Everyday Lives

The pueblo sites on top of a small rise above the Puerco River, surrounded by the wide-open grasslands of the high desert shortgrass prairie.  It has rooms for sleeping, storage, and spiritual matters, forming a trapezoid around a central plaza.  Within the plaza, we make pottery, tools, and prepare food.  My arms are quite muscular from grinding multicolored kernels of qaa-o on my metate with the mano!

My brother Hohoyaw has just returned with his best friend Matsaakwa from hunting long-eared sowi.  They want one of my beautiful Jeddito pots, the big yellow ones I traded for so dearly, for those scrawny hares.  I won't make you eat such disreputable food.

Rabbit-hunter by Tony Abeyta

My piki bread is made of very fine-ground blue cornmeal that is mixed with water to form a thin batter.  With deft strokes, I wipe the batter across my very hot piki stone with my fingers.  It only takes a moment for the piki to cook and I roll it up off the stone, thin as autumn cottonwood leaves.  The bread is blue, the sacred color enhanced by the addition of suwvi ashes to the batter.  Blue as the sky, as turquoise, as water....

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