SYMHC Classics: Pueblo Revolt

This 2014 episode covers the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which Native Americans rose up against Spanish colonists and missionaries at the turn of the 17th century.

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Happy Saturday. In this week's episode on Princess Go Menendez
and Fort Mosey, we talked about how in the United States,
Jamestown and the British roots of the United States tend
to get way more attention than Saint Augustine in the
nation's Spanish roots, unless maybe you live in Florida, where
Saint Augustine is, And we also said both of those

(00:23):
get a lot more attention than cities that were established
and continually occupied by indigenous peoples, such as a Coma Pueblo.
So today's Saturday Classic has connections to Acoma Pueblo and
its history, as well as to other pueblos that have
also been continually occupied for centuries. It's our January twenty ninth,
twenty fourteen episode on the Pueblo Revolt. If I were

(00:46):
writing this episode today after more than a decade of
working on the show instead of in twenty fourteen, when
I had been co hosting it for less than a year,
I would probably take a totally different approach to the introduction.
It is true that the idea of history being written
by the victors is something that gets thrown around a lot,
but it is not as true in practice as we

(01:08):
make it sound in this intro. Another good counter example
is the Lost Cause mythology surrounding the US Civil War.
We did a whole episode on that that ran as
a Saturday Classic on March eighth, twenty twenty five. So
enjoy Welcome to Stuff you missed in History Class, a
production of iHeartRadio. Hello, and welcome to the podcast. I

(01:39):
am Tracy V. Wilson. I'm Holly Frank So Holly yeah.
How often have you heard somebody say history is written
by the victors? I can't even cat how many times
I've said it. I know we've said it a lot
on this podcast. Today we're going to talk about a
pretty giant exception to that conventional wisdom, which is the
Pueblo Revolt of sixteen eighty. And in this revolt, Native

(02:02):
American peoples, who are collectively known as the Pueblos, rose
up in unison against Spanish colonists and missionaries who had
started settling the area at the turn of the seventeenth century.
These settlers were Catholic and had begun systematically converting the
native population, and had also forbidden the practice of the
Pueblo's traditional religions. So on August tenth, sixteen eighty, the

(02:24):
pueblos in multiple villages rose up simultaneously against the settlers.
They threw off the colonial government and lived outside of
Spanish rule for the next twelve years. This was probably
the most successful indigenous uprisings in North American history, but
because the Pueblos were not keeping written records of their

(02:45):
history at the time, it was a largely oral tradition.
Most of the history on this one was actually written
by the losing sid Where we do have written records
of the Native American point of view, it's in the
form of testimony that was given orally by Pueblo peoples
and written down by Spanish priests. So it's clearly not
an unbiased account. Where we do have the Native American

(03:06):
perspective on things, says we're going to talk about today,
this huge revolt of which we have very little record
of the victor side. Yeah. So for background, before the
arrival of European settlers, the part of the world that's
now northern Mexico and the southwestern United States was home

(03:27):
to several tribes of Native peoples who fit very broadly
into two groups, and one group was the more mobile
hunter gatherer peoples, and that included the Navajo and the Apache,
and the other group included the Native Americans who were
living in established permanent settlements that Spanish colonists dubbed pueblos.
So pueblos are communal living situations with terraces and flat roofs.

(03:51):
They are built around a central court and above an
underground ceremonial chamber called a kiva. Once the Spanish coined
the term pueblos, the various peoples who lived in them
came to be collectively known as the Pueblo Indians, and
the Pueblo peoples are most likely descended from the Anasazi,
and they include the Hopi and the Zuni, among others.

(04:13):
Pueblos do still exist today, and one of them, the
Acoma Pueblo, is believed to be the oldest continually inhabited
place in the United States. People have lived in it
since about the year twelve hundred. So although the Pueblo
peoples lived in similar looking structures, this wasn't and isn't
one homogeneous group of people. The Pueblos spoke seven different

(04:36):
languages in the sixteen hundreds, although some may have spoken
Spanish as well. Each individual Pueblo governed itself and had
its own customs and its own cultural nuances. Spain made
its way to this part of the world with the
intent to conquer land and convert the people living there
to Christianity, and last, but not least, on their agenda

(04:57):
was finding a bunch of treasure, and some of that
would fold back in to fund their first and second agendas, right,
And in a lot of views, the primary agenda was
really treasure, but the treasure there was in some some
components of it like that the treasure had an end
besides just treasure in itself, right, and that was conquering

(05:20):
and converting. Spanish settlers made contact with the Pueblo peoples
in the early fifteen hundreds, when Marcos Deniza, who was
a Franciscan friar, claimed the whole region for Spain. The
infamous Conquistadoor Coronado also made his way through in fifteen forty,
and Conquistador Juan de Onate made a voyage there with

(05:40):
four hundred settlers in fifteen ninety eight. At that point
he established New Mexico as a Spanish colony, and that's
really when Spanish colonization of the area started. In earnest
and the whole vast hordes of treasure idea didn't pan
out for New Mexico and Spain wanted to abandon the area.
The Franciscans made a case for their mission work being

(06:02):
far too advance to just come to an end abruptly,
so they continued on with the aim of converting the
indigenous population and ministering to the ones that they had
already been successful in converting. In addition to trying to
convert the indigenous population to Catholicism, the Spanish authorities also
forbade traditional religious practices, so when they arrived in a

(06:24):
Pueblo village, the Spanish would start by destroying the kiva,
which was used for religious and cultural ceremonies and also
was kind of like a gathering place. Sometimes they would
build the church directly over the kiva site. The Spanish
also destroyed masks and other items that were associated with kachinas,

(06:45):
and these were spirit beings worshiped in traditional Pueblo religions.
The Native Americans who resisted the Spanish were often subject
to imprisonment and torture, and in a recurring theme regarding
the coluonnization of the Americas. The settlers introduced measles, smallpox,
and typhus. Up to eighty percent of the Pueblo population

(07:08):
actually died in the years after first contact due to disease. Yeah,
this was not wholly a one sided thing. There were
also diseases brought back to Europe from the colonies. Yeah,
but not nearly with the lethal ramifications as happened in
the America eighty percent a lot huge. Yeah. The Spanish

(07:30):
also implemented taxation in their colonies, and the rates of
taxation were so high that over about a decade, the
Spanish went from asking the Pueblos for food to help
them get started with their colony, to instead the Pueblos
asking the Spanish for food that had been taxed away
from them. And to add to all of this, a

(07:51):
drought started in sixteen sixty six that lasted for four
years before the arrival of the Spanish. The Pueblo people
survived drought by keeping stockpiles of food and trading with
one another. It was very cooperative, but the Spanish had
taxed them so heavily that no one had a stockpile,
and trade among the pueblos was prohibited. Raids by the

(08:12):
apaches on the remaining meager stores made things even harder,
so basically all of their resources were stripped from them, right,
And then there was an epidemic of an unknown and
deeply deadly disease in sixteen seventy one. And all of this,

(08:35):
of course had a measurable effect on the Pueblo population.
Over the seventy five years between the real start of
Spanish settlement and the revolt, the number of Pueblos dropped
from about one hundred to about forty existing today are
about twenty. In the minds of many Pueblo peoples at
the time, life was getting harder and harder, specifically because

(08:57):
they were not being allowed to perform their religious s observances.
Like a Western idea of this might be that God
was exacting vengeance because he was not being worshiped enough, right,
But this was more a worldview that those observances were
crucial to maintaining their quality of life and the way
that the world was supposed to work, and without those

(09:19):
observances going on, that things were going off the rails. Well, yeah,
their entire culture had been upended and most of their
traditions stripped away, right, So yes, that will pretty much
ruin your life. Your structure has been completely taken away.
Spanish authorities cracked down harder on descent after the a

(09:40):
Coma revol in fifteen ninety nine, and in this revolt,
the Acoma Pueblo attacked a party of Spanish people who
asked them for supplies. So Spanish authorities had cracked down
harder on descent after an event that actually took place
sometime before in fifteen ninety nine, and that was the
a Coma Revolt. And in this revolt, the Acoma Pueblo

(10:03):
attacked a party of Spanish people who had asked them
for supplies. The Spanish then burned down the town and
massacred every male living there who was over the age
of twenty five. And in the aftermath of this revolt, floggings,
public executions, and sentences of slavery became more common. So
after that whole thing had happened, the Spanish basically their

(10:24):
approach to anything was going to be swift and cruel
and pretty conclsive. Yeah. Yeah, so over the development of
the diseases and taxation that we've just talked about, other
revolts were also going on. But because the pueblos were
so spread out, most of them were really too small

(10:45):
to be effective, and in some cases Native Americans who
were loyal to the Spanish had tipped them off to
what was happening. So there was resistance going on through
this whole time, but it wasn't really strong enough to
gain a foothold. There's a little piecemeal, yeah. In sixteen
seventy five, Spanish authorities rounded up forty seven pueblo religious
leaders and convicted them of sorcery and conspiring to rebel.

(11:10):
These leaders were beaten publicly and they were sentenced to slavery.
Four were sentenced to execution, though one of them committed
suicide rather than be executed. One of the imprisoned holy
leaders was a man named POPEI, and he was from
San Juan Pueblo. Pope and the other leaders were released
that same year. Pope went to the northernmost pueblo, Taois Pueblo.

(11:33):
There he reported being visited by three spirits who gave
him a prophecy abundance would return to the pueblos if
they purged their world of Spaniards. So the Spanish described
this event as having had a conversation with the devil,
and most of the Spanish writing about the revolt from
the time characterizes it as the work of the devil,
not as a result of Spanish oppression or of the

(11:56):
pueblo's grievances against the Spanish colonists. So, over a period
of years, Pope started to organize the Pueblo people who
were living in villages that spanned up and down the
Rio Grande valley, and they sprawled out over more than
three hundred miles of territory from east to west. So
to address the language barrier that we referenced earlier, which

(12:17):
was one of the things that had prevented all these
different pueblos from uniting in the past, Pope gave each
of the villages a knotted cord, which he delivered to
them using runners, and the villages were supposed to unknot
one knot from the cord every day, and on the
day the last knot was untied, that would be the
day that everyone was to rise up against the Spanish.

(12:39):
And also given to the runners were pieces of deer
skin that were marked with pictograms. Pope rehearsed their meaning
with the runners before they left. So the plan was
to simultaneously attack the Spanish in all these different villages,
using weapons that people had stockpiled and hidden, and then
to destroy the churches and kill the priests, and then

(13:01):
to kill the Spanish or drive them out of their towns.
From there, the pueblos planned to converge to turn their
attention to the Spanish capital at Santa Fe. Two of
the runners that Pope sent out were captured, giving the
Spanish advance warning of what was going to happen. Additional
runners were dispatched to tell all the pueblos to move

(13:21):
the revolution. Earlier news didn't make it to all the
outlying pueblos in time, and a few pueblos appeared to
have declined to participate in the plant. Yes, there are
some descriptions of this that make it sound as though
this was a completely unanimous action on the part of
the pueblos, and for a lot of reasons it wasn't.
Some of them seemed not to have gotten the news

(13:42):
from the runners in time. Others seemed to have consciously
made the decision for whatever reason, either because they were
sympathetic to the Spanish or were allied with the Spanish,
decided not to attack the people who were living there
at that point. So, regardless of all of that, on
August tenth, sixteen eighty, many of the pueblos, along with

(14:05):
allies from the Apache and the Navajo, attacked in more
than twenty villages. Together, they killed four hundred and one
Spanish soldiers and civilians, including twenty one Franciscan priests, and
that was about two thirds of the ecclesiastical force living
in New Mexico at the time. We have absolutely no
casualty count on the Native American side. We have no

(14:25):
idea how many pueblos died during the fighting. At least
one priest, who was father Juan gray Robe and Zuni Pueblo,
reportedly survived by putting aside Catholicism and taking up Pueblo practices,
and he eventually married a Zuni wife. There's a lot
that's actually unclear about this story, though, since it's pieced
together from multiple testimonies that were given orally by Native

(14:49):
Americans and then written down by Spanish priests, So the
veracity of any element of it is a little bit questionable. Yeah,
we've sort of established that this is probably what happened.
Later in a part that we will get to in
a bit, the Spanish did return and apparently found this,
particularly this particular pueblo, still practicing a lot of elements

(15:11):
of Catholic religion, led by Father Juan grey Robe, who
had kind of assimilated into the pueblo culture. Fascinating. That
could be a podcast in and of itself. I would imagine
if we had better records, if we had enough records
to do that, which we really don't. Once the fighting

(15:32):
was done in the villages, about twenty five hundred warriors
attacked the colonial headquarters at Santa Fe, and survivors in
Santa Fe and from the surrounding villages all fled to
the Governor's palace and there they were laid siege. Two
Eventually the pueblos cut off the water supply. Another group

(15:53):
of refugees fled to the Isleta Pueblo, which was seventy
miles to the south and apparently had not taken part
in the fighting. The Lieutenant governor was there with a
group of survivors, and eventually, on August twenty first, the
governor decided to abandon New Mexico. He and the survivors
who had taken refuge in Santa Fe managed to flee
down the Rio grand and exactly whether this is because

(16:15):
they were allowed to go or were just strong enough
presence not to be messed with is still a matter
of some debate. The Lieutenant governor decided to abandon New
Mexico as well. Yeah, we pretty much know that they
all left and the Native Americans allowed them to leave,
but we have no record of the rationale for why

(16:36):
everyone was allowed to leave at this point. Yeah, if
they cut a deal, or if they just were strong
enough that they were like, we're just gonna let this happen. Yeah,
along with some of the Pueblo peoples who were loyal
to Spain, everyone went to El Paso del Norte which
today is Juarez, Mexico, and for twelve years the pueblos
were actually free from colonial rule. So after the revolt,

(17:06):
Pope toured the pueblos and instructed people to really throw
off all Spanish influence. Many people underwent a ritual bathing
that was meant to wash away their baptism. Christian marriages
were also voided until a traditional pueblo ceremony could be performed,
and the pueblos burned down villages that the Spanish had built,
including Spanish built pueblos that the native peoples had been

(17:28):
living in. They basically wanted to eradicate anything the Spanish
had touched. Yeah, they burned down mission churches and smashed
the bells, they whipped statues, gouged out the eyes of
religious paintings. But this really didn't happen in every single pueblo.
This is another thing that a lot of times in
modern accounts you will see this as a universal thing
that happened in every single pueblo to the same extent,

(17:51):
But there's really a lot of variety in exactly how
much each pueblo village did or did not reject Catholic
influence at this point, and some of their tribe. Some
of the tribes actually moved their pueblos to more defensible
vantage points to better defend themselves in case the Spanish returned.
Many of the new pueblos that were built after the

(18:11):
revolt were built immediately adjacent to other villages that dated
back to the twelfth or thirteenth century, So it sort
of seems as though that in addition to going back
to their traditional ways, they were also going back to
the places where their ancestors had lived. But Spanish influence
was not entirely destroyed. Some Spanish introductions to Pueblo culture,

(18:32):
including raising cattle and sheep, had become part of the
way of life there, and POPEI decreed that people should
go back to planting corn exclusively, but some continued to
plant wheat and barley, which had also been introduced by
the Spanish. There were also Pueblo people at this point
who identified as Christians and who didn't want to give
up their religion. These people would salvage and hide what

(18:56):
they could, or incorporate Christian themes into their traditional spiritual practice,
so you can see some kind of merging of the
two influences in the archaeological record. In some places, the
Spanish started to attempt to retake the Pueblo area in
sixteen eighty one. There were skirmishes and sieges that went

(19:17):
on for years. POPEI died in sixteen eighty eight, and
there really wasn't another charismatic leader to take his place
and try to unite all the people of the different pueblos,
And even before his death his leadership had really weakened.
He wound up dying in disgrace. There's some suggestion in
the testimonies that was taken orally from the Pueblo peoples,

(19:39):
that there were pueblos that went along with POPEI because
they were scared of him and not because they actually
wanted to rebel. It's kind of hard to figure out
whether that is really what people thought, or whether that
is sort of an addition of the Spanish translators. But
the fact that he did die in pretty much not

(20:00):
a state of respect or reverence makes it seem like
maybe there was there's some merit to that angry. Yeah,
some merit to that part of it. Also, the sort
of back to the old ways that he was advocating
did seem like in sometimes that it was sort of
back to the old ways as envisioned by POPEI. Some
of the pueblos that were rebuilt after the revolt have

(20:22):
more in common with Pope's particular people than with the
pueblos that they were replacing. And weakened by years of
fighting and a loss of a central leader to coordinate
their efforts, the Pueblo peoples once again fell to the Spanish,
and that was in sixteen ninety two. At this point,
though the evangelical policy of the Catholic Church did become

(20:44):
somewhat less oppressive in terms of religious expression, so there
were still missions and churches being built. Missionaries still tried
to convert people, but they didn't really stand in the
way of the Pueblo people's free religious expression at that point.
So while there was still bill a whole colonial system
going on, that the Pueblo peoples did have more of

(21:05):
an ability to carry on their historical traditions and their
spiritual traditions. But unfortunately that did not stop things from
being bloody in the reconquest process. So while there were
some peaceful surrenders in other places, the Spanish actually went
house to house and burned people in their homes. That's

(21:25):
pretty bloody all around. Uh huh. Historical archaeologist Matthew J.
Leebman frames this whole revolt as a revolution and not
a revolt, and he draws some parallels between it and
the American Revolution. Basically, in both cases, there were farming
people who were unhappy with the leadership, who organized at
night to rise up and get rid of an oppressive

(21:46):
colonial government that they were unhappy living under. And today
there are about seventy five thousand people of Pueblo descent
still living. Yes, we're not talking about people who existed
only in the past. As we said earlier, one of
the pueblos is one of the most or one of
the oldest continually inhabited places in the United States. Yeah,
so the culture endures to some degree. It does and

(22:09):
in endoors, and a lot of the pueblos that still
exist are still inhabited in a way that's similar to
how they were inhabited at this point in history. A
lot of them are places that people can visit if
they are interested in learning about. There are a lot
of resources online to kind of get a sense of
what the etiquette is of going, like what people can,

(22:32):
what visitors can and cannot witness, and can and cannot
do and participate in. We can add that to our
list of History Podcast road trips. Yes, the Pueblo trip.
That would be very cool. There's a statue of Pope
in the Statuary Hall in the United States Capital. It's
one of the seven Native Americans who were represented in

(22:53):
the Statuary Hall. And as we've talked about, there are
nuances to this story, so you know, for that reason,
it was a pretty controversial addition to the statuary Hall.
It was carved by Cliff Fragua of Haimez Pueblo, and
it depicts him he's, uh, he's holding the knotted cord
that was used to help time everything correctly, which is

(23:16):
really a pretty ingenious timing device. Yeah, bol but defective.
I also watched a video that pointed out that it's
kind of weird where it's positioned because where where the
statue of pope is you can see over his shoulder
this this big mural of Columbus quote discovering Aca. But

(23:40):
because of the way the statue happens to be positioned,
he's his face is kind of turned away from that. Interesting. Yeah,
I don't think that was a deliberate I think it
just worked out that way. Fascinating, but yeah, thanks, thanks
so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd

(24:03):
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