As Roy Montoya, tribal administrator for the Santa Ana Pueblo Indians, pulls into the courtyard of the Hyatt Regency Tamaya Resort and Spa here, he is recalling the meetings he had with the team of architects and decorators hired by the hotel chain to design the 350-room facility.
Opened in January 2001, the $80-million Tamaya offers all the expected amenities of a resort, such as gourmet meals, two golf courses, three swimming pools, seaweed wraps, massages and a day camp for children. And something unique besides: a glimpse into the history, art and way of life of the Santa Anas, who have lived on and near this land for at least eight centuries.
The Native American tribe selected Hyatt out of several competing hotel chains to build and run the resort. And, during the planning, Hyatt’s design team pummeled Montoya with questions about the tribe’s customs and folkways, seeking to highlight the Santa Ana culture in the look and feel of the operation. And the patient Montoya answered them — until the questioning became oppressive.
Then, he says, he told them this story:
The Santa Ana people spent a long time migrating along the Rio Grande, looking for a home. At their head were the Twin Warriors, the traditional leaders of the tribe. And, through all this traveling, they kept searching, searching, searching without finding what they were looking for.
And then, one day, a young warrior near the back of the long line of marchers began running forward. He ran along the whole line until he got to the front where he stood before the Twin Warriors.
“He told them,” Montoya says, his face deadpan, “to stop where they were and look around — at the river and the mesa and the mountain. And he told them this was what they were looking for.”
“He told them that this would be a swell place for a couple of golf courses and a resort.”
Lucretia Pino, wielding a long-handled, wide-bladed wooden spatula, slides another loaf of dough into the horno, a squat outdoor oven traditional to the Santa Ana Pueblo and other Pueblo tribes of New Mexico.
Rachel Buck, a stringy 11-year-old from Albuquerque, and her three-year-old sister, Emma, watch. “How do you get it out of the oven?” Rachel asks.
“With this,” Pino says, holding up the spatula.
The girls’ mother, Laurie, comes up. “Is this oven gas?”
“This one is,” Pino says. “But, on the pueblo, we would use cedar wood.” (Baking bread is an important cultural tradition for the Santa Anas, and nearly every home in the tribe’s Old and New Pueblos has a horno outside.)
And, to measure the intensity of the heat inside, Pino says, a tribe member would use oats. “Oats?” Buck asks.
“Yes, oats, and, when they’re golden brown, we know it’s time to put in the dough.”
It’s mid-morning, and, while some of the resort’s guests are golfing, and others have gone to the Santa Ana Pueblo’s casino a couple miles to the south, and still others are splashing in the pools, a small crowd has gathered around Pino in the facility’s inner courtyard as she sets loaf after loaf of dough into the oven.
“It’s always nice to expose the kids to something like this,” Buck says. “I’m thinking of putting the kids in the camp — there’s adobe-brick-making there.”
Nearby is Jackie Stone of Horseshoe Bay, Texas. She’s here with her husband on behalf of the World Senior Golf Association to make the final preparations for the group’s annual tournament at the end of this month — the first time in 40 years that the meeting hasn’t been held at the Broadmoor resort in Colorado Springs.
Stone says the group chose the Hyatt Tamaya because “it’s so different,” and a big part of that difference, she says, is its cultural milieu. “It’s more than a theme,” she says, “because it’s the real thing. It’s not Mickey Mouse running around. It’s true to life.”
An hour later, an even larger crowd of guests is standing around the horno as the first loaves come out, ready for the tasting.
All of the Santa Ana Pueblo’s land is holy, Roy Montoya says, as he bumps along a back roadin a four-wheel-drive resort truck with Steven Dewire, the resort’s general manager.
But some, he says, is holier than others.
As tribal administrator, the 61-year-old Montoya has been the Santa Anas’ main contact with the outside world for 17 years, and he’s been the main contact with Hyatt ever since the tribe chose the firm to build the resort on 500 acres of tribal land, 20 miles north of Albuquerque.
The Santa Ana Pueblo, who call themselves Tamayame (the people of Tamaya) in their own Keres language, treasure their privacy. They are willing to use the resort to tell guests — and the rest of the world — their story, and to let the resort use their culture as an attraction. But they will go only so far in revealing themselves or their land.
“We decided we were going to open a portion of our land for development,” he says. “The rest remains private.”
But, when Montoya says “private,” he doesn’t mean privately owned.
“We look at land differently,” he says. “It’s very close to the hearts of the people. It was always viewed that all the land was sacred, created not by man. The house is mine, but the land underneath it belongs to the pueblo. It’s been a difference in concept [from that of Europeans and Americans]. They like their fences.”
Mike Reeves, the head of the resort’s stables, is driving Montoya and Dewire through the dry, thick sand of this road to a point near the bank of the Rio Grande to ask a question. He wants to change the route of the 90-minute horseback rides that the resort offers guests.
“Are you going to go up the canyon?” Montoya says, as the three men look up the low-water river along the new route Reeves wants to initiate.
“No, just along the bosque,” Reeves says, using the local word to describe the thick line of woods along the riverbank. “There’s a hundred yards through the water there, and splashing through that just makes the ride for the guests. That, and being able to look at the petroglyphs [ancient wall writings]. Is it OK to go there?”
“Go by,” Montoya says.
“Go by,” Reeves says, knowing that Montoya doesn’t want the horseback riders to linger at the sacred spot. “We won’t stop.”
When it was built, the Hyatt Regency Tamaya was the largest resort ever constructed on Indian land. But that distinction has already been lost.
Across the continent, Indian nations, flush with casino winnings, are branching out into the tourism business, opening resorts and deluxe hotels, ranging from the 34-room luxury addition at the Hotel Santa Fe in Santa Fe, operated by the Picuris Pueblo, to the 1,200-room, 34-story hotel added in June to the Mohegan Sun casino complex in Uncasville, Conn.
In October, the 500-room Sheraton Wild Horse Pass Resort and Spa, owned by the Pima and Maricopa tribes, is set to open on the Gila River Indian Community Reservation 11 miles outside of Phoenix.
This dovetails with a movement within the lodging industry known as “cultural tourism.” The idea is that, amid the sea of resort and hotel choices, the ones that have something unique, that give “a sense of place” — that tap into the local culture — will be more attractive to travelers.
This isn’t a new idea. It dates back at least to the 1960s and the use of the Hawaiian culture to lure tourists to the islands in the mid-Pacific. But, often, such efforts have been marred by commercialization and a trivialization of the indigenous traditions and practices — what one expert has called “the rubber tomahawk syndrome.”
The emphasis in the present push is on authenticity. And that’s just what tribes such as the Santa Ana Pueblo want.
At the Hyatt Regency Tamaya, guests get a taste of the Santa Ana culture without being hit over the head with it. The architecture of the resort echoes the long, low lines of the homes in the tribe’s Old and New Pueblos. (While some New Mexico pueblos — the word refers both to the tribe and the tribe’s village — are known for multi-story structures, the homes of the Santa Anas are one-story buildings, clustered in circles.)
Atop the resort are bottomless clay pots, an age-old tribal practice. Decorating the rooms are blankets with traditional Indian designs, draped over a wall bracket — mirroring a practical method used by the Santa Anas. And on the wall above the entrance to one of the resort’s restaurants is a mural by tribal artist Arthur Menchego, “Our Way of Life,” showing a farmer, a hunter, a woman drawing water from the river and, overseeing the scene, the Twin Warriors.
For those guests who want to know more, there’s a cultural center built in the circular, smooth-sided shape of a kiva, the sacred structure where Santa Ana men gather for religious ceremonies. Open three afternoons per week, the center features museum-quality displays about the pueblo’s history and heritage, and a Santa Ana member to answer questions.
There are also opportunities for children — and adults — to learn firsthand the art of adobe-making.
By making a small portion of their land available for business enterprises, the Santa Ana people have been able to solidify their hold on tribal lands and buy back tracts lost over the centuries to invaders and unfriendly courts. By revealing a little bit of their culture, the Santa Ana are able to maintain that culture and strengthen communal bonds that keep the tribe from scattering.
“This is how we remain an identifiable tribe and an identifiable group within a country that’s so diverse,” Montoya says, as he’s driving down Highway 550, heading from the Old Pueblo to the New Pueblo.
The resort, the tribe’s casino and most of its other business enterprises are clustered in the southwestern corner of the pueblo’s 73,000 acres, quarantined from Santa Ana Pueblo’s daily life. The New Pueblo, established a century ago and home of nearly all of the tribe’s 700 members, is across the river and secluded from the curiosity of tourists.
The same is true for the Old Pueblo — the first Tamaya (“The Place” in Keres) — nine miles west of the resort. Established around 1700, Tamaya is the cultural home of the tribe and the center of its ceremonial activities. Although no one lives in Tamaya regularly, each family has two homes — one at each site. And the one in the Old Pueblo, Montoya says, is considered the family’s main home.
Anyone not in the tribe who ventures to the Old Pueblo finds the way blocked by a large aluminum gate. The pueblo is only open to visitors on 10 saint’s days during the year, when the entire tribe gathers for Mass in Tamaya’s 300-year-old mission church and other ceremonies. The Santa Ana religion today is an amalgam of ancient beliefs and Catholicism.
The tribe’s businesses have produced profits to fund new homes, scholarships, health care and a range of other services at the pueblo — and provided jobs for tribal members. Montoya estimates that, at one point before all the development, unemployment had risen to 25 or 30 percent. Today it’s down to about five percent.
Jobs at the pueblo, though, mean more than money, Montoya says. Tribe members who work for the resort or the casino have an easy time getting days off to participate in the feast day celebrations at the Old Pueblo. “You get more understanding than you do, say, from a company in Albuquerque,” he says.
It’s part of an overarching strategy to strengthen the ties of Santa Anas to their tribe — to enable and encourage members to stay on the pueblo.
“Our belief is that this is where you were born, this is where you belong, and this is where you’ve got to be,” Montoya says. “We look at [the isolation and dislocation of much of mainstream America], and we ask: How can they take that? How can they live?”
Members, though, are free to leave. And some do.
Back at the Hyatt Regency Tamaya, Lucretia Pino, her baking done, is working in the cultural center and talking about the aunt she never met until a few months ago.
“It’s the culture — like the old folks say: If you ever move away from here, you’re always going to move back here,” she says. “I believe your home is always the pueblo.”
Long before Pino was born, the aunt had a job with a local non-Indian family. The family left New Mexico for Indiana, and she followed. That was half a century ago.
“She recently moved back here. She’s in her 70s,” Pino says.
“This was where she wanted to come home to.”
