A Conversation With a Taos Pueblo Member That Changed Everything

 

When I first moved to Taos, I thought I was just moving closer to the mountains. I hadn’t grown up camping or hunting—city life had kept me far away from those things. I loved the outdoors, but when it came to animals, I had always drawn a hard line. Killing them? Absolutely not. Eating them? Well, that was different.

At least, I thought it was.

On a construction site in Taos, I worked under a site supervisor from Taos Pueblo. We often talked while we worked—about life, about the land, about traditions. One day, our talk turned to killing animals. I argued fiercely against it, but he didn’t let me off easy. He confronted me directly, "If you were starving and you saw a rabbit, would you kill it?" I said, "No".

“You eat meat, don’t you?” he asked.

The question hung heavy in the air. In that moment, I knew he had me cornered. Either I stopped eating meat altogether or I admitted that I was benefitting from something I didn’t have the stomach to face.

That conversation never left me.

Not long after, in Canada, I found myself with a group of hunters. They handed me a shotgun and welcomed me into their world. When one of them shot a deer and it still moved on the ground, instinct—or maybe courage—pushed me forward. I took out a knife and cut its throat. The others nodded in respect. Then came the ritual: slicing open the chest, taking a bite of the heart. That was my initiation. Read the full story here.

From then on, I understood hunting as more than just pulling a trigger. It was navigation, patience, teamwork, carrying heavy loads, and—most of all—respect for the animal that gave its life. I hunted a bit in Mississippi, got lost in the woods once, and discovered firsthand how steep the learning curve really was.

But whether or not I hunted often, I found my place with hunters. Around the fire, cutting up meat, cooking it, sharing stories—I felt at home. Hunters, I discovered, are grounded people. Skilled, resourceful, and bound together by something old and primal.

For me, hunting became more than a hobby. It became a way of reconnecting with something my DNA seemed to remember—a way of life older than cities, older than stress, older than all the anxieties of modern life. In the act of hunting and cooking, I felt healed, as though I had finally stepped back into rhythm with the world.

And to think, it all started with one conversation, thirty-five years ago, with a man from Taos Pueblo who probably never knew he changed the course of my life.