How do we know what we know about New Mexico’s earliest inhabitants? The above narrative provides a general outline of archaeological knowledge of the Pleistocene (or “Old Stone” Age), and the changes that shaped the transition to the Holocene, also described as the Archaic Period, which lasted between 9,500 BCE and about 500 BCE. We have learned much about the lifeways of the First Peoples of the Americas based on artifacts and fossil evidence.

Indigenous Americans have also kept the stories of their earliest ancestors and passed them down from generation to generation. Although Western academic tradition has long been critical of their limitations, native oral histories often correspond with archaeological evidence in interesting ways. They also depart from archaeological evidence and reflect more recent cultural thinking about the ways in which various indigenous groups relate to their own histories and the world around them. Oral histories, perhaps, are one of the clearest manifestations of the ways in which “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” The oral traditions of Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache peoples (the three main indigenous groups that continue to inhabit New Mexico) add a human dimension to the types of information that can be gleaned from cold artifacts and ancient toolkits. Their entry into academic history is also evidence of the ways in which voices that have long been silenced by colonialism are now being recovered.

As with any historical source, we should keep in mind the limitations of oral histories. Historians traditionally shied away from oral traditions because of their fluid nature. Details of stories change each time they are told, and the events may be reworked to conform to present issues or conditions. Similar concerns exist relative to some methodologies used by archaeologists to make sense of artifacts. In the mid- to late-twentieth century, archaeologists utilized direct-historical or upstreaming methods by which they drew parallels between current cultural practices of indigenous peoples and the presumed cultural practices of their ancestors. In other words, upstreaming was a process of overlaying present social and cultural details onto the ancient past. Some archaeologists and historians have been critical of both upstreaming and oral histories because they ignore change over time. Still, the strengths of these sources and methods add greatly to the realm of possible understandings of New Mexico’s earliest people, so long as they are used carefully and critically. Additionally, we should note that indigenous peoples’ conceptions of history differ from those of the academic world. The elements of oral histories that academics take as weaknesses are perceived as strengths by many natives. The living nature of their stories is precisely what makes them most powerful.

Pueblo, Navajo, and Apache peoples base their history on the tales of their peoples’ points of origin. All other traditions build on and extend out from their origin myths. The term myth carries different meanings, depending upon the context in which it is used. In everyday usage, it often refers to something that is a falsehood. Scholars tend to apply the term to stories or traditions that cannot be factually verified but that provide groups of people with unified identity and culture. Such stories reveal important truths about how people view themselves and their relationship to others, as well as to their physical and supernatural worlds. The recent work of Native American scholars critiques this interpretation by emphasizing the reality that academic studies of indigenous peoples tend to frame their history in ways that belittle tribal intellectual traditions. In other words, academic work tends not to understand native oral traditions on their own terms. By dubbing them “myths,” native understandings of their own history are diminished.