OUR HISTORY

Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo, named Pueblo de San Juan de los Caballeros by the Spaniards in the sixteenth century, is a Tewa-speaking village twenty-five miles north of Santa Fe, on the Rio Grande just north of the confluence with the Chama River. In the traditional history of Ohkay Owingeh (“Place of the Strong People”) the ancestors are said to have emerged from a lake in the north, hence a sipapu or place of emergence from the under world. The lake is often said to have been in southern Colorado, near the great sand dunes of the San Luis valley. The Tewa people after emergence traveled south making settlements on both sides of the Rio Grande, and at the site of Ohkay Owingeh they built two villages one on each side of the river, probably about 1200 A.D. Directly across from Ohkay Owingeh was Yungé Owingeh (“Mockingbird Place”) on the west side of the Rio Grande....