The free Indian labor used by both friars and colonists was illegal. The Viceroy in Mexico in charge of New Spain also frowned upon their interference in annual pueblo elections. Nor were they supposed to run their livestock within three leagues of the pueblos.
Along with the supply wagon came orders from the Viceroy in Mexico, both Eulate and the friars were to halt their abuses against the Indians.”
“Ah that it was so but Mexico is a long way, especially by horseback,” Grandfather said with a heartfelt sigh.
“Listen to this,” she said and peered at the diary.
“My historian tells me that the Spanish government eventually tried Eulate for his crimes and because of him, the Holy Office in 1626 established the Spanish Inquisition in New Mexico. The battle between church and state continued, coming to a head when Governor Lopez in 1660 was accused of being a Jew, along with his friends. The governor died in an Inquisition prison. His accuser, Fray Posado, excommunicated his successor, Governor Peñalosa. The governor then arrested Fray Posado at the Pecos convento, placed guards outside the church and threatened to even kill St. Francis, if the saint came out. He boasted he would hang the pope if he tried to excommunicate him. In the kingdom of New Mexico, Governor Peñalosa claimed to be the prince. In the middle of his term, Peñalosa had left New Mexico to search for Quivira. He had returned, claiming to have found the magical land where golden cups hang from trees. But before he could go back to Quivira to retrieve the riches, the Inquisition arrested the womanizing governor, seized his property, and banished him from New Spain. These were just a few of the governors arrested by the Inquisition.
One upside for the Pecos in building the cathedral was that the friars taught some men the trade of carpentry, and they traveled to other pueblos to build.”
“Bah, carpentry attributed to our depopulation. We are based on community and a skill that allows a member to work away from the pueblo is a ticket out. This is what happens nowadays when children leave the family bosom and move to work in Albuquerque. Today, the population of all the pueblos has dwindled by the young ones who wish to live elsewhere,” Grandfather said.
“Well, people should have the freedom to choose where they want to live, Governor.”
“Read.” He poked his finger against the diary.
“A duty of the guardian friar of a pueblo was to feed and clothe the poor. To this end, they forced the Indians to provide cattle and corn.”
“Bah. No more lies for tonight; I cannot bear to hear anymore. Franciscan friars enslaved and whipped our people to build their mighty mission with the mud of the Pecos River, their bones and burial pottery,” he said.
“I’m sure some of the friars acted like holy men. You mustn’t get so riled, Governor.”
“The back-breaking labor killed many. Pecos blood flowed from broken skin and intermixed with pine cut from the Sangre de Cristo Mountains when our men carried the heavy logs on their backs and their shoulders as they made their way back down the mountain to build the Spanish church. The Sangre de Cristo Mountains translates into the Blood of Christ Mountains because the Savior’s blood runs through the pine trees of our mountains, along with our people’s blood due to the cruelty of our conquerors, or pacifiers, as they later called themselves, men of the same brand as Oñate. I am going to bed.”
She mumbled good night and sat by the fire listening to a Rolling Stones CD.
After the last song, she took a shower and readied for bed.
She lay quietly beside the old man, listening to him puff air from between his lips. She had been a wild teenager and broke his heart with her use of drugs and alcohol to ease her pain, this hollowness she was born with. She took a deep breath to loosen the tightness in her chest; she left those days behind her. Lord knows, she loathed herself but because of her love for Steve, she cleaned up more than a dozen years ago.
The old man turned on his back and kicked her in his sleep, scratching her leg with a ragged toe nail. She resisted the urge to kick him back. Touché. He broke her heart when he abandoned her at St. Mary’s. Funny he should rant about young people leaving the pueblo for the city when he dropped her off at the school and just drove away. She only saw him then at Christmas and summer vacations. He promised so many times to come get her for other holidays and school breaks, but usually wound up drunk and forgot about her. There was that one Thanksgiving he picked her up and drove her to a fast-food diner to eat the longed-for hamburger, which ended up a quarter-sized patty buried in a soggy mess of mustard, pickles and grease.
Her thoughts drifted to her education and the nuns’ attempts to Americanize her and the other girls. Annihilate the Indian and save the girl, was their motto. The nuns changed her name from Hollow-Woman to Holly, which she still called herself when the old man wasn’t around. Steve called her Holly as an endearment and because he hated her given name.
It did not take her long to get used to the name Holly because the nuns punished the girls for using their Indian names or if they spoke Towa, Tewa, Tiwa, Keres, Zúni or any other Pueblo, Navajo or Apache languages. However, they kept their silence around the nuns and when alone, spoke in their Native tongues so the girls learned to speak English with a guttural accent.
Every year, a nun chopped off her hair, a sinful vanity the nun claimed. She stripped off her clothes and locked away her heathen clothing for visits home. The nun threw her in a tub and scrubbed her raw then handed her a uniform to wear, with outstretched fingers like she feared contamination.
Hollow-Woman blamed the nuns for her lack of curiosity to know about her ancestors since they beat the Indian out of her with an unholy relish. They preached the Catholic god to her. The nuns sparsely educated the students on Native American history, instead shoving white-man propaganda down their throats in a teaching style the government felt would assimilate the Indian into white culture and chip away at their nativeness.
She twisted on the mattress beside Grandfather and struggled to concentrate on her memories. Tears dotted her eyelids and mucus bubbles wet her nostrils. She shouldn’t think about school and her unhappy youth but once again, Sister Catherine’s face floated before her, contorted with rage and sweat on her forehead, her glasses jiggling as she yelled. Hollow-Woman couldn’t recall now what she did to anger the fat sister; many incidents in the previous five years got her in deep water. Sister Catherine was exceptionally brutal that morning. Sister knew she couldn’t hurt her with beatings so she shouted at her, you killed your mother, you wretched girl.
No, Sister Catherine, I never knew my mother.
You killed her at birth; your Grandfather said so the day he enrolled you. He said show patience with your wildness because you have never known a mother’s touch. We will overlook your abomination just this once.
She hissed at the nun and held up her fingers like claws.
Sister Catherine took a step back from her with a look of revulsion.
She listened for her fading steps and heard a lot of clinking and clanking of trays. All the other girls gathered at the cafeteria for breakfast.
She pulled her handmade doll from under her pillow. The doll’s hair was combed in the squash-blossom style of an Indian maiden with a huge bun rolled on each ear, looking like Star Wars’ Princess Leia from a movie magazine. Every twelve-year-old longed to see the movie that just came out, but she had never been to any motion picture show, not even a drive-in movie. She sniffed the doll’s real human hair and rubbed the softness against her cheek. For seven weeks her mother labored with love to make this doll, even cutting her own long hair and pasting her locks on the doll’s head. Her mother must have had a premonition her baby would be a daughter.
She stuffed the doll in her school knapsack, along with a candy bar, and then wiggled out the dorm window. She balanced her toes on the branch of a tree, reaching her hands to a lower branch. She stretched her monkey arms and danced some fancy footwork across some branches before dropping to the ground, hunkering and scanning the area for any
spies.
She hitched a ride to the Hispanic village of Pecos then walked the two miles to the pueblo ruins. It was late morning and the sun strong on her back.
Here, this is where her mother’s grave was.
No. There.
Here across from…where? Years of blowing sand had changed the landscape. How forlorn the ruins looked.
The wind blew, fluttering dust around her bone thin ankles, and lifting the hair at the back of her neck because a chanting echoed from a kiva.
Moccasins climbed up the ladder.
Men grunted as their feet stomped against the earth, pockets of red dust whirling around their legs. Their feet spun and feathers twirled around their backs, the eagle and the bear.
She could hear rattling, pounding of drums, and the canary singing of flageolets.
In the midst of these dancing ghosts, a vision walked towards her with hair shorn at the neck, bouncing against her head. A long rainbow-colored skirt whirled around her legs. A piece of her skirt was missing, enough material to make the matching dress of a doll. She had cut the material from her skirt at the exact place of her womb. Blood poured from this hole and the dark-skinned woman paled and grew weaker, staggering towards her, holding her arms out.
She froze, unable to help, not even calling out as she watched her mother die again.
She squeezed her eyes shut and imagined treading water in the womb a dozen years ago, hearing two strong heartbeats. The other heartbeat grew fainter and fainter until she burst from her mother’s womb into the light. She had sucked her mother’s life from her so that she might live. There was room for only one of them in this world.
A snake hissed behind her.
Grandfather stood on two unbending trees the color of a khaki plant, the fabric quenched with thirst.
“I am always watching you. Do not think that because you are away from me that I cannot see what you are up to,” he said.
She threw herself in his arms and sobbed on his stained blue-denim shirt smelling of old wine.
He stroked her hair with a gnarled hand. “Don’t grieve so, Child. Your mother knew the risk. Like gambling, one never knows for sure the odds in this harsh life God has given us on the reservation. I could not save her. She died in my arms and my son…”
“What about my father? Tell me about him.”
He grunted and looked down at the ground. His shoulders shook and his knees buckled so she grabbed him by his armpits to hold him steady.
She walked him back to his truck and helped him into the passenger seat then she shuffled into the driver’s seat. At the age of twelve, she knew how to drive, like most kids on reservations who could ride bareback on prickly horses or steer recklessly behind a steering wheel, along the byways of an isolated pueblo, but this was the first time she ever drove on a highway.
Almost as tall as he, she could reach the pedals if she pointed her toes and leaned way back. She stretched her neck and could barely see above the dash. As champion sixth-grade dodgeballer, other cars were no problem and drivers moved out of her way like judgment day cometh.
All these years later, lying in the camper, she had forgotten he tried to shoulder the blame for her mother’s death. She lay listening to his light snoring, trying to recall pleasant memories not tainted by St. Mary’s and other times when he treated her kindly.
Her chest grew heavy and she fought the dream catcher’s pull but the spinning noise grew louder until she heard the pounding of horses’ hoofs.
Dust clouds dirtied her white nightgown buttoned to her neck like a virgin. The baked earth should have scorched her bare feet, but she felt no pain. The fall of boots with star-shaped spurs mesmerized her. Horses unearthed the dirt, causing dust clouds to swirl above the heads of Spanish soldiers clothed in dull armor. The soldiers followed the dust swirling around the robes of eleven Franciscan friars—one short the number of apostles in the New Testament. The monks walked with their heads bowed. They tucked their hands into the arms of robes, blue as the color of the Virgin Mary. Their large wooden rosaries clicked against their knees. The hems of their robes swung around their ankles, making a hissing noise in the dirt as the Franciscans marched.
The friars hovered protectively around a wagon and a thick glass case tied to the center in which a three-foot wooden statue of a lady, bounced and swayed to the left and then to the right. Her wooden eyes stared straight ahead with a look of uneasiness. On the horizon loomed the mud city of Santa Fe.
Hollow-Woman recognized this same wooden statue of the Lady, who in present day Santa Fe resides at St. Frances Cathedral. She witnessed from the shadows a homecoming of the Lady, as the Spanish called the Virgin Mary. This statue is America’s oldest Madonna brought to Santa Fe by that same custos and Head Agent of the Spanish Inquisition, Fray Alonso de Benavides, mentioned in the diary as the Franciscan friar from the 1600’s obsessed with the idea that all Puebloans were either bloody warriors or witches.
Her dream catcher must have hurled her back to 1625 when the Lady bravely sailed across the great ocean to New Spain to make her home in Santa Fe.
The Lady was carved from Spanish willow and her delicate features painted on the wood. Her clothing appeared wilted from her journey across the ocean. Already, the New Mexico sun parched the bark of her face, cutting wrinkles into her wooden cheeks. A tiny fan in her hands would help cool the Lady during the centuries of dry summer months to come. For now, the Lady was dressed like a Moorish princess with a Castilian mantilla cascading from a Mother-of-Pearl comb protruding from the top of her head. She was clothed in a shimmering golden gown. Ruby earrings sparkled from her wooden ears.
Ah, just what the Spanish need, a feminine touch. Perhaps peace will come now to this land. Maybe the Lady will end the tyranny against the Puebloans and turn the pacifiers into true peacemakers. No more feet cut off at the ankles. No more kidnapping of children. No more enslavement.
The wagon entered Santa Fe and the wheels screeched to a grinding halt before the double doors of an adobe building with the name, Church of the Assumption, carved into the wooden door. Soldiers dismounted and marched ceremoniously, removing the glass case housing the Lady. A friar took a hammer and a nail and pounded a sign beside the name of the church. The sign proclaimed: Holy Office of the Spanish Inquisition Established 1626, New Mexico.
Fray Alonso de Benavides brought the terror of the Inquisition to New Mexico, for Indian, colonist, and governor alike.
Two of the friars released the Lady from her imprisonment.
The double doors of the church parted, as if by magic.
Hollow-Woman peeked into the church and sniffed. A smell of musk permeated the adobe and a gray cloud obscured the wooden altar. The friars waved their censors containing incense, around the pictures of Santos painted on wooden slabs that hung from the walls.
The friars gently stood the Lady on a carved-out crevice in the adobe, displaying her in the most prestigious corner.
The Lady looked over the heads of the friars and stared back at her.
She looked into this Lady’s eyes before in modern Santa Fe and the Lady did not look so sad then. The friars may have the harshest faces, but the Lady had the most mournful eyes. Her wooden shoulders slumped from the weight of her rich clothing, perhaps because a friar hammered a sign at her feet proclaiming her, La Conquistadora. The all-seeing Lady must know that the Spanish Inquisition would give her, a woman, credit for the witch burnings and hangings to come.
Pity moved her for the Lady, who seemed as much a prisoner of the male-dominated church as she was of the male-dominated Indian reservation.
The friars knelt before La Conquistadora but the Lady ignored the Franciscans. The Lady still stared at her and blood flowed from her eyes.
Hollow-Woman reached out her fingers to the Lady.
The statue seemed to shrink as the double doors to the mission church slammed shut with a bang. The Lady was trapped inside with only the male company of friars.
A rush of win
d blew from the slamming of the church doors. The wind swirled dust around the Santa Fe streets, and erected adobe buildings from spinning cones of dirt. Native American men carried logs upon their backs under Spanish whips.
Native American women and children begged on the streets for food.
A cone-shaped shadow of dust encircled her so she wilted in the eye of a puny tornado and coughed.
The wind blew stronger and scattered the shadow of dust which no longer protected her. A ray of sunshine beat down upon her head, singling her out.
“Don’t starve the people and enslave them,” she yelled, clenching her fists to her sides.
The people turned their weary heads to her and eyed her with fear.
Why didn’t any of them speak up? They simply gawked at her.
The sun shone brightly, yet she looked out through a haze. Some sort of veil covered her face and entire body, imprisoning her arms to her ribs. Her ankles touched. When she breathed, a gooey substance contracted and expanded in her nose.
Hooded men in blue robes surrounded her.
She wiggled but could not free herself from a veil, a living membrane that covered her body from head to toe.
One friar moved his face closer and blew his foul breath in her face. Deep marks on his cheeks appeared as if he mercilessly whipped his skin with branches. His eye sockets sunk into his head. His cloudy, light grey eyes appeared like a dead man’s eyes.
The monk jabbed his finger at her.
Her heart slammed against her ribs.
“This woman who accuses us of starving the heathens is of the Snake Clan. She is a snake disguised as a woman,” he said in a booming voice.
The same gooey substance covered her mouth and her only protest sounded like a muffled hiss.
Return of the Bones: Inspired by a True Native American Indian Story Page 8