At the time of Emergence, our Creator gave to us gifts with which to maintain a healthy mind, body, soul, and spirit, along our journey. These gifts were essential for us to be good human beings in this world, because we are taught all living things are related and interdependent. No being is superior to another. What we do to others, we do to ourselves. These are the Original Instructions of a Way of Life gifted to us. 

At the Leadership Institute, we have realized that we are at a critical juncture in our journey, and that it is time to reconvene and engage in discussion, as our forefathers did in their time, to respond to the challenges that are deeply rooted in history. We have developed a timeline that examines 100 years of policies and laws that were conceived to disconnect us from the gifts of our Creator. This timeline provides us context to appreciate how each generation responded to the challenges of its time.

To fulfill our calling, we defined a process to engage people who every day are fulfilling their sacred trust in the maintenance of our Way of Life, guided by our Pueblo core values. We brought together those who represent the stewards of our lands, the gatekeepers and protectors of our places of worship and cultural resources. We gathered people who have dedicated their lives to maintaining and preserving our Mother Tongue, the gift by which we understand the essence of our being and that provides for the understanding of our roles in our defined Way of Life, and of our place in this world. We embraced into the circle those who nurture the spirit of our traditional laws and customs to continue the balance of relationships and wellbeing of our people and communities. We brought the guardians of our children and youth, those who maintain and instill the teachings of essential core values that allow us to maintain the spirit of community, a place of belonging. Included were the protectors of our precious water and resources that provide the sustenance of all life. As we looked to the future, we gathered our cultural leaders to transfer the essential cultural knowledge to protect all that we cherish; and together their challenge was to articulate the necessity of striking a balance and creating new places and approaches for this transfer to occur.

After many years, in our effort to create a critical mass of several thousand people, it was time time to gather the people. The first Pueblo Convocation was planned and convened in 2012. It was time to celebrate the resilience of our foremothers and forefathers -- a time to honor the profound, ingenious ways reflected in the contributions, by word of mouth, from one generation to the next.

-Regis Pecos, Cochiti

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