Pueblos of the Southwest

Sources

General Characteristics. Pueblo peoples constituted a distinctive culture in present-day Colorado, New Mexico, and Arizona. Although speaking languages of diverse affiliation, all Pueblo Indians typically lived (and live) in multistoried stone or adobe buildings, sometimes

Pueblo Architecture and Clothing

Pedro de Castañeda accompanied Francisco Vásquez de Coronado’s expedition in search of gold and gems at the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola (actually the Zuni Pueblos). They traveled throughout the Pueblo country of present-day New Mexico from 1540 to 1542. Castañeda left the most complete account of that exploration and the often violent encounters between the Spanish and Pueblo peoples. Moreover, he described the multistory buildings and some of the clothing worn by Pueblo men and women, which stand in stark contrast to Iroquoian styles:

Cíbola is composed of seven pueblos, the largest of which is called Mazaque. The houses, as a rule, are three and four stories high, but at Mazaque there are houses of four and seven stories. The natives here are intelligent people. They cover the privy and immodest parts of their bodies with clothes resembling table napkins, with fringes and a tassel at each corner, tying them around the hips. They wear cloaks made with feathers and rabbit skins, and cotton blankets. The women wear blankets wrapped tightly around their bodies, and fastened or tied over the left shoulder, drawing the right arm over them. They also wear well-fashioned cloaks of dressed [animal] skins, and gather their hair over their ears in two wheels that look like coif puffs.

Source: David Beers Quinn, New American World: A Documentary History of North America to 1612, 5 volumes (New York: Arno, 1979), I: 392.

on the top of high mesas. Each town contained anywhere from fifty to five hundred houses grouped around a central plaza. In the sixteenth century Pueblo society generally had matrilineal kinship patterns, and women owned the plots on which corn and other foodstuffs grew. Women owned the homes also, requiring men to move in with their wives upon marriage. Large portions of a mother’s day were spent preparing meals for her household. As with other horticultural peoples, corn, beans, and squash were the main staples. Together, these crops

contributed more than 50 percent of the Pueblo diet. The male domain existed outside the home. Aside from engaging in warfare, men conversed with the spirit world inside their kivas.

Life in the Pueblos. Because of the semiarid condition of the American Southwest, Pueblo peoples concerned themselves first and foremost with getting enough food and water. They stored as much corn and other agricultural products as they could spare to prepare for times of drought. They also collected wild plants and traded agricultural products for game with the Apaches, Navajos, and other neighbors. The mid-sixteenth-century Spanish explorer Francisco Vásquez de Coronado reported that Pueblo Indians subsisted on maize, beans, and game, including rabbits and deer. Although Pueblo Indians domesticated the turkey, they insisted that the birds were a source of ceremonial feathers rather than food. Coronado found their corn tortillas delicious, and he noted that Indians ate them daily. Pueblos often relied on each other for assistance in hard times. Likewise, individuals often found marriage partners among members of a neighboring pueblo. Periodically, ceremonial specialists also traveled from one group to another offering assistance in rituals and ceremonies. Pueblo Indians maintained (and still do to this day) a rich and complex ceremonial life centered on the agricultural cycle and dominated by maize rituals. They worshiped the water, Coronado thought, because it made the corn grow and sustained all life.

Arrival of Spaniards. In July 1540 Coronado’s expedition from Mexico City reached the Zuñi Pueblo of Hawikuh. They came in search gold and silver, but they found little of either. Ignorant of Pueblo customs, Coronado’s force trespassed on Zuñi lands, which prompted an attack from the village’s defenders. The Zuñis were no match for the Spanish military, however, and several died, while the rest tried to flee. Coronado spent nearly two years terrorizing and demanding tribute from Pueblo Indians until returning to Mexico City in 1542. For half a century the Spanish in Mexico largely ignored their northern territory until Juan de Oñate journeyed north in 1598 with a large force intent on settling the New Mexico region. Once there, he led a punitive expedition against Acoma Pueblo in response to the killing of thirteen Spanish soldiers. When the battle finally subsided after three days, more than eight hundred Acoma residents lay dead; eighty men and five hundred women were taken prisoner. The prisoners over the age of twelve were sentenced to twenty years of servitude, and all men over the age of twenty-five had one foot cut off. After this massacre large-scale Pueblo resistance against the Spanish did not resurface until the 1680s, when the Pueblos united to eject the Spanish from New Mexico.

Sources

Ramón A. Gutiérrez, When Jesus Came, the Corn Mothers Went Away: Marriage, Sexuality, and Power in New Mexico, 1500–1846 (Stanford, Cal.: Stanford University Press, 1991);

Elizabeth A. H. John, Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540–1795 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1975).