Kewa Pueblo Mission Church, courtesy of Wikipedia.
The Keresan Family of Native American Languages, also called Keres, Queresan, and Queres, includes seven related languages spoken by the Keres Pueblo peoples in New Mexico. Each is mutually intelligible with its closest neighbors, but significant diversity exists between the Western and Eastern groups. This linguistic family of Pueblo Indians includes several villages on the Rio Grande in north-central New Mexico, between the Rito de los Frijoles (at Bandelier National Monument) and the Jemez River, as well as on the latter stream from the Pueblo of Zia to its mouth.
The West division, comprising the Acoma and Laguna Pueblos, is West of the Rio Grande on the San Jose River. Like the other Pueblo tribes of New Mexico, the Keresan Indians maintain that they had their origin at the mythical Shipapu and slowly drifted southward to the Rio Grande, taking up their abode in the Rito de los Frijoles, or Tyuonyi, and constructing the cliff dwellings found today excavated in the friable volcanic tufa.
Laguna Pueblo, 1879.
Long before the Spaniards arrived, they had abandoned the Rito de los Frijoles and, moving farther South, separated into several autonomous village communities. According to Francisco Vasquez de Coronado, who visited the “Quirix” province in 1540, these Indians occupied seven pueblos. Forty years later, Antonio de Espejo found five; in 1630, Fray Alonso Benavides described the people as numbering 4,000 in seven towns. As with Tiwa, Tewa, and Towa, there is some disagreement today among the Keres people on whether there should be a written language. Some pueblo elders feel their languages should be preserved through oral tradition alone. However, many Keres speakers have decided that literacy is essential to passing the language on to children and have developed an orthography (spelling system) for their language. Today, programs are teaching Pueblo children to read and write in five of the seven Keres-speaking pueblos.
Acoma Pueblo, New Mexico, by Detroit Photographic Co., about 1900.
The Keres pueblos include:
Cochiti Pueblo
San Felipe Pueblo
Kewa Pueblo (previously Santo Domingo)
Zia Pueblo
Santa Ana Pueblo
Acoma Pueblo
Laguna Pueblo
©Kathy Alexander/Legends of America, updated September 2026.
Also See:
Ancient & Modern Pueblos – Oldest Cites in the U.S.
Native Americans – The First Owners of America
See Sources.