Hopi-Tewa

The Arizona Hopi-Tewa, are descendants of those who fled the Second Pueblo Revolt of 1680-1692 (natives from New Mexico Tewa speaking pueblos), live on the Hopi Reservation in Arizona, mostly in Tewa Village and Polacca on the First Mesa. They were given their own village on 1st mesa as their own village and they've settled there for all this time and they still speak Tewa as their language (not Hopi).

A PEOPLE: Whereas, the Tewa (or Tano) are a linguistic group of Pueblo American Indians who speak the Tewa language and share the Pueblo culture. Their homelands are on or near the Rio Grande in New Mexico north of Santa Fe. They comprise the following communities:

· Nambé Pueblo
· Pojoaque Pueblo
· San Ildefonso Pueblo
· Ohkay Owingeh (formerly known as San Juan Pueblo)
· Santa Clara Pueblo
· Tesuque Pueblo

A LANGUAGE: Tewa (also known as Tano) is also one of five Tanoan languages spoken by the Pueblo people of New Mexico. Though these five languages are closely related, speakers of one cannot fully understand speakers of another (similar to German and English speakers). The six Tewa-speaking pueblos are Nambe, Pojoaque, San Ildefonso, San Juan, Santa Clara, and Tesuque: The five languages:

1. Keres

2. Tiwa (Taos, Picuris, Southern Tiwa)

3. Towa - are spoken in the Pueblos of New Mexico (with one outlier in Arizona) and were the ones first given the collective name Tanoan

4. Tanoan (also Kiowa-Tanoan or Tanoan-Kiowa) spoken in New Mexico, Kansas, Southwestern Oklahoma, and Texas.

5. Tewa: As with Tiwa, Towa and Keres, there is some disagreement among the Tewa people as to whether Tewa should be a written language or not. Some Pueblo elders feel that Tewa languages should be preserved by oral traditions alone. However, many Tewa speakers have decided that Tewa literacy is important for passing the language on to the children. The Tewa pueblos developed their own orthography (spelling system) for their language, San Juan Pueblo has published a dictionary of Tewa, and today there are Tewa language programs teaching children to read and write in most of the Tewa-speaking pueblos.