Read Kachina and the Cross Online

Authors: Carroll L Riley

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Page 204
The eight decades of Spanish rule in New Mexico produced changes that went far beyond the drastic loss in population. The Spaniards, early in their regime, had imposed a new political structure on the Pueblos, mimicking that of New World Spanish towns. This was curiously democratic: a series of cabildo officers in the pueblos, elected by and under at least a limited control of the actual members of a given Pueblo. The missionaries and the Spanish secular authorities were discouraged from interfering in this process, though in practice there was considerable meddling, especially by local Franciscans and by encomenderos. As we have seen, the missionaries had at least a quasi-legal right to demand personal service from the Indians and, except during the López period, had no great difficulty in extracting it. Encomenderos sometimes (perhaps often) utilized Indian labor for personal projects, including the building of private homes on Indian land. This practice was generally forbidden in the encomienda system but was allowed extralegally in New Mexico.
There is no way of knowing the exact relationship of the new cabildo-like offices to those of the old native hierarchy. Indeed, it probably differed from one part of the Pueblo world to the other. Near the center of Spanish secular power, in the upper Rio Grande Basin, it might be expected that the Spanish officials would have somewhat greater importance than in outlying areas. At distant Zuni for example, T. J. Ferguson believes that "the native religious government was not substantially changed or displaced." According to later Zuni tradition, there was a special officer who filled the lieutenant governor slot, the "Spanish Priest," or Tsibolo:wa Shiwani, "to institutionalize a Zuni priest who dealt exclusively with the Spanish people and culture.'' As far as I know this particular setup did not occur in the Rio Grande Valley.
Through the cabildo and the encomienda system, one office, that of
capitán de guerra
or war leader, among the Pueblos, became more and more important as the century wore on. Threats from marauding Apaches (and toward the end of the seventeenth century, Utes) meant that Spanish military leaders, encomenderos, and/or important estancia holders needed Pueblo Indian auxiliaries, under the command of their own war captains, to flesh out the limited Spanish parties. Such auxiliaries have been discussed in chapter 11, but this important information (crucial to understanding the Pueblo Revolt) is worth reiterating. Native American auxiliaries were chosen from one pueblo or several, fought with native weapons, usually the bow and arrow, and normally were not given horses or European weapons. But they learned the use of these weapons, as well as Spanish tactics and troop organization, and they gradually became aware of Spanish weaknesses as well as strengths. Under Spanish tutelage they slowly became a united fighting force. There is no great amount of information on the
Page 205
Indian leadership, but I strongly suspect that the Spanish-Pueblo war captains were drawn primarily from chiefs of the pre-Hispanic war societies, thus tying these important officials back into the native ceremonial structure.
What the system meant to seventeenth-century New Mexican Pueblos was a fractured system of authority, with various elements pulling in different directions. The Indian cabildo officers had one set of priorities (no doubt differing from place to place and time to time), the missionaries had another, the encomenderos and estancieros a third, and the secular government a fourth. A fifth set of priorities, about which we have very little direct information and a very incomplete understanding, was that of the old native governmental and religious system. There is no doubt that the Pueblos maintained the moiety and clan headships, and that the religious officers were operating powerfully, if generally in secret. This secrecy became more and more necessary in the last twenty years of Spanish control. After López de Mendizábal, the Spaniards ruthlessly dealt with anything that smacked of "nativism" both in religion and socio-ceremonial organization. Members of the religious hierarchy were stigmatized as agents of Satan, and increasingly the secular authorities were called in to enforce the new order. Hangings, whippings, and general terror became the order of the day.
It seems very likely that the basic structure of Pueblo political and ceremonial life continued on as it had in the Oñate period. Pueblo society and religion in the later historic period seems, to some degree, a continuation of these seventeenth-century structures. As I pointed out in an earlier book on the eastern Pueblos, the native political, ceremonial, and religious life was totally intertwined so that religious versus secular had no meaning in the Pueblo world. Assuming a considerable continuity, the
underlying
politico-ceremonial power in the Pueblo world of 1680 would have been held by a handful of older members of the various groups, men who had been trained from childhood in the various esoteric uses of power and political control. Priests of the highest tier were not war leaders; in fact, they were forbidden to kill or even to observe death. Their function was the promotion of harmony, and the well ordering of relations between the Pueblos and the supernatural world. It was revered men like these, rather than the war leaders (the latter functioning to a greater or lesser degree within the Spanish system), who carried the torch of nativism and gave spiritual underpinnings to the resistance. They were the individuals whom the missionaries attempted to root out. And indeed, the Franciscans were correct in thinking that such persons were the major enemies of the mission system.
The Pueblo religious leaders were hardly creatures of the devil as missionary naivete would have it, but their continued influence made it increasingly difficult for the Christian agenda to be put in place. There is an irony in this, for had
Page 206
the Franciscans been able to compromise, they could have "Christianized" the native religion. Indeed, to some degree this eventually did happen, perhaps even beginning in the seventeenth century. Pueblo religion tends to be inclusive and is strongly goal oriented. The spread of the kachina cult in the fourteenth century is an example of a foreign religion being incorporated into the Pueblo system. Had the missionaries been willing to accommodate the native deities and rituals, they likely could have had a colorful and strongly nativistic Christianity with overt kachina overtones and a gradual evolution of native deities into Catholic saints. But Christian missionaries in the seventeenth century did not work that way. In fact, missionaries (at least the more fundamentalist ones that I have met in various parts of the world) often do not work that way at the end of the twentieth century. For the Franciscans, the result was not accommodation but war.
By the 1670s, the missionaries saw enemies everywhere. The discovery that the highly Hispanicized Esteban Clemente was a secret follower of the kachinas must have seemed to threaten the very foundations of the missionization program. Not only were the "old men," the secret religious leaders, hostile to the Spaniards, but now even the most sophisticated and educated of the natives could not be trusted. There was another source of danger, one that neither missionaries nor settlers seemed to take very seriously. Settled among the Pueblos were numbers of racially mixed individuals with varying genetic mixture of European, Indian, and black. Some of these people, as we have seen, were in the upper echelons of Spanish society, at least in the governmental-military society, and remained loyal to the Crown. Others, including some who were part Pueblo Indian, always had a foot in the other camp.
It seems likely that these mixed-blood individuals were well represented in the
native
military as Pueblo war captains. Such men would be at the heart of any revolt, as important in their way as the charismatic religious leaders, for they had the organizational skills to field native armies. We know that at least some of the Pueblo military leaders in the revolt were drawn from this class. Unlike the religious leaders, the war captains had considerable flexibility. Somewhat like the "free companies" of mercenaries in fourteenth-century Europe, they tended to be sensitive to how the political winds were blowing and able to change sides with relative ease. As discussed below, the Spaniards depended heavily on certain of these Pueblo leaders in the reconquest.
Although we know relatively little about the sociopolitical organization of the Pueblos on the eve of the revolt, there is some archaeological information, especially on material culture, from pre-revolt Pueblo sites. Information from such sites as Hawikuh in Zuni country; Awatovi in the Hopi area; Magdalena, San Pascual, and other pueblos in the Piro country; and Humanas, the modern Gran
Page 207
Quivira, in the Salinas region is especially useful. These sites were deserted either a few years before the revolt (Gran Quivira and perhaps Hawikuh), during it (Piro towns), or a few years after it (Awatovi). The pueblo of Pecos has been extensively studied and gives considerable information, but Pecos continued to be occupied for a century and a half after the revolt. At the time it was excavated, archaeological techniques were not enough advanced to always differentiate between, say, Pecos in the latter part of the seventeenth century and the same pueblo in the first part of the eighteenth.
One rather curious thing about the archaeology of seventeenth-century sites is that they quite definitely do not show any massive acculturation in architecture and other aspects of material culture. For example, Hawikuh, which was a major mission station for several decades, had very little evidence of Spanish influence except for the mission itself, constructed of form-made adobe blocks. There may have been some increase in room size, but this does not clearly relate to the Spaniards. There was minor use of adobe bricks, and a few beams that seem to show metal axe work. After the rebels took over the Hawikuh convento in 1680, they subdivided the large Spanish rooms. They did include some corner fireplaces in the Spanish style, although they tore out the staircases. The greatest motivation for change seems to have been the introduction of livestock, especially sheep, and of certain European agricultural plants. When the Hawikuh people seized the convento, they turned the interior of the church, the cemetery area, and the patio of the convento into sheep corrals. Even before the revolt, several rooms in the pueblo were used to pen sheep, although at what time during the Spanish occupation (ca. A.D. 1630-80) is not clear. Other than this use, the people at Hawikuh do not seem to have picked up the Spanish habit of specialized rooms, kitchens, dining rooms, and the like. It has been suggested that Hawikuh and other Zuni towns adopted the Spanish-style outside "beehive" oven, or
horno
, during the seventeenth century because of the increasing popularity of wheat and the use of hornos for wheaten bread production. The use of wheat itself is somewhat problematical, however. Archaeologist David Snow believes that wheat may not have been a significant crop among the Pueblos until the late eighteenth century at the earliest.
Among the Hopi, adobe bricks were used to a minor degree in remodeling the mission churches, but the Indians' use of adobes was minimal. In the Piro country, adobe blocks were occasionally placed on masonry footings, but Spanish building techniques were not used extensively. The same was true in the Tompiro region and, generally speaking, in the more northern parts of the Rio Grande Basin. As far as the interior arrangement of houses was concerned, there was relatively little Hispanization. In places where large numbers of Spaniards had lived for a timeSan Gabriel del Yungue, for examplethere were minor
Page 208
Horno, northern New Mexico, ca. 1935 (courtesy
of the Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 407)
modifications in rooms and the occasional fireplace, but, in general, Spanish influence in house form and function among the Pueblos was minimal.
Seventeenth-century colonial New Mexico, at the end of a long distribution line, was definitely not a waste economy. At the large site of Humanas in Tompiro country, two sherds of bottle glass and a reworked bottle base, plus a number of "trade" beads, represented the entire glass inventory for the site. Iron tools must have been in great demand by the Pueblos, as they were by Spanish colonists, but there is little evidence of iron. Of course, this is true to a large degree in the Spanish settlements. As pointed out in chapter 9, iron was a government monopoly and very hard to come by. Metal of any sort was in short supply and expensive, and tools were mended and recast whenever possible. All this is reflected in the archaeological data. At Humanas, only fifty-six pieces of metal (more than half were amorphous scraps of iron) were found in the excavations despite a Spanish presence of half a century. This small inventory of metal seems to have been typical of New Mexico seventeenth-century Pueblo sites generally. It is worth stressing again that the Pueblo Indians were in no way averse to iron. In spite of the nativistic aspects of the revolt, discussed below, there was a hard-headed realism that certain Spanish items needed to be preserved. For example, at Sandia in December 1681, a Spanish party led by Juan Domínguez de Mendoza found "a forge, with excellent bellows and the share (of a plow) for an anvil." This forging operation had been set up in the convent.
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