After popés revolt, spanish colonists gave up attempts to assimilate the native population.
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The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was a revolution against Spanish religious, economic, and political institutions imposed upon the Pueblos. It is the only successful Native uprising against a colonizing power in North America. Show
In the 1670s, the Spanish governor of New Mexico ordered several Pueblo holy men executed, and many others publicly whipped. Po’Pay, a holy man and War Captain of Ohkay Owingeh, was one of the men whipped in Santa Fe, an experience that hardened his resolve to drive the Spanish from New Mexico. In the face of turmoil, suffering from prolonged drought, and fearing the complete loss of our culture, the Pueblo people resorted to armed resistance. Po’pay of Ohkay Owingeh (formerly referred to as San Juan Pueblo) organized and led the revolt. A date for collective rebellion was set, and runners were sent to all the Pueblos carrying knotted cords which represented the number of days until the day of uprising. Each morning, the Pueblo leadership untied one knot from the cord, and when the last knot was untied, it was the signal for them to act in unison. The successful revolt kept the Spanish out of New Mexico for 12 years, and established a different power dynamic upon their return. The Pueblo Revolt holds great historical significance because it helped ensure the survival
of Pueblo cultural traditions, lands, languages, religions, and sovereignty. Learn more in our new Pueblo Revolt Online Exhibit! Teach your children about the first American revolution by downloading the Pueblo Revolt high school lesson plan from our free Indigenous Wisdom curriculum. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was one of the most significant events in New Mexico’s history. The revolt wasn’t successful in terms of permanently driving the Spanish from New Mexico. It was successful in terms of curtailing the cruelty and exploitation exhibited by the Spanish prior to the revolution. It was not the first act of resistance. There were constant uprisings in the northern pueblos in response to Spanish exploitation, abuse and oppression, with the Coronado expedition establishing a precedent for the atrocities that followed. Coronado ExpeditionCoronado hadn’t anticipated the harsh conditions. Marching across the arid terrain of southern New Mexico depleted their food supplies. By the time he reached Hawikuh Coronado’s troops were starving and increasingly mutinous when they realized the reports of wealth and abundance in the northern lands were lies. Zuni PuebloThe Zuni were already aware of Spanish exploits in Mexico. Word travels fast on the north-south trade routes. The Zuni had relocated their women, children, and elderly to the impregnable mesa top sanctuary on top Dowa Yalanne by the time Coronado arrived. The Zuni warriors tried to repel the invaders, but the Spanish had greater numbers and superior weapons. For the next several months Coronado occupied Hawikuh, putting an enormous strain on the Zuni’s food supply. Representatives from Pecos Pueblo traveled to Zuni to meet with the Spanish. They offered to guide them to wealthy tribes in the east. Pecos relied on trade with both the pueblos and the plains. Raiding parties from eastern tribes were a persistent problem and dispatching the Spanish to deal with them probably seemed like a good idea at the time. Also, the Spanish had really interesting things to trade, things they had never seen before, like horses, sheep, and steel. Coronado’s emissary encountered the Tiguex communities farming the fertile flood plains of the Rio Grande near present day Bernalillo while traveling to Pecos. Given the rapidly dwindling food supply in Zuni, Coronado decided to set up his winter camp in one of the Tiguex pueblos, advancing with his troops to seize the community in the fall of 1540. Tiguex PueblosCoronado’s troops summarily evicted the residents of Kuaua Pueblo with nothing but the clothes on their backs. Whereas many accounts imply that the villagers left peacefully, archaeological evidence discovered in the 1930s suggests there was a battle. That seems more likely. Coronado used the village as a military base. He demanded supplies from the Tiwa pueblos, as well as the Keres and Tewa pueblos north of Tiguex. The Spanish traded with the neighboring pueblos for the first few months, but provisions became scarce and the pueblos refused to give up more of their food, because they needed it to survive the winter. Tiguex WarCoronado ordered his men to take what they needed by force. The post-harvest cornstalks, normally saved for cooking and heating fuel during the winter, was fed to the Spanish livestock, leaving the pueblos both hungry and cold. Spanish soldiers raped women in the pueblo. The Tiwas retaliated in December, killing some of the expedition’s horses and mules. Coronado responded by declaring a war of “fire and blood,” which is known as the Tiguex War. He dispatched a large force of soldiers to attack a neighboring Tiwa village, Arenal. They killed all of Arenal’s warriors, including burning 30 men alive at the stake. The Tiwas abandoned their community on the river banks, retreating to a mesa-top stronghold. Coronado couldn’t breach their defenses. He laid siege from January – March of 1541 until the Tiwa ran out of food and water. The Tiwa tried to escape, but the Spanish soldiers caught them. The conquistadors killed all of the men and most of the women. The soldiers enslaved the remaining women for the duration of Coronado’s occupation. Though Coronado left in 1541, and it would be 39 years before the Spanish returned, he devastated the Tiguex communities. They never recovered. The Spanish created the Sandia Pueblo land grant in 1748 for Puebloan refugees who fled Spanish occupation by living with the Hopi in western Arizona. Sandia Pueblo is the only Tiwa community remaining in the area Coronado attacked, although 15 other Tiwa, Keres, Tewa, and Towa pueblos remain on or near the same sites where Coronado found them in 1540. Juan de OñateWhen Juan de Oñate returned to colonize the region in 1598, he brought both settlers and a pack of Franciscan padres. Though the purported purpose of ecclesiastical involvement was to ‘save souls,’ the underlying motives were control, subjugation and exploitation of the indigenous people; deliberate cultural genocide, borne of a sense of manifest destiny imbued by extreme ethnocentrism. Oñate divided the territory into 7 provinces, dispatching priests to each one. The process involved reducing the number of pueblos through consolidation so the population would be easier to control, convert and tax, a policy refered to as reducciones de indios. This empire building policy also provided a larger, more concentrated, labor force for both the civil authorities and clergy to exploit. MissionariesA few of the Franciscan priests tolerated traditional religious practices as long as the Puebloans attended mass and maintained a public veneer of Catholicism. Others weren’t tolerant, establishing totalitarian theocracies in their designated provinces, characterized by ruthless suppression of religious practices and persistent abuse of Pueblo labor. The priests destroyed kivas, forbade ceremonial practices, and desecrated or destroyed sacred objects. The policy of encomiendas, which authorized demands of fealty, tribute and labor from the natives, created a strain on civilizations that already struggled to survive the winter months without starving. In response, the pueblos frequently rose against their oppressors. The uprisings usually involved a handful of pueblos, with insufficient warriors and weapons to be successful. The Spanish authorities often discovered, and ruthlessly crushed, rebellions before they could organize effectively. They killed the dissidents or sold then as slaves. Acoma PuebloIn 1598, Acoma refused to pay the “food tax” demanded by the Spanish. The Acoma leader, Zutacapan, found out that the Spanish intended to invade Acoma. He was aware of the brutal and extreme retaliation experienced by other villages. Initially, Acoma tried to negotiate and Oñate sent his nephew, Captain Juan de Zaldívar, to the pueblo to consult with him. When Zaldivar arrived on December 4, 1598, he took sixteen of his men up the mesa and demanded food. After being denied, the Spaniards assaulted some of Acoma’s women, provoking a confrontation with the warriors of the village. A fight ensued, leaving Zaldivar and eleven of his men dead. When Oñate learned of the incident, he ordered Juan de Zaldivar’s brother, Vicente de Zaldívar, to punish the Acoma. With about 70 soldiers, Vincente de Zaldivar left San Juan Pueblo in late December, arriving at Acoma Pueblo on January 21, 1599. The battle began the following morning, January 22, 1599. It lasted three days. On the third day, Zalvidar and twelve of his men ascended the mesa and opened fire on the pueblo with a cannon. The conquistadors stormed the village. Out of the estimated 6,000 people living at or around Acoma Pueblo in 1599, at least 2,000 were warriors. 500 died in the battle, along with about 300 women and children. Massacre at AcomaThe Spanish captured approximately five hundred people and sentenced them to a variety of fates, all bad. They sentenced every male over the age of twenty five to have their right foot cut off and to be enslaved for a period of twenty years, carrying out the sentence on twenty-four warriors. Additionally, they ordered all males between the ages of twelve to twenty-five to be enslaved for twenty years, along with all females over the age of twelve. Sixty of the youngest women were deemed not guilty and sent to Mexico City,“parceled out among Catholic convents”. Historians believe they were sold as slaves. The Spanish troops arrested two Hopi men and severed one of their hands before releasing them to provide a warning to other pueblos about the cost associated with defying Spanish rule. Oñate’s actions in Acoma were not only traumatizing to Acoma, but shocking and appalling to the other pueblos. Despite cultural and linguistic differences, the pueblos and tribes in this region were not strangers to one another. Through commerce, alliances, peace and war, they had interacted for centuries. News of conflict, uprisings, Spanish misdeeds, battles and war traveled fast up and down the Rio Grande, with localized frustration and anger congealing into regional ambivalence and animosity towards the invaders. Things didn’t improve in the 1600s. Tension MountsCatholic missionaries attempted to eradicate the ancestral Pueblo world in every respect. The priests dictated what people could believe and how they could marry, work, live their lives, and pray. The Spanish civil authorities, clergy and military vied for the tribute and labor of the local population, leading to persistent conflict between church and state, with the inhabitants of the pueblo caught in the crossfire. Tensions increased among the Spanish soldiers seeking wealth, the priests needing wealth to build churches, and the Indians whose labor and resources were exploited by both. By 1626, the Spanish had established the inquisition in Quarai, one of the Salinas pueblos. Bernardo López de Mendizábal served as governor of New Mexico between 1659–1660. He attempted to curtail the powers of the priests, prohibiting them from forcing the native population to work for free and acknowledging the right of the indigenous people to worship according to their traditions, including performing the sacred dances banned by the Franciscans. In return, the Inquisition convicted him of heresy and condemned him to based on thirty three counts of malfeasance and the practice of Judaism. The priests resumed their policy of religious intolerance. From 1645 on there were several abortive uprisings and the Spanish singled out the medicine men for reprisal. Drought, Disease & RaidsDrought and unusually high temperatures in the 1660s and 1670s made life increasingly difficult. Fray Alonso de Benavides wrote multiple letters to the King of Spain, noting “the Spanish inhabitants and Indians alike are forced to eat hides and straps of carts.” All of the indigenous people, from the Puebloans to the Apache, Navajo, and Comanche were starving. Raiding parties became a frequent and persistent problem for the pueblos, ravaging communities beset by famine. With no food in the villages, the raiders took people. They sold them into slavery in exchange for food. The Spanish soldiers and Pueblo warriors couldn’t quell the attacks. The Spanish exacerbated the tension by seizing crops and possessions, leaving the Pueblos with nothing. The Pueblos attributed their hardships, and the prolonged drought, on the disruption of their religious practices. A population estimated to be 40,000-80,000 in the mid-1500s was reduced to an estimated 15,000 by the late 1600s, primarily due to the impact of violence, forced labor, European diseases, and famine. Po’payThe unrest among the Pueblos came to a head in 1675. Governor Juan Francisco Treviño ordered the arrest of forty seven Pueblo caciques, a Spanish term for indigenous leaders or medicine men. Governor Treviño accused the men of sorcery and plotting a rebellion. He sentenced four to be hung, with three executions carried out. A fourth man committed suicide. He had the remaining prisoners publicly whipped and sentenced to slavery. When news of the arrests reached Pueblo leaders, seventy warriors descended on the Governor’s office in Santa Fe demanding the release of the remaining prisoners. They forced Governor Treviño to concede, because his troops were far from Santa Fe fighting Apaches. He wanted to avoid provoking additional uprisings, because the Apache and Navajo were becoming increasingly aggressive throughout the region, putting a strain on his limited military resources. One of those released was Po’pay (Popé) from San Juan Pueblo (Ohkay Owingeh). Little is known about Po’pay prior to his arrest in 1675. Historians estimate that he was born in 1630, which means he came of age during a period of enormous strife and hardship. Famine and attacks were decimating the pueblos. The Spanish were unable to protect them and, instead, were aggressively eradicating their way of life. Po’pay was described as a “fierce and dynamic individual…who inspired respect bordering on fear in those who dealt with him.” After his release from prison, Po’pay retreated to Taos Pueblo, the northernmost outpost of the Spanish Empire. The residents of Taos had a reputation for aggressively resisting the Spanish. Po’pay began to organize and plan a rebellion with a singular, clear objective: drive the Spanish from ancestral land, eradicate their influence, and return to the traditional ways of life. He began secret negotiations with leaders from all of the pueblos.
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