Pueblo Sovereignty: Indian Land and Water in New Mexico and Texas
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Pueblo Sovereignty: Indian Land and Water in New Mexico and Texas
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Overview
Over five centuries of foreign rule—by Spain, Mexico, and the United States—Native American pueblos have confronted attacks on their sovereignty and encroachments on their land and water rights. How five New Mexico and Texas pueblos did this, in some cases multiple times, forms the history of cultural resilience and tenacity chronicled in Pueblo Sovereignty by two of New Mexico’s most distinguished legal historians, Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks. Extending their award-winning work Four Square Leagues, Ebright and Hendricks focus here on four New Mexico Pueblo Indian communities—Pojoaque, Nambe, Tesuque, and Isleta—and one now in Texas, Ysleta del Sur. The authors trace the complex tangle of conflicting jurisdictions and laws these pueblos faced when defending their extremely limited land and water resources. The communities often met such challenges in court and, sometimes, as in the case of Tesuque Pueblo in 1922, took matters into their own hands. Ebright and Hendricks describe how—at times aided by appointed Spanish officials, private lawyers, priests, and Indian agents—each pueblo resisted various non-Indian, institutional, and legal pressures; and how each suffered defeat in the Court of Private Land Claims and the Pueblo Lands Board, only to assert its sovereignty again and again. Although some of these defenses led to stunning victories, all five pueblos experienced serious population declines. Some were even temporarily abandoned. That all have subsequently seen a return to their traditions and ceremonies, and ultimately have survived and thrived, is a testimony to their resilience. Their stories, documented here in extraordinary detail, are critical to a complete understanding of the history of the Pueblos and of the American Southwest.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780806161990 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Oklahoma Press |
| Publication date: | 03/14/2019 |
| Pages: | 260 |
| Product dimensions: | 6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x 0.86(d) |
About the Author
Malcolm Ebright is a historian, an attorney, and the director of the Center for Land Grant Studies. He is a coauthor with Rick Hendricks of the award-wining Four Square Leagues: Pueblo Indian Land in New Mexico.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
Pojoaque Pueblo
Pojoaque Pueblo has come back from "abandonment" and near extinction twice, once in 1706 when Governor Francisco Cuervo y Valdés (1705–1707) resettled it and a second time in 1932 when fourteen families returned to claim land that the Pueblo Lands Board was adjudicating. The lands board, not always a champion of Pueblo Indians' interests, advocated strongly on Pojoaque's behalf in 1930, awarding the pueblo damages for lost land even though there were no Indians left in the community. Fortunately for Pojoaque, Louis H. Warner, the most liberal board member, had primary responsibility for the pueblo and went to great lengths to locate the Pojoaque Indians who had moved to other villages or to Colorado. In his 1930 memorandum attached to the lands board report, Warner noted, "I cannot think that a pueblo ceases to be a pueblo as it grows smaller. There is some kind of an interest left to the last man, and that has to be recognized." This is the story of how a very small pueblo almost died twice and in each case came back, not merely to survive, but to thrive.
The village's traditional name, Po-suwae-geh, means "the water drinking or gathering place" in Tewa, which is probably derived from a large spring that at one time fed a small pond at the site of the initial settlement of the pueblo. Pojoaque was one of twelve pueblos located in the Española Basin when Juan de Oñate arrived in 1598 with his entourage of soldiers, settlers, Mexican Indian auxiliaries, and priests, although he made no mention of the village. After initially settling at San Juan, Oñate and his colonists occupied Yunque Yunque Pueblo, renaming it San Gabriel del Yunque, which became their capital. By the time of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, only six pueblos remained in the Española Valley: Pojoaque, Nambé, Tesuque, San Ildefonso, San Juan, and Santa Clara, all of which are still in existence today. The population of the eight northern pueblos (the six Tewa villages and the Tiwa villages of Taos and Picuris) declined more than 75 percent during the first forty years of Spanish occupation. Pojoaque, the smallest Tewa pueblo, felt the pressures of dwindling membership more than the others.
Captain Antonio de Salas, an encomendero who notoriously abused the privileges of his position, held Pojoaque in encomienda during the seventeenth century prior to the Pueblo Revolt. In New Mexico, encomenderos received the proceeds of Indian labor, collecting as tribute one fanega of maize and one cloth manta from each household. By law, encomenderos were prohibited from living in the community they held in encomienda, but some New Mexico encomenderos, including Salas, ignored this legal proscription. When Governor Bernardo López de Mendizábal (1659–60) investigated Salas, who had taken up residence near Pojoaque, Salas stated in his defense that the people of Pojoaque had asked him to build a house and reside in the pueblo. According to Salas, New Mexico Governor Juan Manso (1656–59) had allowed him to live in the village, where he had established a ranching operation, grazing a large herd of cattle and sheep on pasturage near Pojoaque. The arrangement was beneficial to the people of Pojoaque, Salas contended, because he provided them with milk and wool. Moreover, he permitted them to work off what they owed him in tribute, toiling at his ranch house and herding his livestock. This admission indicated that Salas was violating the 1549 law that placed limits on the practice of commuting Indian tribute into labor after the repartimiento had been established as a replacement for the encomienda's labor obligations.
Salas's testimony did not convince Governor López de Mendizábal, who commanded him to raze his house and leave Pojoaque. Salas grudgingly complied, but during López's residencia in 1661, Salas requested payment for damages incurred because of the governor's orders. Salas indicated he was aware that it was illegal for encomenderos to reside in the pueblos that paid them tribute; however, Salas contended that because the New Mexico colony faced danger from marauding Apaches and Navajos, it was prudent for encomenderos and their families to live in their encomiendas as this provided additional protection. Moreover, it had long been the practice, and former governors had always permitted it.
Governor López countered that not only was Salas's house near Pojoaque, it was also close to other Tewa villages. From the time he had arrived in New Mexico to take up the governorship, López had heard complaints from these communities that Salas allowed his livestock to damage their crops and that his own milpas encroached on Indian land. The Salas family was such an irritant that on one occasion Governor López had arrested one of Salas's sons and exiled him to Hopi country. The encomienda system was intended to provide an economic benefit for the encomendero, who in turn had the obligation to provide military protection for the pueblos, but it was a hardship for Pojoaque, as it was for other Indian communities. Having to deliver tribute every year was always nettlesome to the Pueblos, and it was a major source of aggravation as well as a significant burden in times when crops failed and famine was abroad in the land. Resistance to paying tribute was one of many factors that provoked the Pueblos to unite and rise in open rebellion.
When the Pueblo Revolt erupted on August 10, 1680, Pojoaque joined its Tewa neighbors, which included Jacona and Cuyamungue Pueblos, in the general uprising against the Hispanos. There are few details about Pojoaque's participation in the rebellion, but it is clear that elders from Pojoaque participated in planning meetings with people from other villages. When Governor Otermín sent Maestre de Campo Francisco Gómez Robledo out from Santa Fe to investigate the situation in Tesuque, Cuyamungue, and Pojoaque, he reported on August 12 that Captain Francisco Jiménez and his family had been slain in Pojoaque, as had José de Goitia. Among the missing were doña Petronila de Salas and her eight or ten children, of whom three were grown males.
The reconquest of New Mexico began in 1692, and Governor Diego de Vargas made his first visit to Pojoaque the following year on San Gerónimo's Feast Day, September 30. When Vargas and his men entered the pueblo at five o'clock in the afternoon, they were greeted by the people of Pojoaque and a man named Gregorio, whom Vargas described as the captain of the pueblo. Vargas noted as he dismounted in the plaza of the village, which consisted of two house blocks, that in anticipation of Vargas's arrival, the people of Pojoaque had erected crosses (the order to do so had previously gone out to all the pueblos). Vargas told them that he had come to reclaim possession of the land for the king of Spain, who was their lord, and that they were his vassals. According to Vargas, the people of Pojoaque rendered their obedience. Fray Francisco Corvera and his fellow Franciscans absolved the Indians, whom he considered apostates, and baptized forty-eight children and infants, some of whom selected Vargas and his men to act as godfathers.
Vargas made no further mention of Pojoaque in his journals until January 1, 1694, when a Genízaro named Juan de la Vega reported that on his recent trip to San Lázaro and San Cristóbal Pueblos in the Galisteo Basin, the inhabitants had fled and spread the word that the Hispanos had destroyed their villages. On his way back to Santa Fe, Vega discovered that the people of Nambé, Tesuque, Jacona, and Pojoaque had abandoned their homes and gone to Nambé Falls. Some had said they were going to live among the Apaches, others thought they would go to Taos, and still others wanted to return to their homes. Vargas directed Vega to go to those people and to take a cross as a sign that the governor had no wish to harm them. The messenger was to tell them that if Vargas wished to destroy them, he would have already done so by going to their villages, sacking and burning them, and killing anyone he found there.
Finding Pojoaque abandoned, Vargas spent the night of January 10 in the pueblo. It soon became apparent that its inhabitants had sought refuge on Black Mesa (Tsikwage) at San Ildefonso Pueblo, where they joined people from Cuyamungue, Jacona, San Ildefonso, and Santa Clara. On January 28 Vargas noted that the people of the Tewa pueblos, including Pojoaque, had not returned to their homes as he had ordered. They had rejected his calls to meet him in San Ildefonso and failed to come to parley with him in Santa Fe. For that reason, Vargas decided that he would have to mount an expedition to force the Pueblos off Black Mesa and back to their villages, although he only wanted to punish their leaders. In Santa Fe on February 20 Vargas learned from a Tewa prisoner from Tesuque named Tomás that the people from his pueblo and from Pojoaque were staying "opposite Pojoaque Pueblo in the place of the colored rock." Later the same day another Tewa prisoner from Ciénega who resided in Tesuque provided Vargas with different information: half the residents of Pojoaque, Cuyamungue, Jacona, San Ildefonso, and Santa Clara were on Black Mesa, and the other half were on another small mesa opposite San Ildefonso known as the Giant's Oven. By late May the people from nine villages — Tesuque, Nambé, San Lázaro, San Cristóbal, Cuyamungue, Jacona, San Ildefonso, Santa Clara, and Pojoaque — were living on Black Mesa.
In early March Vargas failed in his first attempt to attack Black Mesa and lay siege to the fortified mesa top. The Native defenders badly outnumbered the Spanish forces, who lacked a sufficient number of horses and had too little ammunition. A series of storms also made military action almost impossible. Nevertheless, Vargas launched a second, successful attempt during the first week of September.
In the second attack on the Indian forces assembled on Black Mesa, who numbered perhaps close to one thousand, Vargas realized that a frontal assault up the mesa was not feasible. However, he was able to impose a complete siege, encircling the mesa and preventing the Indians, who were mainly Tewas, from coming down for food and water. The final blow came when Vargas sent squads of soldiers to the nearby pueblos to harvest the ripening corn from the pueblos' maize fields. The Spanish troops returned to the siege on September 6 with their pack mules heavily laden with maize that the soldiers had harvested in the pueblos' milpas within sight of the defenders on the mesa. Lacking food and water, the defenders sent an emissary to Vargas on September 8, saying they wanted to make peace. Vargas agreed to lift the siege if all the Indians returned to their pueblos, which they promised to do within a week.
In mid-September 1694 Vargas conducted a tour of inspection to see whether the Tewas had returned to their homes. The harvest was fast approaching, and Vargas found most of the villages, including Pojoaque, at least partially occupied. The Indians told him that those who were missing were tending their milpas in anticipation of gathering their crops.
Vargas traveled to Pojoaque again on October 5, 1694. In anticipation of the arrival of additional Franciscans coming up to New Mexico from El Paso — which meant there would be sufficient clergymen to staff all the pueblos — Vargas directed the people of Pojoaque to have the church and lodgings ready for their priest. However, writing to the viceroy on January 10, 1695, Vargas noted that Pojoaque had no resident Franciscan, the closest being stationed at San Ildefonso. Vargas also appointed an alcalde and war captain in San Juan Pueblo, a soldier who was native to New Mexico and understood the Tewa language.
On June 20, 1696, intent on applying pressure on the Tewa villages that had rebelled against Spanish authority, Vargas stated that he would set out the following day to reconnoiter the hills and canyons where the people of Nambé, Pojoaque, Jacona, San Ildefonso, and San Juan were. According to an Indian from Nambé, Diego Xenome, the people from Nambé, Cuyamungue, Pojoaque, San Cristóbal, and Jacona were gathered in Chimayó, where they had withdrawn to a rugged hill at the foot of the mountains, a location that could not be attacked on horseback. On the twenty-ninth Vargas designated Santa Cruz as his staging area from which to launch his assault against the rebellious Tewas. He arrived in Pojoaque on July 5 on his way back to Santa Fe, then on July 23 in Santa Cruz he examined a prisoner from Cuyamungue who told the governor that the people of his pueblo, along with those from Nambé, Pojoaque, and Jacona, had fled high into the mountains together. In August a prisoner from San Juan stated that one family from Pojoaque and four warriors from San Cristóbal were still in the mountains, but they planned to come down to harvest their beans and maize.
In November men of Pojoaque and Nambé were implicated in the slaying of the governor of the San Cristóbal and San Lázaro Pueblos, don Cristóbal Yope, and his son-in-law, Peruchuelo, because Yope had done the Franciscans' bidding and told the Hispanos what the Pueblos were doing. On November 10, when Vargas dispatched Roque Madrid, alcalde mayor of Santa Cruz, to inspect the Tewa villages, Madrid was instructed to make certain the inhabitants understood that Vargas was pardoning all the Tewas, the Keres of Cochiti, and anyone else who remained in hiding in the mountains out of fear. Three weeks later Vargas reported to the viceroy that only three pueblos remained uninhabited and that the people of Pojoaque were among those who still had not returned to their homes. In his letter to the viceroy of November 28, 1696, indicating how many priests would be required in New Mexico, fray Francisco de Vargas (no relation to Diego de Vargas) indicated that when the people returned to Nambé and its visita of Pojoaque, one priest would be sufficient to serve the spiritual needs of the two communities. It would be almost a decade before Pojoaque Pueblo was resettled.
When the Pojoaque people had scattered to live in other villages and with the Navajos after the 1696 Pueblo uprising, it appeared that they had abandoned their land, so Spanish governors made several grants of Pueblo land to Hispanos. It was often the case that an encomendero's family claimed an interest in the village's land even though the institution of encomienda "did not imply land tenure on the part of encomenderos." Encomenderos or their descendants often claimed the lands of communities from which they had been collecting tribute, either by simply exercising control over the land and then deeding it to a family member or by asking the governor for a grant of abandoned Pueblo land. In one such case, Sebastián de Salas (apparently a relative of encomendero Antonio de Salas) and María de Anaya petitioned for and were granted a tract of land south of the Pojoaque River known as San Isidro, but the pair sold the land two years later to Juan de Trujillo. Trujillo's daughter, María, was married to Juan de Mestas, another large Pojoaque Valley landowner, who had received a grant of agricultural land south of the Pojoaque River in December 1699. Trujillo then purchased another tract from Sebastián de Salas in October 1701, and twelve years later, in 1713, he moved to have Governor Juan Ignacio Flores Mogollón (1712–15) revalidate those purchases and his son-in-law's land grant (the Juan de Mestas grant). Trujillo thus became the owner of one of the largest tracts of former Pojoaque land, and he was one of Pojoaque Valley's largest landowners, along with Juan de Mestas and Ignacio Roybal.
Ignacio Roybal y Torrado, a native of Caldas de Reyes in Galicia, Spain, was a powerful member of the post-Revolt Santa Fe elite whom Vargas had recruited to help with the reconquest of New Mexico. Roybal was alcalde of Santa Fe in 1708 and rose to the military rank of alferez within a decade of his arrival in New Mexico. He served most of his life as alguacil mayor (bailiff) of the Inquisition, one of the most powerful secular positions in the church. He married one of the Gómez Robledo sisters, Francisca, whose grandfather, Francisco Gómez, had come to New Mexico in 1604 with Alonso de Oñate, brother of Juan de Oñate. Other Gómez Robledo sisters were Lucía and Margarita. Margarita's first and second husbands, Jacinto Peláez and Diego Arias de Quirós, both figured in the affairs of Pojoaque Pueblo and its lands. Other Hispanos also acquired Pojoaque land during the eleven-year period when the village was abandoned, including José Quirós, Antonio Durán de Armijo, Juan de Mestas, Miguel Sandoval, Alfonso Rael de Aguilar, Juan de Trujillo, Miguel Tenorio de Alba, Carlos López, and López's mother, María de Tapia.
(Continues…)
Excerpted from "Pueblo Sovereignty"
by .
Copyright © 2019 Malcolm Ebright and Rick Hendricks.
Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS.
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Table of Contents
List of Illustrations,
Preface,
Introduction,
1. Pojoaque Pueblo,
2. Nambé Pueblo,
3. Tesuque Pueblo,
4. Ysleta del Sur Pueblo,
5. Isleta Pueblo,
Conclusion: Acting Sovereign,
Epilogue: Tribal Government, Sovereignty, and the Pueblo Canes,
Glossary,
Notes,
Bibliography,
Index,