Pueblo Revolt

Pueblo Revolt Case Study, D___ Name: As European encroachments on Native Americans’ lands and demands on their labor increased, native peoples sought to defend and maintain their political sovereignty, economic prosperity, religious beliefs, and concepts of gender relations. At times, this led to open resistance, as in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.. The Pueblo Revolt In 1680 the people known collectively as “Pueblos” rebelled against their Spanish overlords in the American Southwest. Spaniards had dominated them, their lives, their land, and their souls for eight decades. The Spanish had established and maintained their rule with terror, beginning with Juan de Oñate’s invasion in 1598. When the people resisted, Oñate ordered that one leg be chopped from every man over fifteen and the rest of the population be enslaved, setting a pattern that lasted four-score years. Now, rising virtually as one, the Pueblos drove out Spanish soldiers and authorities. The rebels allowed many Spaniards to flee, but twenty-one Franciscan priests died at their hands, and they sacked mission churches across their land. It took twelve years for Spanish troops to reconquer Pueblo country. Three hundred and thirty years later, Pueblo people still live in ancient villages across the Southwest, in many ways on their own terms. A proud statue of the rebellion’s leader, Popé (or Po’pay), is one of New Mexico’s two pieces in the National Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. The Pueblo Revolt was the greatest and most successful rebellion of its sort in North American history. What happened? What did it signify? What did it achieve? Unquestionably, one of the revolt’s dimensions was religious. Pueblo people had had enough of Christianity, after eight decades of living in what historian Ramón Gutiérrez has described as an imposed theocratic utopia. Backed by armed force and not reluctant to use the whip, Catholic missionaries had set out to destroy the ancestral Pueblo world in every respect, including what people could believe and how they could marry, work, live their lives, and pray. When the rebels could capture Franciscan priests, they killed them, sometimes after torturing them. They destroyed Catholic images, tore down mission churches, and defiled the vessels of the Catholic Mass. They put an end to marriages on Christian terms. They restored the kivas where Pueblo men had honored their ancestral Kachinas. With Catholic symbols and Spanish practices gone, the Pueblos set out to restore the lives their ancestors had lived. Popé’s great achievement was to coordinate the Pueblos. There was no distinct “Pueblo” people, speaking one language and sharing one culture. Instead, the Spanish conquerors had found Keres, Tompiros, Tewas, Tiwas, Towas, Piros, and Zuni, all living in similarlooking adobe villages (pueblos, hence the name), as well as Utes, Navajos, and Apaches. Their languages differed greatly, and their relations with one another were not always friendly. Nonetheless, Popé’s plan worked nearly perfectly. The Spanish rulers in Santa Fe received only the barest warning before the revolt broke out. People in their settled adobe villages had had centuries to build relationships and customs, of commerce, alliance, peace, and war. If a conflict led to war, village people knew how to abandon their permanent sites and find refuge among wanderers. If anything, the Spanish invasion intensified Native connections with one another. The 1680 uprising was no isolated event. The seventeenth-century history of modern New Mexico and northern Mexico is punctuated by unrest and rebellion. Many of the region’s people had been conquered and none liked their situation, but they understood that though they greatly outnumbered the Spaniards, their foes were ruthless, organized, and determined. The Spanish possessed firearms and steel weapons superior to anything the Natives could muster. But despite all the odds against successful resistance, Spanish records show instance upon instance of plans and outbreaks among American Indians who supposedly had been “reduced” to Christianity and Spanish ways. Slavery, rather than symbolic religious conflict, may have provided the deep underpinning of the southwestern events. Legal enslavement of American Indians by Spaniards had been forbidden by royal decree since the mid-sixteenth century, but that did not stop the actual practice. So-called “just wars” provided one loophole, and 1 on that basis tribes who refused to acknowledge Spanish authority were fair game for enslavers. Settled Christian Indians, such as the Pueblos, could be enslaved for a period of time, if they resisted their condition. Forced encomienda labor, supposedly rendered in return for the benefits the Spaniards had brought, was not far from actual slavery. Enslaved Indians often ended up in the booming, labor-hungry silver mines of Chihuahua, but some were taken farther south and a few as far as Cuba, to work side by side with captured Africans. A lively traffic flourished across the plains in Native women and children, for both sexual exploitation and domestic labor. Outside the Spanish zone, slaving frontiers were pushing westward onto the plains from the British colonies, particularly newly founded South Carolina. Pueblo, Apache, and Navajo country lay many miles from the European centers, but its people were caught up in an enormous web whose most-shared institution was human bondage. The Spanish return in 1692 was a military conquest, just as 1598 had been, but it did not lead to a full restoration of their authority, due in part to the Spanish themselves. Secular Spanish officials began trying to rule “their” Indians in enlightened terms. They saw New Mexico not as mission country, where the friars had to be protected as they went about their task of saving Native souls, but rather as a buffer zone, protecting the precious silver mines from the not-so-distant French and even the British. They saw the New Mexican people as possible allies in the game of transcontinental empire, to be courted rather than conquered. The self-sacrificing, martyrdom-seeking zealotry of seventeenth-century Franciscan “Conquistadors of the Spirit” slackened into routine business. If the purpose of the rebellion was simply to drive out Spanish ways, it failed, because the Spaniards came back and remained until Mexican independence in 1821. The Spanish were followed by two successor republics, Mexico and, ultimately, the United States. There could be no complete return to how Pueblo people had lived prior to the Spanish conquest. But if the rebels’ purpose was to reassert their own ways in a new setting, their rebellion succeeded. 1. How would you describe Spanish-Pueblo relations prior to 1680? 2. What happened during the Pueblo Revolt? Provide a general overview: 3. What were the religious dimensions to this conflict? 4. Who were the Pueblo people? 5. When the Spanish returned in 1692, how did things change? 2