Far to the west, the “Moquis”—as the Spanish called the Hopi peoples of the province of Tusayán—also knew of the Tano’s ferocity. Although they had succeeded in expelling the Franciscans from their mesas in the rebellion of 1680, the region had not enjoyed peace in the decade that followed. As one major source of corn, beans, and squash in the west, the Hopi villages suffered seasonal raids each autumn by Utes, Paiutes, Comanches from the north and Apaches from the south, who waited until after harvest time to sweep through the cornfields that flourished in the sandy washes beneath the four mesas. Raiders also fought “their way into the villages and took food, women, and children,” who might find themselves forcibly adopted kinspeople among their captors, or sold to Spanish slave traders for transshipment as far south as the silver mines of Durango and Zacatecas.
External enemies were not the sole threat, however. According to Hopi oral accounts, intervillage conflict proved even more frequent and devastating. Albert Yava of First Mesa would later recall “sometimes other Hopi villages attacked them too. The people of the Hopi villages did not consider themselves as belonging to the same tribe. They considered themselves Walpis, Mishongnovis, Shongopovis, Oraibis, and so on. Their village was their nationality, you might say.” Neighbors attacking neighbors would foster grievances that festered well before (and after) the conflagration at Awat’ovi. The internal violence concurrently weakened the defensive capability of the whole Hopi coalition.
Especially vulnerable was the community of Walpi at First Mesa. Today the most iconic of Hopi towns, in the seventeenth century Walpi actually lay on the western flank of the mesa below where it now stands (in order to be close to the spring that served its people) and was known by the name Keuchaptevela. Harassed by foreign raiders and antagonistic neighbors alike, after the revolt of 1680 the beleaguered Walpis sought a better defensive site by relocating atop the peñole (rock outcropping) of First Mesa where the village stands today. Even then, as threats intensified, they knew their situation was perilous. Walpi needed to increase its strength. One strategy toward that end could draw upon a centuries-deep custom on the Hopi mesas: the addition of “outsiders” to their community. This process of recruitment involved practices long in use before the Spanish conquest, given the “braided” nature of Hopi historical identities and the array of oral traditions about Hopi clan migrations and the formation of new communities on their mesas.
Popular notions of timeless Indian “tribes” and a body of federal Indian law that recognizes only “tribal” entities have created a fog of misunderstanding around the complexity of the deep past. Albert Yava’s comment about Hopi village “nationalities” points to this at the local level. Indeed, there may be no Indian people in the Southwest with more variegated origins than those known today as the Hopis. Each of dozens of ancient “Hopi” villages, including Awat’ovi, was populated over the centuries by small groups of migrants from across the Southwest, often carrying language and traditions discrete unto themselves, if similar to some of the broader cultural patterns across the region. As migrants sought entrance and acceptance to established villages, they would be challenged to show how their presence might help to sustain the community.
At Oraibi Village an elder recalled the process thus: “When a clan arrived usually one of the new arrivals would go to the village and ask the village chief for permission to settle in the village. He usually asked whether they understood anything to produce rain and good crops, and if they had any cult; they would refer to it and say, ‘Yes, this or this we have, and when we assemble for this ceremony, or when we have this dance it will rain. With this we have traveled, and with this we have taken care of our children.’ The chief would say, ‘Very well, you come and live in this village.’” Once accepted as new members, however, the village chief tested their loyalty, requiring that newcomers “participate in our cult and help us with our ceremonies.” Only then would he distribute cornfields according to the rank of their arrival, a procedure that tended to reinforce the subordinate status of each new immigrant group.
As archaeologist Wesley Bernardini explains, “although the Hopi region may have received a large number of immigrants . . . in fact each Hopi village received a different set of socially distinct immigrants groups who shared in common only a brief period of co-residence at their most recent place of occupation.” As these small social groups coalesced in villages on the Hopi mesas, numerous points of potential friction arose. Different languages made communication difficult, especially around esoteric ceremonial traditions. A strong tendency to “rank” each newly arriving group as socially and ceremonially beneath the status of “founding” clans fostered enduring resentment, and the limited resources in Tusayán intensified an impulse toward intervillage tensions. In order to avoid chaos, communities of disparate peoples “would have required new efforts to integrate populations and consolidate social identity.” Any deviation from those social identities could produce chaos (koyaanisqatsi) and require reintegration, most often through roles associated with clan or Katsina obligations, which created relationships that reached across village and valley divides to align people of diverse origins. If those avenues failed, reintegration might require violence.
Thus had communities formed in Tusayán over the centuries, as diverse and volatile as they were ancient and enduring. After the revolt of 1680, however, the pace of foreign arrivals intensified. Some time after the revolt, probably in response to an autumn 1681 foray by Governor Antonio de Otermín with 146 Spanish men-at-arms and 112 pueblo auxiliaries, the Keres of Sandia Pueblo left their village and set out for the west. Before their departure, the Sandias had transformed the Franciscan convento into a “seminary of idolatry,” adorning the standing walls with Katsina masks “arranged very carefully, after their barbarous custom.” Otermín ordered the remains of the convento put to the torch, destroying the images of the sacred beings. According to several stories, the fugitive Sandias reached Second Mesa in Tusayán and, after convincing the resident Hopis of the value of their ceremonies, were allowed to settle and establish the fortified village of Payupki (the Hopi name for the Keres of Sandia). Around the same time, some refugees from Jemez Pueblo also sought shelter among the Hopis, establishing a village on Antelope Mesa remembered as Akokavi, or “Place of the Sunflowers.” These refugee communities, with firsthand knowledge of the tensions that led to the revolt and the persistence of Spanish efforts to regain their colony, would lend their own bitter experience to Hopi attitudes about the Franciscans.
The people of Walpi sought a more assertive solution. After a discussion among clan leaders, survival of the village seemed impossible without the aid of new allies. Since their own Hopi kinsmen acted more antagonistic than sympathetic, recruitment of battle-hardened Pueblo cousins from the Rio Grande presented an alternative. And events unfolding in the Rio Grande region lent themselves well to the Walpis’ scheme.
There, the winter of 1695–96 visited hardship on Indians and Spaniards alike. The turmoils of the preceding year had prevented successful planting and tending of agricultural fields. The harvest of 1695 had proved lean. A viciously cold season depleted what few stores remained in the pueblos, and the Spanish colonists had even less food on hand. Vargas sent soldiers to the pueblos to levy corn but found the granaries bare. One padre assigned to the Tanos complained of thin attendance at mass, “because they are traveling about soliciting food, since they are suffering seriously from hunger, for during the course of the war they had no harvests whatsoever.” In March of 1696, Fray José Arbízu wrote from San Cristóbal/Tsaewari that “the natives of said pueblo . . . are leaving me, and in the sierra they have placed their corn supplies and clothing . . . [they are] openly in rebellion,” having “prepared covered pits and traps at the ascents to the mountains so that the horses of the Spaniards will fall into them,” and erected stockades at the entrance to their camps. Vargas estimated the fugitive Tanos in their mountain strongholds (apparently reoccupied fourteenth-century v
illages in the valleys of the Rio Chiquito and Rito Sarco, above Chimayó) to number some 600, a formidable challenge to his authority in that they seemed “more intent to make war than peace.”
Lending additional concern to Vargas were the reports he received throughout early 1696 from padres among the Tanos of the presence of “Moquis” (Hopis) at San Cristóbal/Tsaewari. Some of these seem to have been guided into the mountain refuges by locals “where they had, and still have, all of their food supplies and weapons of war and have set up stockades to make themselves invincible.” Vargas feared that the Tanos might be recruiting allies from the Western Pueblos, as well as from neighboring Apache and Navajo bands. He misunderstood the direction of the alliances, however. Hopis sojourning with the Tanos signaled that the process of recruitment designed by the Walpis was underway in 1696, beginning a process of stitching the two peoples into a shared history that continues to the present day.
As cold weather persisted into the spring, delegates from the highest-ranked clans at Walpi—the Bear and the Snake—set out to the east. Traveling some three hundred miles afoot, they sought out the villagers of Tsaewari and extended an invitation “to make a home in our country” far distant from the travails of the Spanish colony. The Tanos considered the request, but more urgent matters prevented a decision.
Late in the evening of June 4, violence erupted at San Cristóbal/Tsaewari. The residents who had not yet fled for the mountains killed Fray Arbízu and his guest, Fray Carbonel, stripped them to their underclothes, and lay their bodies in the dirt plaza, placing one atop the other “in the form of a cross, face up.” Also killed were settlers Simon de Molina and Diego Betanzos, a young Mexican Indian servant, and a fourteen-year-old Indian boy from El Paso who spoke Spanish, probably a doñado (a child given to the Church for upbringing and instruction) attached to the mission as personal servant to Arbízu. Some soldiers, who had been “drinking chocolate with the reverend fathers,” had departed just before the killings began.
Rebellion flamed elsewhere in the colony as well. At San Ildefonso Pueblo, Fray Francisco Corbera was slain. Fray Antonio Moreno, normally resident at Nambe Pueblo, who was visiting Corbera for “spiritual consolation,” and a Spanish family took shelter in the convento, only to have it put to the torch, where they “were suffocated by the smoke.” In the province of the Jemez 2 padres died, as well as 10 colonists, their children, and a soldier. In all, 5 priests and some 25 colonists and their dependents died in the uprising.
Vargas recovered quickly from the shock, ordered that far-flung missions and Spanish settlers convene in Santa Fe to prepare a defense, and gathered his forces for retaliation. The 100 presidiales who arrived in New Mexico in 1693 had been reduced through warfare and disease to a mere 48, and thus his capacity was severely limited. The Spanish found support, however, among the Keres-speaking Pueblos of San Felipe, Santa Ana, Santo Domingo, and Zia, who had long-running conflicts with the Tewas and Tanos (probably predating the Spanish settlement of New Mexico), and thus were willing to contribute auxiliary warriors to the Spanish cause. The leadership at Tesuque Pueblo (Tewa) north of Santa Fe also favored the Spanish, although others in the village remained hostile. Pecos, too, was deeply divided, as it had been in 1680. Rebel leaders were captured and executed at Nambe Pueblo and Santo Domingo, but it was “the accursed Tano nation” that Vargas held responsible for the uprising.
On June 28, he mustered sufficient force to “set forth to make war against the Tewas and Tanos,” and ventured into the mountains above Chimayó. Alerted to his approach, the Tanos fled higher into the mountains but left behind their meager stores of corn. Vargas found but one coscomate (bin) of maize in the refugee site, seven coas (planting sticks), and evidence of preparations for a long siege—“a tall square shed with adobe walls and a door to store supplies. . . . [as well as] ditches and acequias to bring irrigation water to their milpas (fields). They had built a dam across a very large arroyo that comes down to the milpas through the cañada.” Captain Don Antonio de Valverde led a column into this “Cañada de los Tanos,” high up on the Rio Chiquito, and “occupied all their milpas, establishing himself in the middle of them.” The Tanos retired and established another fortified encampment in the high valley above Nambe Pueblo, but it, too, was overrun as the inhabitants fled.
In one month of campaigning, Vargas chipped away at rebels throughout the colony, his forces killing at least 90 and taking several hundred prisoner, most of whom were distributed as household slaves among the colonists. One key rebel, Lucas Naranjo, a Tewa-African “lobo,” was killed by a fortuitous harquebus shot on July 24 during an engagement near the Mesa Prieta (Black Mesa of the north). Throughout the month, too, Vargas received regular reports of western Pueblos, Zunis, and Moquis, circulating among the rebel Pueblos, who were also said to be crafting alliances with Navajos and Apaches. The Moquis were almost certainly not potential allies for the Rio Grande uprising, but most likely representatives from Walpi who were carrying forward their own plan of recruitment.
Three more visits followed the Snake and Bear clan chiefs’ first efforts in the winter of 1695–96, perhaps on an annual basis after harvests were gathered in Hopi country, and therefore spanning the years 1697–1699. On the fourth, the Tanos finally agreed to make the migration. This time, the Walpi clan leaders had brought “a bundle of prayer feathers, pahos,” representing three promises—“male and female pahos together meant people” and signaled their willingness to allow the Tanos “to take Walpi’s sons and daughters as husbands and wives” toward the growth and unity of a village community. The third was a plain, unpainted prayer stick, representing the lands that the Tanos would receive at First Mesa for a new village and cornfields below the mesa. “Land and people, that was the pledge,” a promise still memorialized today in the masked dancer who carries “a tall stick with cotton strings and feathers attached, representing land and people.” The symbolic generosity extended in these pahos, unfortunately, would not be realized in practice, which would shape the Tanos actions in the years immediately ahead.
After departing Tsaewari, the Tanos stopped briefly at the Tewa village of Kha’po Owingeh (whose Franciscan mission was dedicated to Santa Clara) on the western side of the Rio Grande, where they recruited additional migrants. Based on the presence of lead-based glaze-ware ceramics, a Tano clan seems to have left the Galisteo Basin in the early 1500s and journeyed north to the Pajarito Plateau, taking up residence with Tewa clan relatives at the village of Puye for at least a generation, before following their kinspeople in moving off the plateau to the village of Kha’po Owingeh, closer to the river. Two centuries later their Tano relatives would ask them to join the journey to Hopi, and thus crafted today’s enduring relationship between the linguistic cousins on First Mesa and those of Santa Clara Pueblo.
Stories curated and retold over the centuries at Santa Clara Pueblo count several pauses in their Tano relatives’ migration under the leadership of a man named Agaitsay (Yellow Star). Some 400 people made the journey, perhaps 100 families, according to these histories. At each of four locations, the Tanos planted “sacred things” in order to assure a safe journey and perhaps to create a living trail of ties back to their homeland. Some see these pauses to plant as indicating one migratory leg each year, as cornfields were planted in each location, harvested, and the journey recommenced each autumn. Others see the planting pauses as symbolic, a matter of a few days or weeks to mark the journey with ceremonial plantings (corn, tobacco). Tewas today mark these “parajes” (resting places) as “chains of belonging” that link their homeland with the migrant village at First Mesa—Cañoncito north of Laguna Pueblo (Tohajiilee Navajo country); Awpimpa, or Duck Spring, near Grants, New Mexico; Bopaw, or Reed Spring, near Gallup, New Mexico; and Kwalalata, Place of Bubbling Water, at Keams Canyon just a few miles distant from First Mesa.
When at last the migrants reached First Mesa, they discovered they were not, as they had expected, welcome. Rather than receiving a defensib
le site atop the rocky peñole, their Walpi hosts insisted they make their home below, on the eastern slopes of the mesa, where Polacca Village now sits. “How pitifully ignorant must have been our ancestors to believe the Hopi,” recalls one narrative. “Little did they know they would be so pitifully deceived . . . not permitted to ascend the mesa when they arrived at Hopi, but forced to make camp below.” Hungry after their long migration, they “petitioned Walpi women for food . . . they were told to cup their hands to receive a corn-meal gruel,” which was poured into their hands “boiling hot. The Hopi women laughed and berated them for being weak and soft.”
Even while suffering these affronts, the Tanos proved their military skill by repelling a Ute raid on the cornfields below the mesa. In contrast, Tanos claimed that when the enemy was around, “the Hopi hid trembling in their houses, like mice in a granary.” And yet, “when our ancestors had defeated the Utes and made life safe for the Hopi, they asked for the land, women, and food which had been promised them. But the Hopi refused to give them these things. Then it was that our poor ancestors had to live like beasts, foraging on the wild plants and barely subsisting on the meager supply of food. Our ancestors lived miserably, beset by disease and starvation. The Hopi, well-fed and healthy, laughed and made fun of our ancestors.”
The Tanos lost hope for residence on First Mesa and began to explore alternative village locations with Hopi villages to the west. News of the rejection had also reached those relatives in Tsaewari, and a delegation arrived among the Tanos “to take their friends back.” Only then did the Walpis “make reparation,” and “restored the confidence of the Hano.” The Hopi chief offered a location north of Walpi on First Mesa for a new village, and allocated planting lands to the Tanos toward the east, on the slopes of Antelope Mesa. And yet deep suspicions remained. When the Hopi chief reminded Agaitsay that the agreement included the Tanos’ rights to “take some of our women for wives,” the Tano leader demurred. “Wait, let us not go too fast. . . . first we have to see how well our villages live together.” He feared that should Hopi women marry into the Tanos, and tensions arose again, they “might have to break apart. It would be too hard for us to have to go away from here and leave our children and grandchildren behind. . . . later we can talk about taking Hopi wives.”
Mesa of Sorrows Page 7