Pueblo.

When the Spanish moved north from their Mexican strongholds into present-day New Mexico in the late seventeenth century, they encountered the many apartmentlike villages of the Pueblo. These farming people eagerly adopted the agricultural technology of the Spaniards and welcomed the Franciscan friars, according respect to these spiritual leaders as they did to their own. Religion was at the center of these people's lives as they irrigated the land, developed drought-resistant corn, and, in short, sought to control nature for their own purposes. They accomplished this through rituals led by their spiritual leaders, as the gods who brought them to the earth directed them to do before departing.

Creation Myth.

The Pueblo believed that they had once lived in the center of the earth, which was the middle cosmos, with their mother and all living creatures. When it was time to...