Pueblo Indians

This dissertation is an interdisciplinary case study of Spanish mission architecture and material culture among Pueblo Indian communities of Early Modern New Mexico. The domestic quarters (conventos) of seventeenth-century missions were intimate arenas of encounter
and cultural negotiation, where Native American laborers lived and worked with Franciscan friars, comprising heterogeneous mission communities. Missionaries established the Purísima Concepción outside the Zuni town of Hawikku (Hawikuh) Pueblo in 1629, where it was destroyed in a 1672 Apache raid. In 1919, Frederick Webb Hodge and Jesse L. Nusbaum of the Hendricks-Hodge Archaeological Expedition excavated the ruins, producing collections which
eventually become part of the National Museum of the American Indian (NMAI) but remain largely unpublished. As one of the few systematically excavated seventeenth-century New Mexico missions, the Purísima Concepción is a vital resource for understanding everyday mission life.

Interpreting the Purísima Concepción’s archaeological remains with primary sources, Zuni oral traditions, and comparative analysis, this dissertation reconstructs the everyday built environment of Hawikku’s convento, rich with materials of labor and cultural concepts of gender. The cloister design at the adobe mission’s core was an architectural form with monastic and vernacular precedents, which missionaries employed as an architectural rhetorical statement communicating aspirations of orderly acculturation. In contrast, artifacts related to everyday culinary practices of food preparation and consumption mixed cultural traditions, manifesting Native agency, Pueblo cosmology, and the overlooked role of women in shaping mission community experiences. Through Native participants and material culture such as culturally hybrid ceramics including soup plates, candle holders, and a unique salt cellar made by Zuni and Hopi artists (sometimes described as colonowares), Pueblo concepts of gender and cosmology interpenetrated the missionaries’ patriarchal Christianity. The result was a hybrid environment combining both Spanish and Pueblo cultural systems.

Focusing on intercultural relations, everyday life, and Indigenous agency, this dissertation explores a particular example of the multi-vocality of art’s history in the Americas. It shifts scholarly attention from mission churches and Spanish colonial power, to the domestic spaces of conventos and the meaning of missions as rhetorical constructions negotiated among participants of the mission community.

Although C.G. Jung  was deeply moved by his encounters with indigenous people , finding those encounters immensely creative, there has been an astonishing lack of dialogue between indigenous people and Analytical Psychology. This  talk is an attempt to recover some of what we have not known about Jung's encounter at Taos and explains why it is important.

The 1680 Pueblo Revolt was the single largest native uprising in New Mexico colonial history (1540-1821). The event, which resulted in the temporary expulsion of Spanish colonists from New Mexico, was the culmination of nearly a century of tension between invading Spaniards and the Pueblo Indians. However, this large-scale revolt was not the only act of rebellion that took place throughout the 16th and 17th centuries in colonial New Mexico. In Acoma Pueblo, a native settlement in western New Mexico, a rebellion took place in 1599 that permanently altered the nature of native-Spanish relations in the region. The Acoma Massacre, a tragedy that would forever haunt the Pueblo people, was one of several major cultural clashes foreshadowing the later Pueblo Revolt. This book explores the many social, political, and economic causes of the Pueblo Revolt, and how these causes are reflected today in the archaeological record.

This is a seminar syllabus design  by George Scheper and Laraine Fletcher on the subject of Pueblo studies, that focuses first on new directions in archaeological study of the Ancestral Pueblo (or Anasazi) peoples of the Prehispanic Southwest, and then on the cultural histories of individual Pueblo communities, including Hopi, Zuni, Acoma, and Laguna, and the Pueblo communities of the Northern Rio Grande, including the impact of various Eastern interest groups coming into the Santa Fe area, as anthropologists, missionaries, collectors, impresarios, or bohemians.
An assessment of new directions in Puebloan Studies, with comments on influential scholarship that is currently changing the field..

Keywords:

Native American Studies, North American Southwest, History of travel and tourism in the US, Native American reservations, Native American education, American Indian Ethnic Renewal, Cultural secrecy, Indigenous regulation of tourism, Etiquettes of behaviour for tourists, Indigenous peoples rights, NAGPRA (Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act), Pueblo Indians, Hopi people, Zuni people, Acoma people, Navajo people, Aby Warburg (1866-1929)

For the Archaeology of Human Experience to have an impact on public policy, archaeologists need to identify what contemporary society values, determine the extent to which ancient societies provided these values, and examine what it was that enabled certain societies to provide them better than others. I develop a case study of this approach focusing on the famous "collapse" of Mesa Verde society and subsequent formation of ancestral Tewa society in the 13th century C.E. I translate the archaeological record into measures that reflect the United Nations Development Programme's dimensions of human security to show that ancestral Tewa society eventually met basic human needs better than Mesa Verde society had done. I also present archaeological, linguistic, and cultural evidence that argues the ultimate driver of enhanced security was conceptual change during the migration period. This example suggests ideas play important roles in structuring behavioral habits and thus long-term social outcomes. [human development, social change, Pueblo Indians, archaeology, U.S. Southwest]

Rautman's critique of our article "Although They Have Petty Captains They Obey Them Badly: The Dialectics of Prehispanic Western Pueblo Social Organization" (McGuire and Saitta 1996) provides us with an opportunity to clarify some points about our theoretical perspective. Rautman shares our dissatisfaction with attempts to characterize Prehispanic western pueblo social organization as either egalitarian or hierarchical. She, however, questions our dismissal of processual theory and our advocacy of a dialectical approach to the problem. She proposes instead an alternative approach that relies on the concept of heterarchy. We have little problem with the use of heterarchy as a descriptive label for late Prehispanic pueblo social orga- nization, but we desire a more dynamic understanding of that organization than the concept of heterarchy allows. We find that understanding in a dialectical approach.

Este capítulo documenta y analiza el desarrollo de la ocupación territorial como característica fundamental de los dos procesos de conquista que han ocurrido en la historia de Nuevo México, el español y el estadounidense, desmenuzando la complejidad de las relaciones  interétnicas que resultaron de este largo proceso a partir un estudio de caso. Basado en investigación etnográfica (trabajo de campo realizado en 2003, 2004, 2005 y 2007) y de archivo, el capítulo se concentra en los conflictos territoriales y formas de cooperación y convivencia entre dos comunidades que comparten un mismo valle: la reservación india de Picurís y la villa hispana de Peñasco. En particular explora cómo se reflejan estos conflictos en las transformaciones que  experimentó la fiesta patronal de San Lorenzo a finales del siglo XX y principos del XXI.

Rautman's critique of our article “Although They Have Petty Captains They Obey Them Badly: The Dialectics of Prehispanic Western Pueblo Social Organization” (McGuire and Saitta 1996) provides us with an opportunity to clarify some points about our theoretical perspective. Rautman shares our dissatisfaction with attempts to characterize Prehispanic western pueblo social organization as either egalitarian or hierarchical. She, however, questions our dismissal of processual theory and our advocacy of a dialectical approach to the problem. She proposes instead an alternative approach that relies on the concept of heterarchy. We have little problem with the use of heterarchy as a descriptive label for late Prehispanic pueblo social organization, but we desire a more dynamic understanding of that organization than the concept of heterarchy allows. We find that understanding in a dialectical approach.

My current research explores how the transition from colonial to national regimes impacted the Pueblo Indian communities of New Mexico and Arizona, shaping as well the relations they sustained with the surrounding Hispanic/mestizo population settled at different times after 1680, and much later with the Anglo immigrants. The strategies successively implemented by Mexico and the United States to integrate the Indian peoples of the region into the nation, administer the resources they controlled and their intercourse with non-Indian neighbors, had important and diverse effects on the persistence of tribal territories and Indian sovereignty that I discuss here. Those strategies, one must remember, rested upon the Spanish or British "diplomatic" and  political heritage.

This is a large, hardback reference book. color & history black & white illustrations. Each profile features tribe, clan, residence, education, teachers, students, awards, exhibitions, documents, photographs, documentaries, publications, websites.