would be an incredibly rich experience.

Her book, Mud Woman, is available from Oyate.