Kachina and the Cross (44 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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Page 215
conspiracy which was general throughout that kingdom, giving orders to the Christian Indians that all the horse droves of all the jurisdictions should be driven to the sierras in order to leave the Spaniards afoot; and that on the night of Holy Thursday . . . they must destroy the whole body of Christians, not leaving a single religious or Spaniard. This treason being discovered, they hanged the said Indian, Don Esteban, and quieted the rest, and when the property of the said Indian was sequestered there was found in his house a large number of idols.
These various revolts were generally in conjunction with Apaches, who seemed only too willing to back the Pueblos in such endeavors. In 1675 still another rebellion flared up, this one centered at San Ildefonso but containing members from various Tewa towns. This took the form of an attempt to bewitch Fray Andrés Durán, two other Spaniards, and an Indian interpreter, plus the murder of several other persons. Governor Juan de Treviño acted with considerable speed, arresting forty-seven individuals, probably leading religious figures, from the Tewa and nearby pueblos. Treviño ordered four of these
hechiceros
, or medicine men, to be executed, and they were arrested by Francisco Xavier and Diego López Sambrano. Three of these men were hanged, and the fourth committed suicide. That the rebellion had spread beyond the confines of Tewa country is indicated by the fact that one of the hangings took place in Keresan San Felipe and another in Towa-speaking Jemez. Some of the forty-three remaining conspirators were flogged. An armed delegation of some seventy men from the Tewas called on the governor in Santa Fe. Although they brought gifts, offering them in return for the prisoners, they left additional forces in the surrounding hills and clearly intended to force the issue. Treviño backed down, accepted the gifts (eggs, chickens, tobacco, beans, and small deerskins), and released his captives. Among the released prisoners was the religious leader Popé, an important figure in the Tewa pueblo of San Juan. Popé subsequently moved to Taos, always a hotbed of rebellion, to await more propitious times. They were quick in coming.
It has been suggested on the basis of the Treviño incident that Spanish repression had actually lessened by the 1670s, but this really does not seem to be the case. Rather, I think that a rising tide of Pueblo aggression coincided with increasing Spanish weakness, militarily and otherwise, explaining Treviño's loss of nerve in the affair of the Tewa religious leaders. It also explains the desperate efforts of Father Ayeta to get additional soldiers for the frontier, even if their ranks were largely filled with convicts. The official reason for these additional men was to fight the Apaches. Even granted that the Spaniards were in deep denial, it is impossible to believe that they did not have some clue that a rebellion was fast brewing among the Pueblos.
Page 216
When did the Indians first get the idea of a pan-Pueblo coordinated movement against the Spaniards? It certainly predated the movements of the late 1670s. According to Pedro Naranjo, an aged Keres rebel leader captured at Isleta in December 1681, the first attempt to unite all the Pueblos was during the governorship of Ugarte y la Concha (1649-53). The center of this early unrest may have been the Keres pueblos or Jemez, and the insurrection failed because the Hopi refused to join. In the words of Naranjo, ''The pact which they had been forming ceased for the time being, but they always kept in their hearts the desire to carry it out, so as to live as they are living to-day."
The revolt, carefully coordinated and planned as it was, must have been the work of numbers of people in most if not all the Pueblos. Two groups of individuals might be expected to lead such a movement. One of these was the native elders, the moiety and clan leaders in the various pueblos, the "old men" and hechiceros of the Spanish accounts. The other group of natural leaders, as mentioned above, must surely have been the military leaders, the "capitanes de guerra" who led native troops against the Apaches and who generally formed the backbone of Spanish-led expeditions against nomadic Indians.
Were there acculturated outsiders who served as leaders in the Pueblo Revolt? In a 1967 article, the Franciscan historian Fray Angelico Chávez suggested that one of the leaders of the revolt was the descendant of a black freedman who came to New Mexico in Oñate's time and who married a Mexican Indian woman. This man, Mateo, took the name Naranjo in New Mexico and established himself perhaps at Santa Clara Pueblo. Chávez believed that the Pedro Naranjo whose age in 1681 was given as eighty years, was a son of Mateo.
The previous year, during the first days of the rebellion, Governor Otermín had received information from captured Pueblo Indians that a major player was an "Indian lieutenant of Po he yemu [who was] very tall, black, and had very large yellow eyes, and everyone feared him greatly." Chávez believed that this representative of Pohé-yemo (or Poseyemu, as it is more normally written) was a member of the Naranjo family, perhaps a brother of Pedro who had thrown in his fortunes with the Indians. Chávez's hypothesis rested in part on a model of Pueblo life which saw the Indians as basically passive and peace loving, attracted to the Franciscan theology and too unsophisticated to mount a rebellion. The intelligent and urbane Naranjo, speaking both Spanish and several Pueblo languages, and knowledgeable in the uses of Christianity, Pueblo religion, and that of native central Mexico provided the intellectual underpinning for the rebellion. The description given of him was that of a black individual, taller than the average Pueblo Indian.
Why would Poseyemu have been the deity chosen to help trigger the rebellion? For one thing, this spirit was essentially pan-Pueblo under various names.
Page 217
Poseyemu
is the Tewa name; the god appears as
P'ashayani
among the Keres,
Puspiyama
among the Southern Tiwa,
Poshaiyanki
at Zuni,
etc.
Poseyemu has culture hero aspects, and legends about him tell of a despised youth who was reviled but who taught the Pueblos many of the arts of life.
As part of Father Angelico's argument for a strong black/Mexican Indian influence on the Pueblo Rebellion, he cites a bit of information given by Pedro Naranjo to Otermín's soldiers in late 1681. Naranjo described three native deities who appeared to Popé in a kiva in the pueblo of Taos. These three, named Caudi or Caydi, Tilini, and Tleume, told Popé that they were returning "underground to the lake of Copala." They instructed Popé to tie knots in maguey fiber which would signify the days till the rebellion. The three spirits were observed to "emit fire from all the extremities of their bodies." Chávez pointed out that Copala was a bit of Spanish mythology rather than that of the Pueblo Indians, and he further thought that the three spirits were Aztec deities. As said above, he saw this bit of information as being part of the Naranjo intellectual contribution to the rebellion, with a brother of Pedro functioning as the powerful representative of Poseyemu himself. Chávez thought that this man might be Domingo Naranjo, presumably a younger brother of Pedro. If Chávez's theory is indeed correct, I wonder if it might not have been Lucas Naranjo of Santa Clara, who was killed during the revolt of 1696. This Lucas may have been Domingo's son and Pedro's nephew.
The mythical land of Copala is certainly Spanish in origin, and during the period of early Spanish exploration, its location moved from western Mexico to the North American West. Of course, it may well be that Caudi, Tilini, and Tleume were Aztec spirits, perhaps described to Pedro by his Mexican Indian mother. However, the anthropologist Alfonso Ortiz of San Juan Pueblo thought that the spirits might have been Pueblo, that Popé was in fact doing "a very wise and traditional Pueblo thing: invoking sacred culture heroes as his ultimate rationale for the rebellion he was planning." In fact, Ortiz identified Tilini as the revered Tewa culture hero Tinini Povi (Olivella Flower Shell Youth). Ortiz could not match the other two deities to Tewa supernatural figures and thought that they may have been Keresan or Tiwa. It seems to me that Tleume might conceivably have been a Spanish mishearing of the word
Thliwale
, the kachina-like mountain spirit of Isleta. It might even be a misrendering of the term
Tlatsina
, the Taos form of the word
kachina
.
Something else needs to be considered here. A black man with glowing or burning eyes is a fairly typical late medieval and renaissance European iconographic rendition of the devil. In the Spanish New World such a figure was described by Pérez de Ribas for the Sonoran area a half century before the Pueblo Revolt. Poseyemu therefore owes something to Spanish as well as to
Page 218
Indian imagination. In addition, the three spirits who voided fire from their body extremities could well have been drawn from contemporary European illustrations of the Christian devil. What may be the case is that a merger of the two traditions took place, strained, of course, through the Spanish literary culture. This does not mean that Poseyemu's representative was
not
a member of the Naranjo family, only that mythologies from both culture worlds were involved in his description.
Who specifically made up the leadership of the Pueblo Revolt? There seems little doubt that Popé was a major figure, probably the single most important individual in the revolt. His inclusion in the group of "hechiceros" arrested by Trevifno suggests that he was a member of the Pueblo priesthood. Alfonso Ortiz believed that Popé was a priest, perhaps the chief priest, of the summer moiety at San Juan and that his name could be roughly translated "ripe cultigen." The fact that he never appeared with a Spanish name suggests his deep commitment to the native religion and culture. As a religious leader, Popé would not have been involved in the taking of life, so his role in the Pueblo Revolt would have been one of overall strategy and of prayers and meditation instead of fighting. Curiously, Popé was supposed to have murdered (or ordered the killing of) his son-in-law, Nicolás Bua, Indian governor of San Juan, an individual who sympathized with the Spaniards and who might have prematurely revealed the rebellion (see also chapter 13). According to the Spaniards, Popé insisted on the death of backsliders among the Pueblos after the revolt succeeded. These things simply do not fit Popé's priestly role and remain somewhat of a mystery. The information about the murder of Nicolás Bua, however, came from one source, a Tesuque native named Juan who was in the process of apostatizing (or who perhaps had always been a missionary fifth-columnist). Juan may have been misinformed or lying, as indeed may have Pedro Naranjo, who talked of Popé ordering the execution of Indians who tried to remain Christian after the revolt. Still, the possibility remains that Popé decided to adopt a position in society paralleling that of the Spanish governor, giving up his priestly functions for this highly secular role.
What is perhaps more likely is that the revolt was more elaborately structured than the Spanish realized, with a council of religious leaders as well as a group of military leaders working together but with differing functions, something traditional in Pueblo society. Popé was a religious leader, but certain other headmen mentioned in the Spanish accountsfor example, Tacu of San Juancannot be identified as to function. Another set of rebel leaders included Pedro Naranjo of San Felipe, his relative (Poseyemu's representative; perhaps Lucas Naranjo?), Catiti of Santo Domingo, Luis Tupatú of Picurís, the Keresan chieftain Antonio Malacate, the Tano leaders Juan of Galisteo, Antonio Bolsas, and Cristóbal Yope,

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