Friars were enjoined to communicate an explanation of the significance of the baptismal sacrament, always the first step in conversion. A priest took the measure of a convert’s devotion by observing his or her participation in confessions and willingness to receive the sacrament of the Eucharist. Porras distributed gifts of cloth and iron tools as a demonstration of the Church’s benevolence, which doubtless attracted interest. Feast days in honor of the mission’s patron saint, in this case San Bernardo, were occasions for distribution of new foods like beef, mutton, poultry, and wheat bread, although more often than not it fell upon the Hopis to provide the substantial majority of the meal, which bred resentment rather than gratitude. The Franciscans also attempted to weave instructional pageants of the life and passion of Christ into Hopi customs of public ritual and dance, and even suffered the continuation of dances associated with the Hopi ceremonial calendar if they deemed them free of heretical content—although those celebrating the arrival of the katsinam too often fell in that category.
Coercion and studied violence were among the padres’ tools, as well. Since the Katsina priests presented perhaps the greatest obstacle to conversion, their kivas and icons were prime targets. Kivas drew the attention of Franciscan architects, who strove to position the altars of their church naves atop those traditional ritual spaces, at once an effort to erase spiritual competition, and to co-opt the spiritual forces that resided therein. This would present a particular challenge for the archaeologists who would later excavate Awat’ovi. Dances featuring the presence of katsinam were another target, expressly forbidden by Porras and doubtless cause for offense among the priests who summoned those deities for rainmaking. So, too, was the making and employment of pahos prohibited, as Hopi prayers were henceforth to be directed at only one God. Deviation from approved devotional practices could bring public humiliation, flogging, and expulsion from the mission.
Hopi oral histories of the mission era, although recorded nearly three centuries after the fact, suggest initial curiosity with the Franciscan project and customary hospitality on the part of the Hopis. In 1902, Wíkvaya of Oraibi village told Mennonite missionary Henry Voth that the Hopis consented to peace with the Spaniards “and assisted them in building their house.” They “gathered stone for them” and lent their labor to the construction of an “assembly house” that had a “tower in which bells were suspended.” When this (the church) was complete, the “Tutáachi (priest) told them that he was going to wash their heads.” The Hopis “asked him what that was, what that meant,” and he told them “that it was something very good . . . and he poured a little water on the heads of those present.” After this, the “Hopis had to assemble in the assembly house on Sundays, where the Tutáachis spoke to them . . . and soon they asked the Hopi to work for them. Thus the Spaniards kept the Hopis at work in various ways, and they were not bad to them at first.” But relations began to sour, according to Wíkvaya:
For four years everything went along well, and it rained often, too, so that there was water in the cisterns; but at the end of four years things began to change. The priests commenced to forbid the Hopi to have Katcina dances and to make báhos . . . and they did not let [the Hopis] concern themselves about the clouds and the rain.
Trouble lay on the horizon, but it stretches credulity to imagine that the extraordinary constructions accomplished in the first decades of Franciscan missionization could have been effected by simple intimidation, given the very small numbers of mission personnel—generally no more than two priests and a handful of lay brothers—available to exert those arts. Somehow, Porras obtained great effort from Hopi men and women, with men clearing and digging construction spaces, hauling tons of raw stone to the mesa tops, and shaping those into masonry foundations more massive than anything seen since the era of Chaco Canyon’s Great Houses. According to friars, churches “were built by women and by boys and girls taking Christian doctrine,” for it was “the custom among these nations for women to build the houses.” Women probably worked together in gathering the clay, sand, straw, and water—especially the thousands of gallons of water necessary to make adobe bricks—and laying the stones and bricks, with fine finishing the work of women, who undertook that task in pre-Spanish times. Certainly, therefore, Porras drew upon knowledge of political tensions within the pueblos that the Franciscans had cultivated over several decades, since the general pattern defining Catholic sympathizers versus opponents in New Mexico shows that young men, who could not attain power until well along in years, and women, whose influence was circumscribed by their gender, most often proved receptive to the missionaries’ messages. Social fissions were nothing new in the Pueblo world, and posed a clear threat to established authority. Early in the summer of 1633, the chronicler Benavides reported that “the old men, evidently angered at the loss of power through the adherence of so many of their tribe to the missionaries, poisoned some food, which the father ate.” Porras’s agonizing death may have “brought great sorrow to all of the Christians,” but Benavides was confident that it was to Porras’s “great joy, because he had attained the goal which he had sought, namely, to give his life in the preaching of the Holy Catholic Faith.”
Porras died, but the Franciscan project at Awat’ovi moved forward. The archival records fell dim for two decades after Porras’s death, and yet the church and convento certainly grew during that period. The most likely successor to the martyr was Padre Andrés Gutiérrez, who was assigned to the visita of Walpi, but probably resident at Awat’ovi, and therefore able to administer the last sacraments to the dying priest. Gutiérrez amended Porras’s plans to accord with a more modest reality, relocating and down-sizing the church considerably. Recognizing the impossibility of spanning the transept Porras had laid out, he narrowed the church to 16 feet, a more manageable span given the challenge of transporting timbers from the Chuska Mountains, some fifty miles distant. He also moved forward with the construction of a convento (friary) of more than twenty-five rooms that would serve to house the mission personnel and supplies, a sprawling one-story complex that seems to have been completed over the next decade.
Redesigning and repositioning the church proved important for another reason—it allowed Gutiérrez to follow a Franciscan strategy of co-opting the spiritual forces embedded in Hopi spiritual life to their own proselytizing ends. Since the earliest years of Spanish evangelism in the Americas, missionaries had sought to display in architecture the triumph of the Christian god over those of the pagans. At Cholula and Tenochtitlán, Mexico, in the 1520s, the Soldiers of God had torn down temples that stood atop the massive earth-and-masonry pyramids and replaced them with churches, “symbolizing the supplanting of pagan rites by the domination of the cross.” More than simply a show of force, Franciscans also knew that the lingering memory of traditional practices and power would doubtless infuse the new churches. Fourteenth-century Aztecs had used similar tactics to invent a fictional lineal descent from the more ancient Toltecs, as had the priesthood at Chaco Canyon designed their Great Kivas to evoke memories of the original pit-houses of their progenitors.
Padre Gutiérrez imposed the same strategy in locating his church, with the difference that in New Mexico, indigenous sacred spaces more often lay underground, rather than atop pyramids. Writing in 1638, Padre Juan de Prada would wax eloquent that “where there were nothing other than the ceremonial chambers (kivas) of barbarous idolatries, today temples may be seen that are frequented by Christians, who acquaint themselves with the Christian faith and good customs.”
Indeed, nearly two meters beneath the church altar Harvard Peabody archaeologists excavating in the 1930s would find a perfectly preserved kiva, its roof beams still in place and even the entrance hatch undisturbed. Excavators were immediately struck by the difference between this kiva and what would normally be found in an abandoned Hopi pueblo—roofing vigas (timbers) were simply much too valuable to leave in place when a room or kiva fell into disuse, and Hopis salvaged them for new constru
ction. Of the twenty-four kivas investigated at Awat’ovi in the 1930s, only the one beneath the church altar had timbers still in place. Strikingly unusual, too, was the manner in which the kiva had been filled. In all other cases at Awat’ovi, mixtures of household rubbish, broken ceramics, animal bones, and charcoal comprised the fill of abandoned kivas. Beneath the church, however, the kiva had been carefully filled with clean, sifted sand—a deliberate act that not only provided solid support for the foundations as the massive church was constructed atop the kiva, but also preservation of the fourteen layers of earlier kiva murals that had been painted by Hopi priests in their ceremonies. Whether Hopis had earlier used sand to fill the kiva as an act of abandonment ritual—seen occasionally elsewhere in the Southwest—or the mission laborers had filled the kiva with sand in order to establish a stable foundation for the church nave is impossible to know. But what lay between the altar and the kiva roof beams would ultimately prove more puzzling to the story.
Before the discovery of the kiva, and much to their surprise, excavators encountered the bones of a Spaniard. Catholic canon law explicitly forbade burial within a colonial church, but here they found a “secondary” or reburial, in express contravention of that injunction. The man’s bones, once defleshed and disarticulated, had been bundled in remnants of European clothing and placed upon a Hopi basket for interment—deliberately and caringly deposited beneath the packed earth of the altar floor. The bundling of the bones vaguely recalls medieval cathedral ossuaries, but more likely reflected Hopi burial practices of swaddling bodies with cotton textiles and personal items like baskets, bowls, awls, knives, bows, and arrows. In this case the arm bones were bound with a cord of yucca fibers and dogbane, which “on discovery, immediately suggested the type of rope associated with priestly robes.” Deposited almost certainly after the ruination of the church in the uprisings of 1680, someone had, after first allowing his flesh to decompose, lain a European male in his early 20s, dressed as if in Franciscan habits in the liminal space between Catholic and Hopi ceremonial chambers. Might this body be that of Francisco de Porras? It seems unlikely, since that martyr died at nearly fifty years of age. Might he be a victim of the revolt of 1680? Perhaps. But only if someone had buried him within the altar and taken pains to replace and resurface it such that it would be invisible to the eye (and later archaeologists). No Spaniards survived those violent few days, at least so far as the documents tell us. And why violate Christian rules against burial within the nave?
Just who played some role in this odd transgression of canon law may never be resolved. We do know that major construction continued under Gutiérrez, and that during those years some fraction of Awat’ovi’s people were drawn physically, as well as spiritually, closer to the Franciscan presence. As time passed, a “friendly” pueblo of Christian adherents developed on the far (east) side of the plaza to house these converts, whether nominal or devoted. This pattern appeared often throughout Franciscan New Mexico, and expressed visually the divisions that were developing as Christianity vied with traditional Pueblo spiritual practices for the hearts, minds, and bodies of Indian people. These new villages are generally of much more hurried, and fragile, construction than the premission pueblos, and exhibit a material culture that hints at “lower order” economic status for their residents—very few items of luxury (beads, turquoise, elegantly decorated ceramics) and bare minimum dwelling size. Yet their social status may have been something of a rather higher order, as those drawn to Mission San Bernardo saw themselves as active agents in the transformation of the High Place of the Bow Clan.
At the best-studied of similar sites, the Mission Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de Porciúncula at Pecos Pueblo east of Santa Fe, the “friendly” pueblo grew to embrace some 300 rooms, with perhaps 100 resident families. With stone and timber resources scarce—yet not nearly so rare as on the Hopi mesas—families obtained their building materials by literally dismantling their homes in the premission pueblo. With the departure of each adherent, fortress Awat’ovi would be losing both citizens and mass. At Pecos, National Park Service architectural historian James E. “Jake” Ivey estimates that by the middle years of the seventeenth century the original North Pueblo “probably looked half-empty and partly in ruins.” This new pueblo at Awat’ovi might well have mirrored what researchers claim for Pecos: a “place of greatest power and influence on the mesilla during the seventeenth century, with the [premission] North Pueblo a half-empty slum-like backwater occupied by ‘unconverted Pecoseños’—Pecos kin-groups that refused to ally themselves with the Franciscans.” The insult of Franciscan intrusion would be manifest each day as Katsina priests rose to offer their prayers and corn pollen to the rising sun, for directly in the foreground would be the steadily increasing edifice of the “Christian Indians.”
Given the amount of architectural work accomplished during his tenure, we can presume that Gutiérrez’s tenure at the mission featured tangible success in recruiting the sympathies of a substantial portion of Awat’ovi’s people. That would change, however, with the arrival of Padre Alonso de Posada in 1653. Posada was unequivocally the “dark side” of the Franciscan Order, and a man who doubtless dismantled much of the goodwill that Gutiérrez may have cultivated. Abrasive in style and impudent in act, Posada almost immediately became the subject of Hopi shaming ritual, since “formalized public mimicry and burlesque” was (and is) often part-and-parcel of Hopi ceremonialism, expressed in “clowning” that draws attention to well-known but privately discussed misbehavior. Not a few modern tourists attending Hopi ceremonial dances today have felt the sting of Hopi mockery of white ways, from consumerism to obesity to puritanical attitudes toward sexuality.
Midway into the padre’s brief tenure a Hopi convert named Juan stood accused of impersonating Friar Alonso in a ribald and embarrassing performance, while Posada was absent visiting a distant pueblo. Juan “summoned the Indians to the church, where he put on the friar’s vestments, took the incense burner and censed the altar, then sprinkled the holy water” in the manner of the priest. Coupled with what the documents coyly describe as a performance of “grave sexual immorality”—of which we will understand more shortly—Juan’s parody of the padre drew him a journey to Santa Fe and “a period of service in the convent where he could be instructed in the faith.”
Juan’s satire likely referenced a rather more “grave” incident at the heart of which lay Posada himself. The Franciscan had taken to keeping a converted woman named Isabel in his chambers for other than Christian pleasures, a fact widely known and resented among the Hopis. When a Hopi man, Sixto, a “leading Indian of the pueblo,” began “making trouble” with Isabel, Posada ordered two of the Christian pueblo’s capitanes á guerro (war chiefs) to murder him, which command they obeyed. Fearing that his guilt might be revealed, Posada then summoned the mestizo alcalde mayor of the mission community to “bring the two capitanes to swift and summary trial…upon some pretext of disobedience, and hang them—which he did.” The padre’s attempts to manage his crisis failed, and in 1656 he found himself a prisoner in the mission convento at Santo Domingo Pueblo south of Santa Fe. Unfortunately for Indian justice, civil governor Juan Manso compelled the friar’s release and by 1660 he had been assigned the custodianship of the entire province.
The whipsawing of Franciscan leadership and Hopi sentiment at Awat’ovi continued as conflagration drew near. The decade following the departure of Posada featured a far different Franciscan style, and one that shaped the pueblo’s history profoundly. Padre José de Espeleta arrived on the Hopi mesas in 1661, assigned first as guardian to the small church at Shungopovi, and to Mission San Bernardo in 1663. Espeleta, a “highly spiritual man who sensed the value of the mission as Spain’s most effective colonizing force,” set out to repair the damaged relations with the Hopis. He beseeched Governor Diego Dionisio de Peñalosa to send an organ and trained singers from Santa Fe to help him communicate the soothing words of Christ in music. Soon he earned the governo
r’s approval to excuse any Hopi singers from labor or tribute requirement, and devoted intense effort to inculcating in the already ritualistically inclined Hopis a love for choral singing and associated liturgical dramas. Navajo oral histories recorded in the early twentieth century seem to recall Espeleta’s tenure, for as Navajos herded their sheep and goats beneath the escarpments of Antelope Mesa, they marveled at the music drifting down into the canyons and washes. They gave Awat’ovi the Navajo name Tallahogan—the Singing House, or Place of the Singers—evoking a history strikingly incongruous with the ways its meaning has descended to us today.
Espeleta also began a program of taking Hopi boys into the mission for intensive Christian education. Residing in the convento rather than the Christian pueblo, the boys learned Spanish and Latin, to write, to recite the rosary and the catechism as the essential and fundamental contents of the Catholic doctrine, and to spread their knowledge among their kinspeople. Only one of these boys survives in the historical record, but “Francisco de Espeleta,” as he was known among the Franciscans (and “don Francisco” by Spanish governors), plays a powerful, if ambiguous role in the story ahead. Writing several decades later, Friar José Narváez Valverde would claim that the Hopis “remain in their heights in primitive freedom” under the command of one Francisco de Espeleta “because of his having been brought up and taught to read and write by one religious whose name was Espeleta. . . . since this uprising (1680) it has not been possible to reduce them.”
If Narváez were correct, it would not be the first time that a devotee turned on his teachers and became leader of native resistance. Perhaps the most famous of such figures is that of Opchanacanough—He Whose Soul Is White—a Powhatan leader who first received tutelage in European ways as a boy christened “don Luís.” Taken from his natal village of Kiskiak to Spain at the age of seventeen and educated there, he returned to help spread the faith in the short-lived Jesuit mission at Ajacán on the Virginia Chesapeake. But within a year don Luís led the revolt that extinguished the mission and fulfilled the Jesuit missionaries’ desire for martyrdom. Closer to home, the Naranjo family of the Tewa pueblo at Santa Clara fielded mission-educated participants in the Pueblo Revolt, as well as to the Spanish reconquest thirteen years later. Francisco de Espeleta, however, is one of the most opaque characters in the story of Awat’ovi’s demise and the Hopis’ rejection of Catholicism. He seems to have been torn in his sympathies and himself driven from pillar to post in negotiating the intense clan and village politics of Tusayán during the period of the Pueblo Revolt.
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