CHAPTER 02
Values & Beliefs
The Foundation of Culture
VALUES AND BELIEFS
By Johnson Bryant
In New Mexico...
values could not be taught in classrooms
they’re learned when preparing meals, at the dinner table, through music,
beats of the drum and its rhythm.
Experiences and lessons from Community and Identity.
It started with respect for the Earth, because she feeds you and she can take it back.
- Water is sacred.
- They understand land is not owned, it's borrowed.
- Every offering is answered with responsibility.
- Faith here never wavered.
- Even when everything else did.
Even when land was taken, names were changed, and promises disappeared.
There has always been the belief that something bigger is watching.
Something more powerful than any person, any government, any border drawn in ink.
Catholic prayers rise beside Native songs not woven clean, but layered, scarred, and still breathing.
Traditions stacked on top of each other because survival demanded memory.
Family means obligation.
Community means accountability.
Elders are listened to because forgetting costs lives.
Ancestry is honored because the dead are still teaching.
- Belief here isn't soft.
- It's not for comfort.
- It's for endurance.
- Community here isn't perfect, it's proven.
- And identity isn't finished, it's alive.
It lives in the sunrise over mesas, reflecting off the Sandias in hands passing food when there isn’t much, in stories told around firelight so the next generation knows they are part of something older, stronger, and bigger than themselves.
This is where spirit and soil are the same thing.
Where devotion meets resilience.
Where faith isn’t questioned it’s carried.
Birth, Life, Death, Eternity.
