The Blessing Way (1970)

An elevated, fairly level expanse of land raised sharply above adjacent land.

A mixture of lime or gypsum, sand, and water that is applied to the walls of structures as a sealant. In the Southwest, many pueblos are made of adobe, which comes from the Spanish verb adobar, meaning “to plaster.” Part of the annual maintenance cycle of pueblo structures can include the ritual of whitewashing, or plastering, interior and exterior walls with a local derivative of plaster.

A pistol is a firearm, or gun, that can be used with one hand, leaving the other hand free for defense or the use of another weapon. There are two main classes of pistols: revolvers and automatics. Revolvers are multi-shot firearms, meaning individual bullets are encased in a revolving element. Automatic pistols are more modern and involve multiple bullets stored in a magazine chamber just below the barrel of the gun.

A smoking implement with a hollow bowl attached to a long hollow stem. Tobacco is placed in the bowl, and once lit, the smoker inhales on the stem.

Spanish for spotted or painted with color, the pinto is a horse with a spotted coat of different colors. Pintos are most often associated with the Plains Indians of North America, because after the Spanish introduced horses to North America, they were adopted by indigenous groups who quickly mastered horsemanship and then the plains themselves. There are two types of pintos, overo and tobiano. Overo is a coloring where the white of the coat spreads from the underbelly to meet a darker color near the top of the horse. The tobiano coloring occurs when the white spreads from the top and to create clearly-formed spots.

A large blue-grey song bird similar to a crow, the piñon jay is found in the Western Great Basin of North American, including the U.S. Southwest, especially in foothills and lower mountain slopes where the Pinyon-Juniper forest type is found. These jays harvest piñon pine seeds, storing them against the winter months.

Phosphorescence is a luminescence (or light) that occurs without the presence of combustion. Phosphorescence also occurs due to slow oxidation, or the release of oxygen, stimulated by the presence of light, which provokes a chemical reaction that produces light even after the original source of light has been removed.

Philip Bock was a University of New Mexico Presidential Professor in Ethnology. He graduated with his doctoral degree from Harvard University in 1962 and taught ethnology, language, culture, and ethnomusicology of North America and Mexico at UNM.

A type of igneous rock that can form intrusively, under the earth’s crust, or as part of an extrusive flow of lava. Once perlite cools it breaks into concentric pieces that look like rough, light-colored pearls, hence the name. Perlite can be used instead of sand in plaster and concrete. There are large deposits of perlite in the western United States.

The largest city in Pennsylvania, founded by William Penn in 1682 during the U.S. Colonial period. Philadelphia is popularly known as the “city of brotherly love” from the Greek translation of the name. It is located in eastern Pennsylvania between two rivers, the Delaware and the Schuylkill. The U.S. Declaration of Independence (1776) and Constitution (1787) were signed in Philadelphia.