Santa Clara Pueblo is near the mouth of Santa Clara Creek, a year-round
stream flowing out of the Jemez Mountains into the Rio Grande. To the
west of the pueblo, on lands owned by Santa Clara, are the famous Puye
Cliff Dwellings ruins. The people of Santa Clara claim these natural
cliff homes as their ancestral dwelling places, a fact which has been
substantiated by archeologists. The Santa Clara Indians represent, then,
an important living Indian group in which one can observe institutions
and traditions that can be linked to traditions of the cultures that
lived in the caves and abandoned cities of Southwest antiquity.
Like most of the pueblo people, Santa Clara joined the Pueblo Revolt,
but this action did not seriously harm the pueblo. The real damage was
done to Santa Clara in the late eighteenth century when intertribal
warfare over witchcraft, plus the ravages of disease, took nearly 500
lives in the village. The current population is about 500.
The church at Santa Clara is quite modern, having been constructed in
the twentieth century. The old church, built in 1760, was caught up in
the modernization craze that swept through the pueblo world in the early
1900’s. Perhaps one of the most substantial and beautiful of all pueblo
churches, the old church collapsed during a storm in 1909 (the same
storm that destroyed the church at Nambé); it had been structurally
weakened by the removal of the roof for remodeling.
The village has excellent agricultural lands and supplements its income
by manufacturing an excellent and distinctive pure black pottery. Its
annual festival is in mid-August.