Witchcraft in Early North America - Alison Games [78]
By secretly and repeatedly sowing his diabolical doctrine in various places, the bedeviled Indian kept these people demented and fooled. This was ultimately the true origin and cause of this uprising and revolt and the tragic apostasy of the Tepehuan nation.
Source: Andrés Pérez de Ribas, History of the Triumphs of our Holy Faith Amongst the Most Barbarous and Fierce Peoples of the New World, trans. Daniel T. Reff, Maureen Ahern, and Richard K. Danford (Tucson: The University of Arizona Press, 1999), 594–95.
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5. Witchcraft, Sorcery, and the Pueblo Revolt, 1680–1681
These two documents suggest the complex role that ideas about witchcraft played in the Pueblo Revolt in New Mexico in 1680. This revolt, which drove the Spanish out of the territory for over a decade, was unprecedented among North American indigenous resistance movements in its success, and the Spanish struggled to make sense of its origins and its organization. The first document contains the testimony of Pedro Naranjo, a Queres Indian captured by the Spanish. It provides a glimpse at the spiritual power of the Pueblo leader Popé and his message of cultural and religious revitalization, much like that of the “sorcerer” in document 4. An elderly man when he testified, Naranjo had lived most of his life under Spanish occupation.
The second document comes from the testimony of Luis de Quintana, a Spanish official. Which do you think was more troubling to the Spanish—the military uprising or the religious rejection? In what ways did ideas about witchcraft shape Spanish and Indian interactions in New Mexico, and whose ideas? Was witchcraft important to the Pueblos?
The Declaration of Pedro Naranjo of the Queres Nation, December 19, 1681, in the Place of the Rio del Norte.
In the said plaza de armas on the said day, month, and year, for the prosecution of the judicial proceedings of this case his lordship caused to appear before him an Indian prisoner named Pedro Naranjo, a native of the pueblo of San Felipe, of the Queres nation, who was captured in the advance and attack upon the pueblo of La Isleta. He makes himself understood very well in the Castilian language and speaks his mother tongue and the Tegua. He took the oath in due legal form in the name of God, our Lord, and a sign of the cross. . . .
Asked whether he knows the reason or motives which the Indians of this kingdom had for rebelling, forsaking the law of God and obedience to his Majesty, and committing such grave and atrocious crimes, and who were the leaders and principal movers, and by whom and how it was ordered; and why they burned the images, temples, crosses, rosaries, and things of divine worship, committing such atrocities as killing priests, Spaniards, women, and children, and the rest that he might know touching the question, he said that since the government of Señor General Hernando Ugarte y la Concha they have planned to rebel on various occasions through conspiracies of the Indian sorcerers, and that although in some pueblos the messages were accepted, in other parts they would not agree to it; and that it is true that during the government of the said señor general seven or eight Indians were hanged for this same cause, whereupon the unrest subsided. . . .
Finally, in the past years, at the summons of an Indian named Popé who is said to have communication with the devil, it happened that in an estufa [sacred underground chamber] of the pueblo of Los Taos there appeared to the said Popé three figures of Indians who never came out of the estufa. They gave the said Popé to understand that they were going underground to the lake of Copala. He saw these figures emit fire from all the extremities of their bodies, and that one of them was called Caudi, another Tilini, and the other Tleume; and these three beings spoke to the said Popé, who was in hiding from the secretary, Francisco Xavier, who wished to punish him as a sorcerer. They told him to make a cord of maguey fiber and tie some knots in it which