"Susan E. Wallace was the wife of Lew Wallace, Governor of New Mexico Territory from 1878-1881. When they moved to the southwest she began sending articles to magazines and literary publications. she shares her observations about the land, the customs and the mix of inhabitants that she finds. Her journey West starts first by rail and then by buckboard. She details her first encounter with Native Americans and her first visit to an Indian ceremony. Wallace writes about forcing open a heavy wooden door into a locked and forgotten room in the Palace of the Governors in Santa Fe. What she uncovered was a pile of jumbled papers, some of them dating back to the 1600s. The Land of Pueblos documents the past by a person who was truly in the land where she lived."--Published description.
This long-awaited book is the most detailed and up-to-date account of the complex history of Pueblo Indian land in New Mexico, beginning in the late seventeenth century and continuing to the present day. The authors have scoured documents and legal decisions to trace the rise of the mysterious Pueblo League between 1700 and 1821 as the basis of Pueblo land under Spanish rule. They have also provided a detailed analysis of Pueblo lands after 1821 to determine how the Pueblos and their non-Indian neighbors reacted to the change from Spanish to Mexican and then to U.S. sovereignty. Characterized by success stories of protection of Pueblo land as well as by centuries of encroachment by non-American Indians on Pueblo lands and resources, this is a uniquely New Mexican history that also reflects issues of indigenous land tenure that vex contested territories all over the world.
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.
In her second book on Galisteo, New Mexico, cultural historian Lucy R. Lippard writes about the place she has lived for a quarter century. The history of a place she refers to as Pueblo Chico (little town) is based largely on other people's memories--those of the descendants of the original settlers in the early 1800s, heirs of the Spanish colonizers and the indigenous colonized who courageously settled this isolated valley despite official neglect and threats of Indian raids. The memories of those who came later--Hispano and Anglo--also echo through this book. But too many lives have already receded into the land, and few remain to tell the stories. The land itself has the longest memory, harboring traces of towns, trails, agriculture, and other land use that goes back thousands of years. The Galisteo Basin is a cultural landscape that has become familiar to Lippard, simultaneously enriched with the stories she has been told by longtime residents and veiled by those she has not been told. From its inception, Galisteo has been about the vortex of land and lives, about the way the land reveals its coexistence with humans, the ways people have changed it, and the ways the land has in turn changed the people who lived here long enough to become part of it. Complementing the history are two hundred historical and contemporary images, many provided by Galisteo's citizens and heirs.
Highly regarded by Native Americans as well as Anglo and Hispanic historians, Sando's book covers the origins and development of Pueblo civilization, the Spanish conquest, the Pueblo Revolt, the influence of the United States government in Pueblo history, and the issues of land and water rights so vital to the survival of Pueblo people today.
Explorers in Eden uncovers a vast array of diaries, letters, photographs, paintings, postcards, advertisements, and scholarly monographs, revealing how Anglo-Americans developed a fascination with pueblo culture they identified with biblical associations.
Southwestern archaeology has long been fascinated with the scale and frequency of movement in Pueblo history, from great migrations to short-term mobility. By collaborating with Pueblo communities, archaeologists are learning that movement was—and is—much more than the result of economic opportunity or a response to social conflict. Movement is one of the fundamental concepts of Pueblo thought and is essential in shaping the identities of contemporary Pueblos. The Continuous Path challenges archaeologists to take Pueblo notions of movement seriously by privileging Pueblo concepts of being and becoming in the interpretation of anthropological data. In this volume, archaeologists, anthropologists, and Native community members weave multiple perspectives together to write histories of particular Pueblo peoples. Within these histories are stories of the movements of people, materials, and ideas, as well as the interconnectedness of all as the Pueblo people find, leave, and return to their middle places. What results is an emphasis on historical continuities and the understanding that the same concepts of movement that guided the actions of Pueblo people in the past continue to do so into the present and the future. Movement is a never-ending and directed journey toward an ideal existence and a continuous path of becoming. This path began as the Pueblo people emerged from the underworld and sought their middle places, and it continues today at multiple levels, integrating the people, the village, and the individual.
The vast and beautiful landscape of the American Southwest has long haunted artists and writers seeking to understand the mysteries of the deep affinity between the land and the Native Americans who have lived on it for centuries. In this pioneering study, art historian Vincent Scully explores the inhabitants' understanding of the natural world in an entirely original way—by observing and analyzing the complex yet visible relationships between the landscape of mountain and desert, the ancient ruins and the pueblos, and the ceremonial dances that take place with them. Scully sees these intricate dances as the most profound works of art yet produced on the American continent—as human action entwined with the natural world and framed by architectural forms, in which the Pueblos express their belief in the unity of all earthly things. Scully's observations, presented in lively prose and exciting photographs, are based on his own personal experiences of the Southwest; on his exploration of the region of the Rio Grande and the Hopi mesas; on his witnessing of the dances and ceremonies of the Pueblos and others; and on his research into their culture and history. He draws on the vast literature inspired by the Native Americans—from early exploration narratives to the writing of D. H. Lawrence to recent scholarship—to enrich and support his unique approach to the subject. To this second edition Scully has added a new preface that raises issues of preservation and development. He has also written an extensive postscript that reassesses the relationship between nature and culture in Native American tradition and its relevance to contemporary architecture and landscape. "Coming to Pueblo architecture as he does from a provocative study of sacred architecture in ancient Greece, Scully has much to say that is both striking and moving of the Pueblo attitudes toward sacred places, the arrangement of structures in space, the lives of men and beasts, and man's relation to rain, earth, vegetation."—Robert M. Adams, New York Review of Books
Po'pay: Leader of the First American Revolution is the story of the visionary leader of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which drove the Spanish conquerors out of New Mexico for twelve years. This enabled the Pueblos to continue their languages, traditions and religion on their own ancestral lands, thus helping to create the multicultural tradition that continues to this day in the "Land of Enchantment." The book is the first history of these events from a Pueblo perspective. Edited by Joe S. Sando, a historian from Jemez Pueblo, and Herman Agoyo, a tribal leader from San Juan Pueblo, it draws upon the Pueblos' rich oral history as well as early Spanish records. It also provides the most comprehensive account available of Po'pay the man, revered by his people but largely unknown to other historians. Finally, the book describes the successful effort to honor Po'pay by installing a seven-foot-tall likeness of him as one of New Mexico's two statues in the National Statuary Hall in Washington, D.C. This magnificent statue, carved in marble by Pueblo sculptor Cliff Fragua, is a fitting tribute to a most remarkable man.
