Almost everything official in New Mexico carries the same small emblem: a circle with four groups of four rays pointing to the four directions. It is on the state flag, the license plates, the highway markers and the state quarter, and on countless business signs and tattoos. To most people it is simply the state's symbol. It belongs to the people of Zia Pueblo, a small Keresan pueblo on the Jemez River northwest of Albuquerque, and to them it is sacred.
A pot and a contest
In the early 1920s a group of New Mexico women's clubs decided the state needed a flag that looked like New Mexico, and a design contest followed. The winner was Harry Mera, a Santa Fe doctor and archaeologist. He set a red sun symbol on a yellow field, in the red and gold of Spain, and took the symbol from a pot made at Zia. The legislature adopted the flag in 1925. According to a memorial the legislature passed in 2015, the pot had belonged to the pueblo, was noticed missing, and later turned up on public display.
For Zia the sun is the giver of life, and the pattern of fours is usually explained as standing for the directions, the seasons, the stages of a life and the obligations a person carries through it.
Seventy years without asking
No one asked Zia. In 1993 a company called Coulston International applied for a federal trademark on a logo built around the symbol, and the pueblo fought it until the application was withdrawn. Federal trademark law bars registering marks that copy a state flag, which keeps the flag's version of the symbol out of private hands and also keeps the pueblo from registering it for itself.
In 1999 a House memorial acknowledged that the use of the sacred symbol on the flag had never been authorized by the pueblo, said the legislature regretted it, and asked the state's Office of Indian Affairs to negotiate a plan to compensate Zia while keeping the symbol on the flag. Bills and a task force followed in 2000 and in 2003 and 2004 without a settlement. In 2012 both houses passed memorials recognizing the symbol as ancient and sacred to the Zia people.
A courtesy asked
What Zia asks now is simple: that anyone who wants to use the symbol ask the pueblo first. The 2015 memorial asked governments across New Mexico to post that request on their websites and pointed to the Pueblo of Zia's cultural development fund, which receives contributions from those who use the symbol with permission. No settlement over the flag itself has been announced.
Zia Pueblo lies off US-550 between Bernalillo and San Ysidro, a few miles from Jemez Pueblo, whose ancestors built the village at Gisewa. The sun on the flag came from here.