The Pueblo Revolt, page 24
In the Dinétah, on the other hand, I was transported by the supernatural potency of the images, mingling abstract symbolism with haunting evocations of gods and culture heroes. With the help of Polly Schaafsma’s books, I began to learn the shorthand of the art: the bow-and-hourglass emblems that betokened the War Twins; the upraised hands of a ye’i; feathered shields and star ceilings; the horned figure seen sideways, holding a downthrust spear, a rainbow bursting from its back, that evokes Ghanaskidi. One amazing panel of red-and-white pictographs, hidden in a short, dead-end bend of an otherwise unimpressive side canyon, marks the very spot (so some experts argue) where the Navajo invented the Night Chant.
Yet at the same time, in the midst of these panels, I kept seeing figures that could have come straight from the Galisteo Basin—the plumed serpents, knife-wing birds, and fierce-toothed masks of the kachina religion. It seemed unarguable that here Navajo artists had learned or at least borrowed much from the Puebloans.
All science is political. As if in reaction to the implied condescension of received theory, which had it that Puebloan refugees had taught the Navajo to build, to plant, to paint, and to make pottery, a generation of younger archaeologists, many based in the Farmington area, has recently set out to prove that the so-called transformation of Navajo life was really an indigenous development. A key manifesto, published by the Farmington office of the Bureau of Land Management in 1991, is Patrick Hogan’s “Rethinking Navajo Pueblitos.”
Hogan takes umbrage at what he calls “uncritical acceptance of the ‘refugee hypothesis’”: “The archaeological evidence for a large influx of Pueblo refugees has never been conclusive.” Hogan does not deny Puebloan influence on Navajo culture, but argues that similarities in architecture, pottery, and rock art stem from imitation, not from direct tutelage. In their frequent trading missions among the pueblos, the Navajo would have seen plenty of mud-and-adobe rooms, plenty of painted pots; they might have simply gone home and experimented with clay, adobe, and stone to make their own vessels and pueblitos.
It would not be surprising, after all, if the Navajo had transformed their way of life by observing and copying Puebloan productions. Among all the native peoples in the Southwest, the Navajo have long been both damned and praised as the great adapters and imitators. Only a few generations after the Navajo saw their first Spanish sheep and goats, they became the herders par excellence of the Southwest. (After the beautiful black-on-black vases of Maria Martinez and other Tewa potters started to fetch top dollar in art galleries from Santa Fe to Flagstaff in the 1970s and 1980s, certain Navajo craftswomen flooded the market with cheap knockoffs in their own black-on-black style.)
As for the size of the Puebloan diaspora after 1694, Hogan dryly concludes that it numbered “at most, a few hundred individuals.” Other experts go even further. Larry Baker, a Bureau of Land Management archaeologist at Salmon Ruins near Bloomfield, told me that he and a close colleague, Farmington BLM archaeologist Jim Copeland, like to tell tour groups and student seminars, only half tongue-in-cheek, “Yeah, there were Puebloan refugees up here—about eight of them.”
Meanwhile, in 1996, a pair of Farmington-area scholars made the closest study yet undertaken of Navajo Gobernador Polychrome, proving that the pottery style dates from 1650—almost half a century before the alleged intrusion of Puebloan refugees.
The tour de force of this revisionist understanding of what happened in Dinétah has come in several years of work by Ron Towner, a young scholar working at the Tucson-based Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research. Coring a total of 798 beams from sixty-five pueblitos, Towner came up with dates that consistently clustered in the periods from 1710-14, 1725-29, and the late 1740s. Only two sites clearly dated earlier than 1696. The anomalous early-cutting date found from the odd single beam in an otherwise post-1700 pueblito could be credited to the “old wood problem,” the usage of a long-dead tree in constructing a new village.
In Defending the Dinétah (2003), Towner draws his conclusions. The pueblitos were built too late to have served Puebloans as refuges against the Spanish. They were built instead almost entirely by Navajos (no doubt to some extent in imitation of Puebloan models), as a defense not against the Spanish, but against Ute raiders. Around 1775, the Navajo abandoned Dinétah en masse, moving west and south to such areas as Canyon de Chelly and the Lukachukai Mountains—driven out perhaps by Ute depredations.
Impressive though Towner’s work is, and however much needed the current thrust toward indigenous invention is as a corrective to the old idea of the Navajo learning everything at the knees of their more gifted Puebloan tutors, I had my lingering doubts as I wandered through Dinétah. Was the new emphasis on Navajo origins for Pueblo-looking ruins and rock art just another swing of the eternal academic pendulum?
It is all too tempting, even for the most disinterested scholar, to form an emotional attachment to the achievements of the peoples he spends decades studying. Archaeologists even have a rueful word for this half-unconscious bias: “My-site-itis.” I had seen the tendency at work elsewhere in the Southwest: Arizona archaeologists eager to trace the roots of the kachina religion to the Little Colorado River, arguing themselves blue in the face against their New Mexico colleagues who plump for the Galisteo Basin; Four Corners scholars unleashing a mass Anasazi migration just before A.D. 1300 toward their Santa Fe brethren, who say, in effect, thanks, we’ve got enough folks already down on the Rio Grande by 1300. Had the Farmington group, proud of their understudied backyard Dinétah, perhaps chosen up sides with those perpetual anthropological underdogs, the Navajo?
The work of Towner and friends is far from settling the question. The dean of Navajo studies, David Brugge, has criticized Towner’s work for ignoring ethnographic data. The best proof of a substantial exodus of Puebloan refugees into the Dinétah lies, according to Brugge, in the nature and origins of Navajo clans. Brugge cites the pioneering work of Gladys Reichard, who in a 1928 monograph identified seventeen existing Navajo clans that originated with the Puebloans, with two more of probable Puebloan genesis.
For Joe Sando, the Jemez elder and historian, the question is open-and-shut. It was Puebloans who built the pueblitos. “Among the Navajos,” Sando told me in his Albuquerque office, “the Coyote Clan, especially, and the Young Corn Clan, still call themselves Pueblo. And lots of Navajos still come to our Jemez feast day every November 12. There are quite a few Navajo words in Jemez.
“When I was a kid, there was a guy [at Jemez] who used to talk Navajo to me all the time. He was just teasing me.
“Our people ran away up there from the Spanish. They built their own houses, and then the Navajo moved in. A good many stayed, and married Navajos.”
In any event, Vargas himself believed that a substantial number of refugees, mostly from Jemez, had fled north and west to join the Navajo. From time to time after 1696, he and other New Mexico governors sent punitive raids up into the Dinétah. The most ambitious of these was prosecuted in 1705 by Roque Madrid, who had been Vargas’s right hand man in the reconquest. (Mike Bremer on Madrid, as we had read Vargas’s journal out loud among the ruins of Old Kotyiti: “I picture a squat little fireplug of a guy”)
In 1996, two excellent New Mexico historians, Rick Hendricks and John P. Wilson, published Roque Madrid’s campaign journal of that 1705 raid, after years of using a copy of the manuscript to work out the route of the maestre de campo’s rampage through northwestern Nuevo México. Following that campaign by car and on foot in April 2003, with Hendricks and Wilson’s book in hand, I managed to find three otherwise obscure corners in this sandstone maze that still bear eloquent testimony to the ravages of Madrid’s campaign.
Though at least sixty years old by 1705, when he set out on his ruthless march through Dinétah, Madrid was as tough and unyielding as the most adamantine of conquistadors. The Spaniard had no doubts about the righteousness of his mission. With a typical flourish, he begins his diary thus:
In this pueblo of San Juan de los Caballeros, on 31 July 1705, I, Maestro de Campo and principal military leader Roque Madrid, by order of the lord governor and captain general, don Francisco Cuervo y Valdés, knight of the Order of Santiago and treasurer and factor of the Royal Treasury office of the city of Guadalajara, go forth to make war by fire and sword on the Apache Navajo enemy nation.
(Navajos were often called “Apaches de Navajo” by the Spanish, who had trouble telling one of the two closely related Athapaskan peoples from the other.)
It took Madrid, however, ten days to find his first Indians. They were a pair of lone women, on the verge of starvation, one with a young boy on her back; one was Navajo, the other Jemez. Madrid promptly had the women tortured until they revealed the whereabouts of the rest of their people.
On August 10, Madrid at last made contact with “the enemy,” who fled before his advance, the soldiers killing a few stragglers. It was not until two days later that the first true battle was waged. Forewarned, the Indians had taken refuge atop a butte south of Gobernador Canyon. Armed with Hendricks and Wilson, I located this stark plug of sandstone, which even today is seldom visited, though it stands visible for miles around and commands a lordly panorama of distant horizons. The butte caps a steep, 350-foot-tall cone of calcified mud, which requires a nasty scramble to surmount. The summit of the butte is guarded on all sides by vertical walls ranging from sixty feet tall to over 100. There is but a single weakness, a series of ledges separated by short cliffs on the northwest side of the formation.
Madrid camped beneath the butte on the night of August 11. The Indians on top screamed curses and taunts. Wrote Madrid, “Though we called them through the Indian interpreter to come down and fight, they did not want to. They told me that when the sun came up we would fight, that the people were united to have done with us.” At dawn, the Navajo and Jemez launched an attack from ambush. Madrid drove them back up to the summit of the butte. The Indians had placed a ladder against the final cliff, but, Madrid reported, “As they blocked each other’s way up, some misstepped and fell, dying before their people’s eyes; they saw them dragged away and scalped [by the Spaniards’ Puebloan allies].”
Madrid and his soldiers forced their way to the foot of the ladder, but could not succeed in scaling it: the enemy “concentrated their force there, throwing and rolling rocks down.” After having two soldiers and three Indian allies wounded, Madrid called off the attack. For the first and only time in Dinétah, the natives repulsed the invaders.
Two hundred and ninety-eight years later, I started up the cliff where the ladder had once stood. With no rope, climbing gear, or belayer, I almost backed off: the pitch was about 5.4 in difficulty, its hardest move just below the top. Pulling myself onto the summit, I felt a burst of gratification. I spent the next hour exploring the refuge, which was waterless, only three quarters of an acre in extent.
None of the local Bureau of Land Management archaeologists I talked to had ever been on top of this butte, because of the difficulty of the climb. I found a profusion of potsherds scattered everywhere. Some time before, historian John Wilson (one of the two editors of Madrid’s journal) had gained the summit, adducing with his trained eye that the pottery was both Navajo and Puebloan. (This seemed to me a strong argument for the Jemez presence among the warriors.) I found also a number of stone rings, which Wilson had recognized as the bases for Navajo hogans. Most vivid were the piles of big rocks still stacked on the rim above the ascent route—the very ammunition that the besieged warriors had flung down upon the Spaniards trying to clamber up the ladder.
I sat for a while, gazing at distant vistas. Not even the faint rumble of a natural gas truck miles to the south marred the tranquillity of this eyrie. Yet my head was full of the desperate battle of 1705. I imagined that, even as they nursed their wounded and sank into the relief of temporary reprieve, the Navajo and Jemez who had here repulsed Roque Madrid stared down at the retreating army and envisioned the doom about to befall their cousins to the west.
It took me a while to find Tapacito Ruin: though it stands only a stone’s throw from a meandering dirt road, on a bench above a 200-foot cliff, it is hidden from all three logical approach routes. Four well-preserved, square rooms, made of stones mortared with mud, constitute the ruin. Two of the rooms incorporate a feature—a curved stick masoned into one corner, two feet off the ground, called a “hooded fireplace”—that the Puebloans adapted from the Spanish.
At Tapacito, Ron Towner, the tree ring virtuoso, got a date of 1694, one of only two sites among the sixty-five pueblitos he studied that clearly predated the reconquest. Towner brought two Navajos to Tapacito, who swore that the ruin had not been built by their people. Despite his summary argument that the pueblitos were almost solely a Navajo phenomenon, Towner nonetheless conceded that Tapacito “may be the only genuine Pueblo refugee structure in the Dinétah.”
Two days after his repulse at the sheer-cliffed butte, Madrid led his army down Tapacito Creek to its mouth. At its junction with Largo Canyon, on the bench above the streams where the ruin stands, he found a considerable number of the enemy amassed. “Immediately after I arrived,” wrote Madrid, “the Apaches [Navajo] began to shout, saying that they wanted to do us no harm, that they wanted peace, and that for this reason we should talk at length.” The maestre de campo feigned agreement with the Indians, meanwhile devising a ruse to “give them the punishment they so deserved.” Through his interpreter, Madrid kept up the parley for more than two hours. All the while, a flanking party was sneaking up to the mesa top and circling behind the Navajos on the Tapacito bench.
With lances and guns, the flanking party attacked. The defenders were routed. “Of the more than thirty that were there,” Madrid dryly noted, “no more than five escaped, not counting two who in a great fury threw themselves over the edge.” One of these suicides was tied to a rope held by a Puebloan ally of the Spanish, who, neglecting to let go, was likewise pulled off the cliff. At last Madrid withdrew his troops, “thanking God that in the whole battle only one of my men was lost, and he was an Indian.”
Though he fought no more pitched battles in Dinétah, as he completed his long loop through the Navajo country Madrid burned every cornfield he could find. He was back in Zia Pueblo by August 20, smug in the conviction that it was “impossible to punish [the Navajo] more than we have done.” In early 1706, a delegation of Navajo men arrived in Santa Fe to sue for peace. Madrid lived on in New Mexico to a ripe old age, retiring from his military career only after reaching seventy.
So far as I know, no ethnographer has ever recorded the oral traditions kept by the Navajo about the devastating campaign of Roque Madrid, who was the first Spaniard ever to explore Dinétah. But one day in Largo Canyon, I found an intensely vivid memorial of that incursion. At the mouth of Largo’s tributary, Cuervo Canyon, on a south-facing sandstone cliff, stands an astoundingly rich panel of Navajo—and perhaps also Puebloan—petroglyphs. Corn plants with ripe ears sprouting from them, the life-giving ye’is, horned supernatural beings redolent of kachinas, the bow-and-hourglass designs emblematic of the Warrior Twins, and a masterly portrait of Ghanaskidi, the Humpbacked God, sprawl across the orange stone. Some of these faces seem to be caught in frozen screams of agony.
In the middle of the panel, moving from left to right, ride two Spaniards on horseback. Their left hands hold the reins tight, their right hands clutch upraised swords, ready to smite. Even the skeptical Bureau of Land Management archaeologists in Farmington agree that this ominous tableau surely records the scorched-earth passage of Roque Madrid through Dinétah.
The final mystery of the Puebloan diaspora unfurls, however, not in Dinétah, but on the Hopi mesas of Arizona. From the very start of my inquiry into the Pueblo Revolt, I had puzzled over Hopi’s role in the uprising. To the Spanish, from Coronado forward, those western villages lay so far from the heart of the Pueblo world that conquistadors and governors alike tended to ignore Hopi for years at a time. Yet three of the priests killed on August 10, 1680, were ministers to the Hopi, one at Awatovi, two at Oraibi. (A puzzle within the puzzle: Hopi lies some 250 miles as the crow flies from Tesuque. How could even the swiftest of runners have carried the knotted cords across such a distance in time for the killings to be carried out—as all sources insist happened—on the same day as the Puebloans slew the other eighteen Franciscans in New Mexico?)
James Defouri, the Victorian panegyrist of the priest-martyrs, offers an alternative (and most likely apocryphal) story of Fray José de Espeleta’s fate at Oraibi: “There are authors who say he was not put to death, but was kept by the people of Oraibi as a slave in the Pueblo, the beast of burden of those cowards; that he lived for years in the vilest conceivable servitude, the laughing object of every one, old and young…. Be that as it may, if Father Espeleta was kept a slave by the Moquis [Hopi], it was only a long torturing martyrdom, a lingering death.”
If Hopi remained marginal to the Spanish colony of Nuevo Mé xico throughout the eighty-two years after Oñate’s conquest, it would become central to the story after Vargas had completed his reconquest. Yet my efforts to plumb the role Hopi had played as refuge for the Puebloan diaspora after 1696 were frustrated at every hand.
As many observers have noted, no indigenous peoples anywhere in the world have been more intensely studied than the Hopi. And no Native American tribe has been the object of more sentimental claptrap on the part of well-meaning Anglos than the Hopi. The cult of the Hopi as mystics in tune with the universe, as peaceful philosophers living in harmony with the earth, reached its zenith in Frank Waters’s 1963 best-seller, The Book of the Hopi. And though that work has long since been denounced at Hopi as both invasive and just plain wrong, hippies from all over the world still show up almost daily on the Hopi mesas, tattered copies of Waters’s tome in hand, expecting to find gurus to set them on the path to spiritual enlightenment.
