Kachina and the Cross (4 page)

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Authors: Carroll L Riley

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BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
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Jamestown (1607) managed to put down settlements. It is interesting that Quebec, Jamestown, and Santa Fe, soon to be capital of the province of New Mexico, were founded within a year or two of each other. A second group of English towns in what became New England date from the 1620s, as does the Dutch settlement of New Amsterdam (later New York), the latter near the site of a failed 1615 fort and storehouse.
The Spanish domination of the New World was not only political and military but also religious. In no other colonizing power of the period did the religious organizations, intent on missionizing the native peoples, have as much power as in Spanish America. The English settlements were largely secular, as in Virginia, or were formed by religious refugees fleeing the control of the English official church, as in New England and, a few decades later, Pennsylvania, founded by William Penn's Quakers. The Dutch settlements along the Hudson were essentially stations for the fur trade. In all cases, attempts to missionize the native population were sporadic and halfhearted. Treatment of the Native Americans by both English and Dutch colonists (with the exception of certain remarkable individuals such as William Penn of Pennsylvania and Roger Williams of Rhode Island) was marked from the beginning with cruelty and double-dealing. Only in the French-controlled lands, where the Jesuit order was powerfully deployed, was there a more or less consistent and relatively benign Indian policy. Even the French colonies, however, did not have the close state and church partnership in exploration and settlement that developed during the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries in Spanish America. With it came a humane (though very paternalistic) attitude toward and treatment of the Native Americans, more so than exhibited by any other European colonial power.
Part of Spain's success in the sixteenth century lay in the makeup of Spanish society at the time of Columbus. The wars with the Moorish population of Spain were coming to an end, and Castile and Aragón had large numbers of footloose fighting men. The New World offered a young, militarily trained, and tough generation new military adventures and the chance of fame and fortune abroad. It also shored up the Spanish economy by exporting large numbers of idle soldiers to take part in entrepreneurial operations in the Americas. The Spaniards who took part in the early conquests in the New World had, in many cases, already been involved in a holy war against the Islamic Moors. During the first incredible century, Spanish armies were usually inspired by two driving forces: the search for wealth, especially gold, and the belief that Spaniards were part of a great crusade, doing God's work in heathen America. In Spain itself, this crusading spirit had a sinister side. At the instigation of the clergy, but apparently with strong public approval, Castile and Aragón launched a period of "purification" aimed at the
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non-Christian elements (Jews and Muslims) both on the Iberian Peninsula and overseas. Granada, the last Moorish stronghold, fell in 1492, and within a short time the program of mass, forced conversion to Christianity was underway. Those refusing conversion were killed or forced to flee the country.
The Spaniards' belief that they were on a divine crusade in the New World was certainly encouraged by the religious orders and by the Crown, which financed and backed these orders in their search for souls. Only in the first chaotic two decades in the New World was there little or no influence by the missionaries. Certain expeditions of a slightly later periodespecially ones like those of Cortés and Pizarro, before the viceregal system was firmly in placewere relatively little influenced by the missionaries, but as the century wore on this became less and less the case.
The Franciscans were the first of the religious groups in the New World, at least on an organized and regular basis. There was a Franciscan on Columbus's second voyage, and twelve friars sailed with Ovando for Santo Domingo in 1502 with instructions to give the native Taino instructions in Christian doctrine. They do not seem to have had much effect on either Spanish or Indian behavior. The twelve Franciscans who reached Mexico after Cortés's conquest had greater success. They arrived in central Mexico in 1524 and were quickly involved in educating Aztec and Tlaxcalan youths, especially young noblemen. The missionaries soon began to learn Nahuatl, the major language of the region. These first Franciscans had considerable political clout; one of them, Pedro de Gante, was a kinsman of King Charles. Their missionizing work was made even easier when three years later a Franciscan bishop, Juan de Zumárraga, was sent to Mexico City. Hostile Spanish bureaucrats tended to act as a counterbalance to the missionaries until the arrival of first viceroy, Antonio de Mendoza, in 1535. Mendoza was an enthusiastic protector of Indian rights, and he and Zumárraga worked hand in hand. There were also Franciscans on the Pizarro expedition and with Coronado in the Southwest. In fact, the period from about 1530 to mid-century was a kind of golden age for the Franciscans. Their millenarian beliefsthat conversion of the New World people would hasten the Second Coming of Christled to a feeling of divine mission accompanied by frenetic efforts to fulfill that mission. It did pay an unexpected dividend. The Franciscan study of native languages and collecting of aboriginal histories and customs were to be of inestimable value to later anthropologists and historians; however, the early Franciscan agenda, especially the use of native languages to promote Christianity, fell out of favor in the latter years of the sixteenth century.
The Franciscans were the earliest workers in the Southwest and were given the province of New Mexico for their mission activities. They were in the region
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as early as 1539 and took part in a number of the sixteenth-century expeditions to the Southwest. In the seventeenth century, the main focus of this book, they dominated the religious life of the upper Southwest. The Sonoran region, however, was assigned to the Jesuits (see below). (For a further discussion of the Franciscan order and its development in the Southwest, see chapter 8.)
The second group of missionaries to reach the Americas was the Dominican order, whose first members arrived in Santo Domingo in 1510. They were instrumental in offering some protection to the remnants of the Taino groups, and the greatest of them all was Bartolomé de Las Casas, who joined the order in 1523 and became a compelling and powerful voice for protection of Native Americans everywhere.
The last major missionary group to come to the Western Hemisphere was the Society of Jesus, or order of Jesuits, founded in A.D. 1540. The Jesuits first reached the New World in 1549. By the latter part of the sixteenth century, they were operating in several areas, including the northwest of New Spain, where they continued to be a powerful missionizing force until the removal of Jesuits from the Americas in the mid-eighteenth century. As mentioned above, the Jesuit order was also the missionary group that functioned in French North America.
By the last decade of the sixteenth century the tide of Spanish affairs was definitely on the wane. It is often said that the Spanish golden age of empire ended with the death of Philip II in 1598. This date, coinciding with the beginning of colonization of New Mexico, is a useful marker. However, it must be pointed out that a general decline of the Spanish Empirecaused in part by continuing adventurism in Europe and overseas, ruthless religious repression, and a destructive economic policy at homewas already well advanced by the end of Philip's reign. The gold and especially silver from the American mines helped fuel an inflation that affected all of Europe. Prices in Spain in A.D. 1600 were four times what they were in A.D. 1500.
Parenthetically, the Spanish literary Siglo de Oro, or Golden Century, is generally considered to start in the mid-sixteenth and run to the mid-seventeenth century. Though brilliant in literature, this was also a period when both Spain's economy and her political fortunes were flowing downhill, slowly at first but then in a precipitous and disastrous torrent. The unstable coalition of Spain and Portugal broke apart in 1640; that same year Catalonia revolted and, with French help, remained outside the Spanish orbit for twelve years. The long de facto independence of the northern Netherlands was formally ceded by Spain in 1648.
A part of Spain's decline in the seventeenth century had its roots far back in the
reconquista
, that period of several centuries when the states of Christian Spain were gradually reclaiming the peninsula from the Muslims. At first the
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struggle centered on the
meseta
country of central Spain. At one time heavily agricultural, the back-and-forth surges of armies increasingly discouraged the maintenance of agricultural villages. More and more, people turned to herding in order to have a certain mobility of capital. Over time a powerful organization of sheep owners called the
Mesta
grew up, often able to dictate even to the state. The result, by the end of the reconquista, was the entrenchment of herding, especially in Castile, to the detriment of grain agriculture and to the environment generally. In southern Spain another but equally devastating trend took place after the fall of Seville and the rich Andalusian region in A.D. 1248. Hundreds of thousands of Muslims, perhaps the most skilled farmers in Europe at that time, were driven out. The land was quickly made into large estates (latifundia), ceded to important members of the Spanish nobility and to the Church. Agricultural production fell rapidly and remained low. At the same time as this destruction of agricultural potential by latifundia, Spanish cities were becoming static. The middle class of merchants, professions such as law and medicine, the building trades, and various kinds of manufacturing had drawn heavily on Jewish and Muslim elements. Many of these were now forcibly converted or driven out. Even though large numbers of both groups became converts, they were the object of constant suspicion and harassment by Church and Crown. Even in the vibrant sixteenth century these basic economic weaknesses could barely be glossed over. In the seventeenth century they rendered Spain increasingly feeble, especially in international affairs. Long before Turkey, Spain was the ''sick man of Europe.''
Though no longer a bona fide world power, Spain managed to stabilize her national life and policy in the eighteenth century; however, in the early nineteenth century most of the American colonies were lost to independence movements. Spain tenaciously clung to Cuba and Puerto Rico until the Spanish-American War of 1898. After a period of experiment with democracy, a regressive movement in the late 1930sled by a brutal military
caudillo
, Francisco Franco, backed by elements in the Church, with active support of Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, and tacit help from Englandattempted to turn back the clock and re-create an earlier Spain. This had the incidental effect of alienating many of the Latin American nations, especially the ones tending to democracy. The Franco experiment collapsed in the 1970s, and in the post-Franco era, Spain, now a full economic and cultural partner within Europe, has redeveloped strong cultural and economic ties with her former colonies.
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Chapter Two
The Native Americans
The Southwest was occupied as part of that earliest migration out of northeast Asia near the end of the
Pleistocene
, or Ice Age. At that time the climate of the Southwest was wetter than now with many lakes and large rivers. The first
Paleo-Indians
to become, indisputably, an element in the Southwestern landscape were people of the
Clovis
archaeological tradition who probably reached the region about 11,500 years ago. There is increasing evidence to suggest earlier settlements, but the Clovis Paleo-Indians with their fluted stone points used to hunt the great Pleistocene elephants are fully documented. Clovis sites are found over much of the Greater Southwest and extend beyond it in every direction. Clovis peoples had a technology probably based on the spear-thrower, sometimes called by its Aztec name,
atlatl.
The atlatl is a flattened two-foot billet of wood, bone, or ivory, tapered at one end to form a hand grip, with a notch at the other end into which is fitted the butt end of a short spear. The spear is then cast with a rounded motion of the arm, sending the missile farther and faster than could be done with the arm alone. Clovis spears were often tipped with a chipped stone point that was fluted; that is, a flake was removed on either side of the point along its long axis. Fluting is a characteristic American method of chipping and may have served to make the wound bleed more freely.
Clovis was replaced by a series of more topographically restricted cultures, the best known of which is
Folsom
, whose hallmark was another type of fluted point. By Folsom times, the various elephants (mammoth and mastodon) had largely disappeared from the Southwest, and Folsom hunters concentrated on the large Pleistocene bison. After Folsom came other hunting traditions, but the climate was growing warmer and drier. By about 6000 B.C. it was becoming very difficult to depend on big game hunting. Slowly, the Paleo-Indians adapted to this more difficult climate, concentrating on a strategy of gathering wild plants and hunting small and mid-sized game. This new era of human endeavor is called the
Archaic

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