By Keli Holt
The great civilization of the Ancestral Puebloans collapsed around 1100 as changes in the climate led to drought, social upheavals, and violence. Once heavily-populated cities, like Pueblo Bonita in Chaco Canyon, had become deserted, their people disbursing in all four cardinal directions. They took with them their shared legacy of sedentary farming, primarily of the three sisters crops of bean, squash and maize, and a spiritual legacy centered on rituals performed around a subterranean kiva.
When the Navajo entered the great area of Ancestral Puebloan culture in Chaco Canyon, the nomadic hunter-gatherers were shocked at the vastness of these abandoned great houses that had once supported thousands of people in a centralized city. While they used Chaco Canyon for their own purposes, they regarded the ruins of the houses with fear. They even avoided entering them, as it was whispered that the people responsible for this clearly advanced civilization had simply disappeared.
The ancestors of the great cities of Chaco Canyon, however, had not vanished; they had just left and settled into communities all over the Four Corners region. Today there are 19 recognized Pueblo Nations in New Mexico. While they have a shared history and common legacy stemming from the Ancestral Puebloans, they have evolved into separate nations with unique identities: Taos, Picuris, Ohkay Owingeh, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Nambé, Pojoaque, Tesuque, Cochiti, Santo Domingo, San Felipe, Santa Ana, Zia, Jemez, Sandia, Isleta, Acoma, Laguna and Zuni.
These Pueblo nations of sedentary farmers were who the Spanish encountered first when they entered New Mexico in the 1540s under Coronado in search of mineral wealth. While they did not find gold in New Mexico, the Spanish came across the settlements of the various Puebloans scattered up and down the Rio Grande Valley. Recognizing the sedentary farming lifestyles as something akin to the lush farms of the Iberian Peninsula, the Spanish focused on building relations with the Pueblo people rather than with the nomadic or semi-nomadic nations like the Navajo, Ute and Apache. The Spanish viewed their lifestyles as “primitive” and “savage.”
The Puebloans recognized that the Spanish, who were trading partners, were also potential allies against the nomadic nations, which would often raid their villages. To supplement their farming, the Puebloans adopted the livestock the Spanish brought with them, such as pigs, cows and chickens, none of which were indigenous to New Mexico.
Despite the best efforts of the Spanish, who tried to forbid all trade with the nomadic nations, these powerful warrior tribes gained access to Spanish weapons and even more importantly to the horse, which revolutionized their societies. Now that the Puebloans possessed livestock in corrals in their villages, the horse-mounted warriors of the Navajo, Ute and Apache would swoop in and rustle the livestock.
Spanish insistence that their new Pueblo allies convert to Catholicism and dismiss centuries of Native beliefs and rituals caused tensions from the beginning. The Spanish could not accept that most cultures indigenous to New Mexico were syncretic, meaning that Native peoples were fine with adopting new rituals and customs they found useful as long as they did not have to discard their old ways.
To the Spanish, this attachment signaled a kind of primitivism that justified taking harsher and harsher measures to try and stamp out all vestiges of traditional Pueblo life. Catholic friars destroyed the traditional kivas, burned ceremonial masks and forced everyone to accept Catholicism as the one true faith. Naturally, the more the Spanish pushed the Pueblo people to adopt Spanish customs, the more they pushed back. Within a few decades the Spanish had basically enslaved many Puebloans within their missions, justifying their actions as being for the betterment of the Natives.
By the 1680s, it was clear that the Spanish had overstayed their welcome. The Pueblos banded together and rebelled against the Spanish. Under the leadership of an Ohkay Owingeh religious leader named Popé, the Pueblos coordinated their assault by sending each tribe a string of knotted cords of yucca, with each knot representing one day before the assault. On the appointed day, the Spanish were attacked, with the Catholic friars being especially targeted. Warriors surrounded the Spanish capital of Santa Fe and cut off its water supply, forcing the survivors to flee all the way to what is now the modern city of El Paso. Historians describe the event as the only successful Indigenous rebellion against Europeans. For the next 12 years, there were no Spanish in all of New Mexico, courtesy of the Puebloans.
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