Kachina and the Cross (50 page)

Read Kachina and the Cross Online

Authors: Carroll L Riley

Tags: #History, #Native American, #United States, #State & Local, #Southwest (AZ; NM; OK; TX), #Social Science, #Anthropology, #General, #Ethnic Studies, #Native American Studies, #test

BOOK: Kachina and the Cross
8.92Mb size Format: txt, pdf, ePub
Page 248
instrumental in triggering the Hopi attack on Awatovi, described below. Although Payupki was deserted by mid-century, with the Sandia Indians returning to the Rio Grande, Hano remains to this day a Tano enclave at Hopi.
Meanwhile, Governor Vargas, whose term of office officially ended in early 1696, found himself buffeted by shifting political winds. His old friend, the viceroy Conde de Galve, was replaced in 1696 by Bishop Juan de Ortega Montañez. Although Ortega was acquainted with Vargas and probably well disposed to him, it was not the firm friendship that Vargas enjoyed with Galve. To make matters worse, Galve died shortly after returning to Spain, leaving the governor without an important advocate at court. Then Ortega himself was replaced in late 1696 by José Sarmiento y Valladares, Conde de Moctezuma y de Tula, who had no connections to Vargas. Like a number of previous New Mexican governors, Vargas was having increasing difficulty with the Santa Fe cabildo, whose members disliked him for his arrogance and for perceived errors, especially in the handling of the 1693 colonization and the 1696 revolt. In addition, Vargas had a running dispute with the Franciscans, who tended to blame him for the murder of five of their number in the 1696 uprising.
Although Vargas petitioned for an extension of office in New Mexico, King Carlos II had, several years before, granted the governorship of New Mexico to Pedro Rodriguez Cubero, with the understanding that the latter man would take office at the end of Vargas's term. Rodriguez Cubero is a rather interesting person, indicative of how ability rather than ties to the nobility sometimes counted in seventeenth-century Spain. A member of a relatively humble family, Cubero came from Huéscar in southern Spain. This was an area where there were large numbers of converted Moors, and Rodriguez Cubero may have had Moorish antecedents, though he also had influential relatives, two cousins being members of the prestigious military Order of Santiago. Rodriguez Cubero entered the naval infantry service in 1674 as a common musketeer and rose to the rank of captain of infantry. He seems to have had enough family wealth (or collected enough money on his own) to purchase a post in Havana and then the future of the governorship of New Mexico. As was common in that period, he made a donation to the Crown in return for the favor of the office. By 1695 Rodriguez Cubero had changed his mind and petitioned the Spanish authorities to let him out of the contract, pleading that his poor health made residence in such a cold area as New Mexico undesirable. His petition was denied.
Arriving in Santa Fe in early July 1697, Rodriguez Cubero quickly found himself embroiled in a quarrel with Vargas, who simply refused to leave office. The cabildo filed charges against Vargas, and Cubero had the ex-governor imprisoned in Santa Fe, where he remained for almost three years before finally being allowed to jour-
Page 249
ney back to Mexico. During his term of office, Rodriguez Cubero carried out a number of programs originally planned by Vargas. He initiated a building program in Santa Fe and also turned his attention to bringing the western Pueblos back under Spanish control. In 1699, missions were reestablished at Acoma and Halona, and a new mission station set up at Laguna. The following year, the missionary at Halona, Father Juan de Garaycoechea, along with Fray Antonio Miranda, launched an attempt to reintroduce the mission system to the Hopi. They made a short visit to the pro-Spanish, easternmost pueblo of Awatovi, where they, were favorably received. Before the Franciscans were able to follow through with their missionization efforts, the other Hopi towns attacked Awatovi, sacking the pueblo and killing many of the inhabitants. In July of 1701 Rodriguez Cubero led a force against Hopi but found that the Indians had retreated to their mesa-top fortresses. Finding water only at ruined Awatovi and unable to maintain a protracted stay in the field, the governor returned to Santa Fe. In spite of repeated attempts to reconquer Hopi during the eighteenth century, this group of pueblos remained permanently outside Spanish control. In the midst of this activity, Rodriguez Cubero's term of office expired, and he was replaced by Vargas. Rodriguez Cubero, whose health was now seriously affected, returned to Mexico City, where he died in 1704.
Meanwhile, his bitter enemy, Diego de Vargas, arrived in New Mexico for a second term as governor. Favored by the king and backed by the new viceroy, the Duque de Alburquerque, Vargas's star was on the ascendant once more. He had won long-drawn-out legal battles with the Santa Fe cabildo and with Rodriguez Cubero. Vargas was awarded the title of marqués and granted an encomienda worth an extravagant four thousand pesos to be collected annually from the Indians of New Mexico. But he was not to enjoy those honors for long. Like Rodriguez Cubero, Vargas seems to have been in rather poor health. In late March of 1704 he began a campaign against the Faraón Apaches, who had recently attacked the new settlement of Bernalillo. Vargas became suddenly ill on April 3 in his field camp south of Bernalillo. He was carried back to that settlement, where he became steadily worse, dying on April 8. The diagnosis was ''a severe attack of fever caused by stomach chills," perhaps dysentery or pneumonia.
Though his contemporaries did not fully realize it, the Diego de Vargas years marked the end of an era and a new beginning for New Mexico. Indeed, this new era might reasonably be dated from Vargas's colonization effort beginning in 1692 with its final demonstration that the Pueblo Indians lacked the unity and stamina necessary to hold the region. The old, introverted group of settlers now gave way to the Vargas colonists, people for the most part new to the colony. Eighteenth-century New Mexico was quickly to face very different problems from the mission-dominated colony of the seventeenth century. For one thing, the ratio of
Page 250
Duque de Alburquerque, Viceroy of New Spain, 1702-11 
(oil by Gerald Cassidy, courtesy of the Museum of New Mexico, neg. no. 8780)

 

Page 251
Spaniards to Pueblo Indians changed radically over the course of the century. In 1680 the Indians outnumbered Spaniards by a ratio of perhaps six to one. Vargas understood very well that a secure province of New Mexico needed a larger Spanish base, and this was one of the main points of his strategy for reconquest. By the end of the Vargas period, calculating in the loss of the Hopi towns, the population ratio was probably more like one colonist to every four or five Indians. The colonial population continued to grow, albeit rather slowly, throughout the century, whereas the Pueblo population fell, though not as drastically as in the seventeenth century. By the time of Domínguez in 1776, there were more Spaniards than Pueblo Indians in New Mexico. Another important demographic trend was that in the eighteenth century encomiendas were done away with (even the Vargas one was never taken up), and the old order of large estancias gave way to small holdings, family operations that did not depend on native labor. In the eighteenth century, New Mexico, with its growing population and with increased Spanish settlement to the south, became more closely tied to New Spain. Even so, throughout the century, raids by nomadic Indians continued to impact the major routes connecting the province with central Mexico. On the other hand, a route westward to California was gradually forged during this same period.
Following the reestablishment of the missions in the mid-1690s, there was a gradual retreat from the religious certainties of the previous decades. The eighteenth century saw a slow crumbling of mission influence. Much of the Pueblo religion remained underground, and the missionaries did not fully comprehend its continuing hold on the Pueblo people. Commissary Visitor Fray Atanasio Domínguez, writing in 1776, commented on the scalp dance which the Spanish authorities allowed, perhaps even encouraged, as a price for Pueblo cooperation in the continuing fight against hostile nomads. Probably, Domínguez's statement can be taken as indicative of the new missionary attitudes toward Pueblo ceremonies in general: "The contradances or minuets, do not appear to be essentially wicked and are usual on solemn occasions during the year, here in the scalp ceremonial the dances are tainted by the idea of vengeance. The fathers have been very zealous in their opposition to this scalp dance, but they have only received rebuffs, and so the fathers are unable to abolish this custom
and many others
[italics mine], because excuses are immediately made on the grounds that [the Indians] are neophytes, minors, etc."
Eleanor B. Adams and Angelico Chávez, editors of the Domínguez report, assumedas indeed seems likelythat Domínguez was referring to kachina and other ceremonial dances. By the 1770s, according to Adams and Chávez, "the Pueblos were in full use of their estufas and everything connected with them as they are today."
Page 252
Although they would not have appreciated the comparison, the approach of the eighteenth-century Franciscans did not differ greatly from people like López de Mendizábal. And in the eighteenth century the Pueblo Indians began to work more and more within the Spanish legal system, using the courts to press their various claims to land and to individual and group rights.
At the beginning of the seventeenth century the Pueblo Indians and their nomadic neighbors were at the very edge of the larger world. Their contact with Europeans and Africans had been sporadic, generally unpleasant, and not particularly coherent. Oñate changed all that, and the seventeenth century was a learning time, a period in which the worldview of at least some of the Southwestern Indians became strikingly broadened with new skills, new languages, and the beginnings of literacy. It was also a time of great tension and increasing bitterness, for the newcomers were determined to destroy the very matrix of Pueblo cultural being. This does not mean that the Spaniards were especially ruthless or cruel. As discussed earlier, Spain, even in the harsher social environments of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, treated the New World natives better than any other European colonial power. This was primarily due to the humanizing tendencies of the Spanish Church, and Church influence on the secular power structure. If Spain had the best record, surely the Anglo-Americans had one of the worst, their treatment of Native Americans being marked from the first by cruelty and greed. But for all of Spanish humanity and good intentions, the Franciscans in New Mexico were embarked on an all-or-nothing program of Christianization and Hispanization. Had the friars had their way, the Pueblo Indians of later times would have been turned into a Hispanic peasantry. Other Indian groups in northern and western New Spain became just such marginalized peasants, losing their native languages and cultures. Later, after New Spain was replaced by the independent nation of Mexico, many individuals from such groups were able to make their mark in the political, military, and artistic life of their country. They functioned, however, in a distinctly Hispanic cultural world.
For the Pueblos, things worked out differently: a bloody revolt killed one out of six of the Spanish colonists and sent the rest scurrying back to the edges of Nueva Vizcaya. It took two decades or more for the Europeans to regain control, and even that control was not entirely on their own terms. The eighteenth century was one of accommodation, a period that produced the multilayered structure of the modern Pueblos. In a sense, the Southwestern Indians had won their cultural struggle, but in the process they took sustenance from the dominant Hispanic society. It can be seen today in the Pueblo gene pool, material culture, social and political organization, religion, and to some degree, language. The Pueblos contributed also to their Hispanic neighbors, genetically and culturally. Both groups surely benefited from this interchange.
Page 253
Sources and Commentary
Chapter 1, Spain At The Flood
The situation of Castile and Aragón at the beginning of a united Spain is discussed in J. H. Elliott,
The Revolt of the Catalans: A Study in the Decline of Spain, 1598-1640
(Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1963), pp. 1-7. Another detailed discussion can be found in J. Ramsey,
Spain: The Rise of the First World Power
(Office of International Studies and Programs and the University of Alabama Press, 1973), esp. pp. 116-78. For the Nasrids in Spain, see W. M. Watt and P. Cachia,
A History of Islamic Spain
(Edinburgh University Press, Paperbacks, 1977 [first published 1965], Edinburgh, U.K.), pp. 147-50.
Eratosthenes arrived at his estimated circumference of the Earth by measuring its arc between Syene near Elephantine in upper Egypt and Alexandria in lower Egypt. He measured the angle of the sun at noonday in the two places, and decided that they were separated by one-fiftieth of the Earth's circumference. The distance between the two places he estimated at 5,000 stadia, making the circumference of the Earth 250,000 stadia (later "corrected" to 252,000 stadia). Unfortunately, there are several values for a Greek stadium, so modern estimates for Eratosthenes's circumference vary from about 24,000 to almost 29,000 miles, compared to the actual circumference of a little less than 25,000 miles In any case, considering the primitive nature of his instruments, Eratosthenes's figure is remarkable. Consult G. Sarton,
A History of Science: Hellenistic Science and Culture in the Last Three Centuries
B.C. (Harvard University Press, Cambridge, Mass., 1959), pp. 103-6.
For early exploration in the Atlantic, see the two volumes of S. E. Morrison's
The European Discovery of America: The Northern Voyages
(Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1971) and
The Southern Voyages
(Oxford University Press, New York and Oxford, 1974). Also consult two books by C. O. Sauer:
The Early Spanish Main
(University of California Press, Berkeley, 1966) and
Northern Mists
(University of California Press, Berkeley, 1968). See also J. B. Brebner,
The

Other books

Death Cache by Helmer, Tiffinie
Murder Fir Christmas by Joyce Lavene, Jim Lavene
Wreckage by Niall Griffiths
The Marriage Profile by Metsy Hingle
Demon From the Dark by Kresley Cole
Long After Midnight by Ray Bradbury