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Jack of all tribes trial version7/15/2023 ![]() Pueblo people had not worked out anything like the Great League of Peace and Power that the Iroquois developed about the time of Columbus to solve their own problems and that served them well throughout the colonial period. They learned about horses, mules, burros, cattle, sheep, and Spanish tools and weapons. If anything, the Spanish invasion intensified Native connections with one another. ![]() If a conflict led to war, village people knew how to abandon their permanent sites and find refuge among wanderers. ![]() Pueblo languages differed, but so did Basque, Castilian, Catalan, Portuguese, and other tongues of the Iberian Peninsula. In this regard Pueblo people were not much different from other settled horticultural villagers, including the Caddo of East Texas, the Mandan of the Upper Missouri Valley, and the Huron on Georgian Bay, all of whom also dealt regularly with nomadic neighbors. By the time the Spaniards arrived, the settled tribes had also built relationships and customs with nomadic groups (the Utes, Navajos, and Apaches), creating webs of trade and understanding. People in their settled adobe villages had had centuries to build relationships and customs, of commerce, alliance, peace, and war. Neither distance nor language formed a barrier against communication. Forbes demonstrated decades ago, the Southwest’s people were not strangers to one another at all. The Spanish rulers in Santa Fe received only the barest warning before the revolt broke out.ĭespite the differences, as the late historian Jack D. Nonetheless, Po’pay’s plan worked nearly perfectly. Their languages differed greatly, and their relations with one another were not always friendly. Instead, the Spanish conquerors had found Keres, Tompiros, Tewas, Tiwas, Towas, Piros, and Zuni, all living in similar-looking adobe villages ( pueblos, hence the name), as well as Utes, Navajos, and Apaches. There was no distinct “Pueblo” people, speaking one language and sharing one culture. The runners had to deal with language differences as well. He solved it by dispatching runners carrying knotted ropes, each separate knot to be untied, one day at a time, until the chosen day, August 11, 1680. The enormous, open distances of the Southwest posed a major problem. Po’pay’s great achievement was to coordinate the Pueblos. With Catholic symbols and Spanish practices gone, the Pueblos set out to restore the lives their ancestors had lived. They restored the kivas where Pueblo men had honored their ancestral Kachinas. They put an end to marriages on Christian terms. They destroyed Catholic images, tore down mission churches, and defiled the vessels of the Catholic Mass. When the rebels could capture Franciscan priests, they killed them, sometimes after torturing them. 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. From Pecos Pueblo near the edge of the Great Plains to Acoma and Zuni in western New Mexico, Pueblo people had had enough of Christianity, after eight decades of living in what historian Ramón Gutiérrez has described as an imposed theocratic utopia. Unquestionably, one of revolt’s dimensions was religious. What happened? What did it signify? What did it achieve? The Pueblo Revolt was the greatest and most successful rebellion of its sort in North American history. 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. Three hundred and thirty years later, Pueblo people still live in ancient villages across the Southwest, in many ways on their own terms. They never did conquer the Hopi, who had been the westernmost contributors to the rebellion. It took twelve years for Spanish troops to reconquer Pueblo country. The rebels allowed many Spaniards to flee, but twenty-one Franciscan priests died at their hands, and they sacked mission churches across their land. Now, rising virtually as one, the Pueblos drove out Spanish soldiers and authorities. When the people of Acoma 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. The Spanish had established and maintained their rule with terror, beginning with Juan de Oñate’s invasion in 1598. Spaniards had dominated them, their lives, their land, and their souls for eight decades. In 1680 the people known collectively as “Pueblos” rebelled against their Spanish overlords in the American Southwest.
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