One Soul Equals 10 Bucks

Hello from Zion National Park!

I'm a little behind on the blogging, but I wanted to write about this place we visited a couple days ago in New Mexico. There's this place in the New Mexico desert called Acoma Pueblo, also known as "Sky City". Acoma Pueblo is an active Native American village built on top of a 400-foot sandstone mesa in the middle of this beautiful part of New Mexico. It was built sometime around the 10th century, and is supposedly the oldest continuously inhabited city in the United States.

The place was breathtakingly beautiful, and the tour we took through the Acoma village was pretty fascinating. There was one weird thing, though.

Driving up to Acoma Pueblo, there were all these signs strictly forbidding taking pictures of the village or any of the Acoma people. That wasn't the weird thing -- I think everybody's heard of Native Americans not wanting their picture taken because they fear the cameras will steal their souls. But when we got to the visitor's center, we found out that if we paid a $10 "camera permit fee", the whole soul-stealing thing wouldn't really bother them so much anymore, and you could take all the pictures you wanted.

The other weird thing is that the whole "no cameras without a permit" rule applies not just to the Acoma Pueblo, but to the whole Acoma reservation, so if they catch you taking a picture anywhere on the reservation and you don't have a permit, they can confiscate your camera. Even if you're just taking a picture of a mesa with no Acoma people in sight.

But the place is freaking beautiful, so we, along with everybody else on our tour, paid the ten bucks. I now present you with three of the pictures we took of Acoma Pueblo and the surrounding reservation. 'Cause dammit, we want to get our money's worth.


Thanks, I feel better now.