Causes and Legacy of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680

Introduction: The Pueblo Revolt in Context

In 1680, Native Americans known as the Pueblo revolted against their Spanish conquerors in the American Southwest (Calloway, 2003). The Spaniards had dominated their lives, their souls, and their lands for over eighty years. The Spanish colonists conquered and maintained their rule through terror and intimidation from the very beginning, when their troops under the command of Juan de Oñate invaded the region in 1598 (Countryman, 2013). When the natives in Acoma resisted, Oñate commanded that every man over the age of 15 have one foot amputated and that the rest of the population be enslaved — setting the tone for what would become a brutal rule lasting eight decades. The Pueblo people then rose as one community, united by their resolve to unshackle the chains of domination, and succeeded in driving out the Spaniards. Although the Pueblos allowed many Spaniards to escape with their lives, one of the most tragic outcomes of the war was the death of 21 Franciscan priests at the hands of the rebels, who also ransacked the mission churches that had been built across their lands. It took Spanish troops over twelve years to re-conquer the whole of the Pueblo lands — and they never managed to re-conquer the Hopi in the westernmost parts of Pueblo country (Countryman, 2013).

The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 was one of the most important, yet most misrepresented, events in the history of Native Americans. After decades of oppression under Spanish rule, Pueblo Indians across the North American Southwest united and organized a widespread rebellion in the summer of 1680, successfully gaining freedom from Spanish rule by the spring of the same year (McHugh, 2015). When investigating the causes of the rebellion, the lack of authentic Pueblo written accounts raises serious questions about the validity of available data and makes one wonder whether the actual sequence of events can ever be fully known. Even though the widely accepted narrative cast the Spanish as missionaries sent by God to save and convert the "primitive and barbaric" Pueblos, the event seen from the natives' perspective was nothing other than an invasion by foreign overlords driven by self-interest. The Pueblo Revolt — from the burning of churches to the violent deaths of Catholic priests — demonstrates that spiritual abuse was among the main causes of the uprising. Without written accounts from the natives themselves, scholars must rely on other forms in which they stored information to gain insight into the reasons behind the revolt and what helped them overcome the powerful Spanish forces (McHugh, 2015).

Three centuries later, the Pueblo people still live in traditional ways in villages across the Southwest region of North America. A statue commemorating the leader of the rebellion, Po'pay, is one of two figures representing the state of New Mexico in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. The Pueblo Revolt remains the most significant and successful rebellion in the history of North American indigenous peoples. This essay investigates the reasons behind the revolt, what occurred, what it signified, and what it ultimately achieved.

The Role of Religion in the Conflict

Without a doubt, one of the central dimensions of the revolt was religious. From the Zuni and Acoma communities on the western edges of New Mexico to the Pecos Pueblo near the fringes of the Great Plains, the Pueblo people had grown weary of the missionaries after eighty years of what the renowned historian Ramón Gutiérrez described as a forced theocratic utopia. Backed by Spanish troops and with no reluctance to use the whip, Catholic missionaries had systematically dismantled the traditional world of the Pueblos in almost every respect — dictating what they should believe, how they should live, work, marry, and pray. When the revolt began, the rebels bore a specific and intense grievance against the Franciscan priests: whenever they captured one, they first tortured him before killing him. They destroyed all vestiges of the Catholic Church, annihilated mission churches, and desecrated the vessels used in the celebration of Mass. They forbade marriage on Catholic terms. Once all symbols of Christianity had been eliminated, they restored the Kivas — the sacred spaces where their ancestors had honored their gods — and set about living as their forebears had lived.

Although the Pueblo people highly valued their spiritual rituals, the Catholic missionaries were determined to eradicate what they considered "pagan" practices. After the Spaniards failed to locate the fabled golden city of Quivira in the latter half of the sixteenth century, they redirected their ambitions toward converting the natives. From the turn of the century, they penetrated deeper into the lands that now form the state of New Mexico, the heartland of Pueblo country (Liebmann, 2012). Backed by the whip and the cross, the missionaries sought to completely eliminate the natives' religion. Any resistance to Spanish rule was met with torture, imprisonment, or death. Records indicate, for instance, that in 1655 Fray Salvador de Guerra whipped a native for worshiping idols so severely that the man was bathed in blood (Liebmann, 2012). Furthermore, Catholic priests destroyed approximately 1,600 native prayer sticks and Katsina spiritual masks. This evidence reveals not only how the conquerors physically tortured and abused the Pueblo for their religious beliefs, but also how they systematically dismantled their spiritual practices. Rather than regarding the natives as equals, the Spanish conquerors viewed them as idolaters, which only hardened their resolve to force conversion upon them (McHugh, 2015).

Slavery as a Core Factor

Beyond religious differences, slavery was perhaps the factor that provided the final impetus for the locals to revolt against their Spanish overlords. Legal enslavement of the natives had already been forbidden by royal decree from the Spanish Crown since the mid-sixteenth century; however, that prohibition had not ended the practice in reality. The so-called "just wars" offered a legal loophole, and on that basis the Utes, Apaches, and other Native American tribes that resisted the Spanish became fair game for enslavers. Settled Christian Native Americans such as the Pueblo people could be subjected to slavery for fixed periods if they refused to acknowledge Spanish authority. Compulsory encomienda labor — which was ostensibly given by the natives in return for the "benefits" the Spanish had brought — was in practice little different from outright slavery. Enslaved Indians frequently ended up in the vast, labor-dependent silver mines of Chihuahua. Some were transported as far as Cuba to work alongside enslaved Africans on plantations. Native women and children were also sold across the plains for domestic labor and sexual exploitation.

Outside Spanish-controlled lands, slaving frontiers were advancing westward — from the British Colonies (particularly South Carolina) and from New France. The Apache, Navajo, and Pueblo country lay far from the European capitals, yet its peoples were caught in a vast web whose most pervasive common institution was human slavery (Countryman, 2013).