by David Treuer
Around 1200 CE, a wave of Athabascan newcomers arrived in the region who would change the Southwest forever. While the southwestern “supercultures” (Hohokam, Mogollon, and Násaazí) were in full swing, small groups of Athabascan-speaking hunters and gatherers began migrating south from what is now Alaska and British Columbia. They were subarctic peoples, and it is likely that at first they stuck to the ways they knew by hewing to similar climates in the Rocky Mountains while in search of game. As they traveled south over the course of a few centuries, they picked up various skills—pottery making, basket weaving, the use of the bow and arrow—that certainly eased their way. By the time of their arrival in the Southwest between 1300 and 1500 CE, the great culture groups of the region had disbanded and scattered, and the new hunter-gatherers found ample room for settlement, though legend has it that the newly minted Apache (one set of these arrived northerners) fought the Pima (derived from the Hohokam) fiercely and lost. The northerners, having grown and divided and divided again as they moved south, divided themselves still further by settling in different parts of the Southwest. In doing so they came into being as distinct peoples. Those who would become known as the Diné (Navajo) fetched up in the Four Corners area. The future Western Apache (Tonto, Chiricahua, White Mountain) set up on the western side of the Rio Grande, whereas the Mescalero Apache settled between the Rio Grande and the southwestern edge of the Llano Estacado, which straddles northwestern Texas and eastern New Mexico. The Jicarilla Apache settled into northern New Mexico northeast of the Rio Grande. Other Athabascans swung farther east and adapted to the Plains. They would become the Kiowa and Lipan people.
In 1540, when the Spanish first ventured into New Mexico looking for Cibola (one of the fabled Seven Cities of Gold), they found a well-populated, well-demarcated Indian homeland that had been settled for millennia by constantly evolving tribal groups, among them the Diné, Pueblo (who themselves included the Zuni, Acoma, Cochiti, Taos, and more), Pima, O’odham, and Apache. It should be emphasized again that wherever the groups came from or whomever they descended from, they were defined more by their spiritual and cultural genesis in the lands that sustained them than by their wanderings. This sense of identity is reflected, for instance, in the way the Diné speak of themselves as traveling through three worlds only to emerge into this one, the fourth. Their creation story, like all Indian creation stories, is significant not just as folklore, and not just for Native people. Such stories explain how Indian peoples and Indian homelands came to define each other. The Diné recognize that they come from someplace else just as Americans recognize they come from someplace else and likewise became who they are through struggle and loss and hardship. Just as we might recognize that Americans were once French and English or Dutch or Italian, their origins don’t invalidate their claim to the country or alter the fact that Indians of all kinds were here before any colonial power, and remain here. It also explains why the Spanish, when they did come, were met by Indians ready to protect their homelands.
Of all the colonial powers that came to America, the Spanish have the worst reputation, and it appears to be earned. When Hernando de Soto staged his entrada into Florida, in addition to soldiers and clergy, he brought attack dogs and blacksmiths to forge chains to control Indian slaves. During his exploits in the Southeast, he demanded that Indians in a town in South Carolina feed his army. The chief, a woman, said they could not because they had lost so many people to disease that they could barely attend to the harvest. She gave him as much food as she could spare and some freshwater pearls. In return, he used his chains on her and many other villagers and hauled them, manacled, west. Later, in 1542, de Soto fell ill on the west bank of the Mississippi. He demanded that Indians on the other side help him cross because he was the “Son of the Sun.” Their chief said that if that were true, he could very well just dry up the river and cross that way. De Soto died shortly thereafter.
It was Francisco de Coronado who led the first entrada into New Mexico in 1540, largely on the basis of false reports of gold and riches made by a black former slave named Esteban. Esteban had survived the disastrous Narváez expedition, most of whose members had perished in Florida, and escaped with others by boat, washing up in Galveston Bay. He and the others lived in captivity to coastal Indians in Texas for six years before they escaped and made their way over time, incredibly, to Mexico City. There Esteban and the other survivors told fabulous tales of cities and gold and riches ripe for the plucking. Ever a glutton for punishment, Esteban found a berth in the 1540 Coronado expedition as a guide. On a recon mission to scout the way for Coronado’s thrust, he and a band of Mexican Indians arrived at a Zuni village named Hawikuh. The Zuni seem to have been waiting for them, having drawn a line of cornmeal on the ground. Esteban stepped over it and demanded food, turquoise, and women. The Zuni withdrew to consider this. After three days they emerged and promptly killed Esteban. The others escaped to inform Coronado, who arrived at Hawikuh the following year. He, too, was greeted by a line of cornmeal on the ground, with more than two hundred warriors on the other side of it and a warning not to cross.
Coronado had been ordered to explore and take possession of land in the north but not to harm Indians—after four decades in the New World even the Spanish recognized that their prior treatment of Indians had been horrific. Nonetheless, he charged. The Zuni fought but lost and scattered to the mountains to rejoin their families. Coronado stayed in Hawikuh for five months, during which time his army ate all the Zunis’ corn and other vegetables and their domesticated turkeys. The Zuni, anxious to be rid of Coronado, told him the Hopi had more wealth than they did. And so the story repeated itself throughout the Southwest as Coronado “explored” his way east and up the Rio Grande past Santa Fe, with a detachment going as far north as Taos, a region over time almost continuously inhabited by Pueblo people settled in their neat villages, surrounded by lush fields and cottonwoods. Informed by his Native guide that there was gold to the east, Coronado made it as far as the Plains and saw the then-limitless herds of bison. But no gold. He executed his guide and returned to New Mexico. In 1580, Spanish explorers reached the Diné near Mount Taylor. The Diné asked that some of their people, stolen by the Hopi and in turn by the Spanish, be returned. The Spanish refused. A battle ensued.
Although there were no Seven Cities of Gold to be found, the Spanish persisted. In 1600 the first real attempts at settlement took place. At Acoma Pueblo in 1598, Juan de Zaldívar, nephew of the Spanish expeditionary leader Juan de Oñate, demanded food. The Indians refused. The Spanish attacked. Twelve of the Spaniards were killed. Two escaped. The Spanish returned in force and killed more than eight hundred Acoma Pueblo Indians and enslaved the rest. Every man over the age of twenty-five had his right foot cut off.
Spanish settlers moved into land bordering the Pueblos, but when they could not make it fertile—it was bare and dry, with hardly enough forage for sheep and horses—they began encroaching on Pueblo land. The Franciscans who were there to convert Indians didn’t behave much better. They conscripted Indian labor and forced the Indians to build the missions while at the same time whipping Indian spiritual leaders, smashing idols and ceremonial objects, and banning dances and ceremonies as devil worship. This was the face of Spanish settlement: slavery, subjugation, and extermination.
Over the 150 years after first contact, the Pueblo, Pima, Diné, Apache, and (later) Tohono O’odham were buffeted by settlers, the Church, and the Spanish military—and increasingly by one another. The introduction of horses and sheep had a profound effect on intertribal relations. By the late seventeenth century, smaller tribes were being raided regularly by mounted Apache and Diné. Pueblo people in turn raided the Diné. Diné took Hopi slaves. The Hopi took their own. For the first time wealth—in the form of cattle and sheep—could be captured and kept.
In 1675, the Spanish military, along with the Franciscans there, publicly whipped forty-seven Pueblo ceremonial leaders. Four of them died an
d the rest were imprisoned temporarily. The atrocity brought home to the Pueblo people, forcefully and finally, that the Spanish colonial presence in the Southwest was an assault on their way of life. Although there had been small, sporadic revolts in the 150 years that the Spanish had been raping Indian homelands and Indians themselves, this event precipitated the largest and most successful resistance to Spanish rule yet seen. Within days of their release, one of the leaders—Popé from San Juan Pueblo—returned home and began plotting in concert with other Pueblo leaders. This entailed uniting dozens of communities with vast cultural differences (exogamous, endogamous; matrilineal, patrilineal; all corn-centered, but with radically different methods of agriculture and rituals). Popé met with other leaders in secret, often under cover of chaotic feast days and other celebrations. They carefully weeded out potential snitches, including Popé’s own son-in-law. On August 12, 1680, they struck.
Sweeping down from the north, they attacked haciendas and settlements, killing men, women, and children. They attacked the hateful Franciscans as well, destroying churches and altars and sometimes smearing feces on religious icons. The Spanish settlers fled from all directions and gathered in the walled plaza adjacent to the governor’s mansion in Santa Fe. For the next few days, Pueblo Indians continued to attack the plaza, loosing arrows and throwing rocks. They diverted the Santa Fe River away from the plaza, thereby depriving the colonists of water. The Spanish sallied out in a “heroic” attempt to break free. They killed some Pueblo Indians, captured some water, and retreated to the plaza. After a week or so the situation was once again desperate. This time their exodus met with no resistance. The Pueblo watched them go, having accomplished what they wanted: the departure of the Spanish.
The few Spanish survivors traveled down to what is now Juárez to regroup. They wouldn’t return for twelve years. When they did, they would never again assume their superiority over the Indian people of the Southwest. It should be noted that today Indian artisans from all over the Southwest gather on the weekends to sell their work under the portico of the plaza: the Indians are still there. And while their descendants remain, the Spanish crown and government do not.
Meanwhile, over to the west, in Arizona, the Jesuits rather than the Franciscans made contact with and settled in among the Tohono O’odham and Pima. The Jesuits employed an entirely different method of colonization through conversion than did the Franciscans. They did not, as a rule, conscript Indians to build missions or cut off their feet or whip them publicly. Instead, they brought livestock and seed. They learned the Indian languages of the region and even seemed to enjoy the company of the people they were intent on converting. A kinder, gentler sort of assault, but an assault nonetheless. The Spanish remained in the Southwest, though they never expanded farther north and west than Santa Fe and Tucson. The northern tribes—Hopi, Diné, and Apache—were too strong. The Spanish had to content themselves with pushing west to California.
Over the next 150 years, although the Spanish exerted less (and more cautious) influence, other forces they had set in motion came into play. The horse, which they had loosed upon the Plains and in the Southwest, changed life in those regions forever. Formerly scattered and relatively small bands of Apache, Comanche, and Ute became mobile, richer, and, as a result, larger. No longer was the struggle in the Southwest merely binary—with the Indians, collectively, on one side and the invaders on the other. Now the region was formed by shifting alliances of some Pueblo people with the Spanish to hold off the Comanche, and the Tohono O’odham and Pima acting as buffers between the Apache and the Spanish. The Diné and Hopi, despite fighting on and off with each other, effectively kept the Spanish at bay.
In the mid-1800s the annexation of Texas and the outcome of the Mexican-American War—culminating in the Gadsden Purchase in 1853—ended Spanish and Mexican control of what we now think of as the Southwest. The centuries-old mix of Native and Spanish cultures that had evolved in Texas, New Mexico, and Arizona came under American rule even if the cultures of the region were not then and are not now what we think of when we say “American culture.” And with the Americans came new land grabs and cultural assaults. Still, contrary to the familiar narrative of erasure, wherein tribes (lumped together) were gradually reduced to nothingness by successive waves of first European and then American power, this history tells a more complicated and accurate story: tribes charted different courses and in the process embraced different fates.
The Pueblos of the Rio Grande and the Hopi, for example, allied themselves with the United States against northern raiders, principally the Apache and Comanche. And in 1848 the United States recognized Spanish land grants and included those made to the Pueblos by the Spanish. As such the Pueblo weren’t coded (or treated politically) as Indians. This meant that much of the Pueblo homelands remained intact. So, too, did their governmental and ceremonial structures, a combination of chiefhood, representative democracy, and clan systems. Not that this ensured that Pueblo ways of life were respected by the United States government. The government built a boarding school to educate Hopi children in 1887, but most of the Hopi wanted to have nothing to do with it: they could see that it meant being severed from their children and allowing their children to be severed from Hopi life. Nevertheless, the U.S. government prevailed, by arresting the parents and holding them hostage until the children were sent to the school.
The Diné suffered horribly. By the time the Americans began administering the Southwest in 1848, the Diné and Apache were well horsed and numerous. They killed the village-bound Pueblo and mestizo New Mexicans regularly. For their part, the Pueblo and New Mexicans raided and killed the Diné and stole women and children to sell into slavery. The trade on which the Athabascans had come to rely had largely dried up, and in the context of the Spanish-inflicted amputations and conscriptions, this was not an extraordinary escalation of patterns of conflict that had long existed. When the Americans arrived, they began grazing their horses and livestock on the homelands of the Apache and Diné, tried to force the Diné into punitive treaty arrangements, and in countless ways attempted to impose their will on an already fraught cultural and political landscape. Attempts to negotiate with the Diné were also complicated by the lack (or at least the apparent lack) of a centralized government. Different clans and bands of Diné took their own counsel, and there was no single government, much less a spokesperson, for the thousands of Diné living within the borders of their four sacred mountains. In 1846 and again in 1849 the U.S. government sent military detachments into Dinétah to sign treaties. The treaties were signed both times, but they were not recognized by the bands and leaders not present at the signings. To make matters worse, Narbona, a prominent Diné leader intent on establishing peace between the Diné and the Americans, was killed en route to one of the signings, and further bloodshed resulted. The Diné resisted. The Americans pushed back by building forts in the Diné homelands. The forts were attacked and burned.
In 1863 the military launched a series of campaigns against the Diné meant to bring them into the embrace of the United States by force. Led and masterminded by Kit Carson, the military eschewed direct conflict or battles (this would become a signature of U.S. military action in the Southwest and, later, on the Plains). Instead, they systematically destroyed flocks and crops wherever they were encountered. The Diné called this “the fearing time.” They could perhaps flee and hide, but their corn, orchards, and sheep could not. Many Diné surrendered until only some holdouts were left, who made Canyon de Chelly their “last stand.” There they persisted for weeks while Carson and his militia destroyed century-old peach trees and orchards in the canyon—a wound that, for the Diné, has not yet healed. Once these last fighters were captured, all the Diné were marched to Bosque Redondo, three hundred miles away in eastern New Mexico, for resettlement. Bosque Redondo had sustenance for only half the number of Indians who arrived. It was scant on wood for fuel and shelter and watered by an alkaline river that
caused intestinal disease. And it was peopled by Mescalero Apache, longtime enemies of the Diné. It was, in short, a hell. Smallpox arrived, taking even more lives. The relocation was, even according to the government, a failure. After five hard years, the Diné were able to return to a portion of their homelands to live a version of the lives they had lived before they were marched to “the suffering place.”
By 1891, just after the massacre at Wounded Knee, life was hard in the Southwest. But there was life. Village structure (as well as ceremonial and political structures) persisted for the Pueblos. The Diné were back in their homelands, much the poorer but still in possession of the land within the four sacred mountains. The Apaches were largely where they had first made their homelands in Arizona and New Mexico, though their territory had shrunk drastically. The Tohono and Akimel O’odham, having passed between the warring Spanish on one side and the northern raiders on the other, remained in Arizona. Elsewhere in the United States tribes had largely been displaced or decimated, or had persisted only as islands in the stream of settlement. But in the Southwest tribes did much more than that. With every wave of immigration—Spanish, Mexican, American—they shaped the culture and fabric of the place, so much so that to be in the Southwest is to feel the continued lived presence of Native America to a degree not found in most other homelands in the United States.
