Turkeys Befriend a Girl: Turkey Husbandry, Ceremonialism, and Tales of Resistance during the Pueblo Revolt Era

From Basketmaker II to Pueblo II (200 BC–AD 1150), turkey husbandry flourished among Ancestral Pueblos inhabiting the northern and southern San Juan areas (300 BC–AD 1250) and the Rio Grande Valley (AD 1250– 1700) due to the ritual-symbolic importance of turkey feathers to rainmaking ideology. As primary caregivers, Ancestral Puebloan women's long-lasting social bond with domesticated turkeys was disrupted by Spanish maize and textile tribute (encomienda) systems and demands on Native labor (repartimiento) of the mid-1600s, a major factor contributing to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Despite the Spanish assault on their culture, Native people clandestinely practiced kachina religion by reusing turkey feather ceremonial objects, seeking refuge in ancestral mesa-top villages, and repurposing Spanish ecclesiastical materials as part of a pan-Pueblo resistance and revitalization movement. This study examines a previously overlooked form of Native resistance to Franciscan conversion efforts—“turkey girl” tales that appropriated and repurposed a Spanish religious folktale. Evidence suggests that these tales were authored by Pueblo Revolt–era war captains who attended Franciscan mission schools around the 1630s. To varying degrees, these “turkey girl” tales express nativist resistance to Franciscan conversion efforts, commitment to revitalization ideology, and pan-Pueblo ethnogenesis.

Colonial Consecrations, Violent Reclamations, and Contested Spaces in the Spanish Americas

During Spanish colonization in the Americas, Catholic evangelizers often purposefully consecrated spaces that were already sacred to Indigenous Americans. In many regions, however, Indigenous deities, spirits, ancestors, and their devotees, rebelled. The Pueblo Revolt of 1680 killed and evicted Spaniards while claiming Christian constructions and objects for native usage. Yet the end result of this revolt was not just the re-consecration of sacred spaces to once again welcome Indigenous spirit beings. Rather, in its wake, the line between the pure and the contaminated cannot be neatly drawn; indeed, such sharp distinctions make little sense within Indigenous epistemologies wherein binary opposition is rarely found. Comparative materials from Mesoamerica and the Andes help complicate the commonplace narrative of conquest and resistance.

Spatiotemporal, Geographic, and Linguistic Fixity: (Counter)hegemonies in the Pueblo Borderlands

Discussions about migration, geography, and Indigenous language use are key ways that community members perform, negotiate, and contest identities and politics in multilingual Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, a federally-recognized Native nation located within the city of El Paso, Texas. This linguistic anthropological piece illustrates how tribal members creatively use local ways of speaking and the indexing of language ideologies to critique hegemonic discourses that constrain tribal members’ Native identities and call into question the tribe’s status as an Indigenous community. Through “indexing”—or pointing to—dominant and emergent narratives about place and language, Ysletans are able to enhance their visibility as a nation and their political and social influence in the region and beyond. Speech genres focusing on the 17th century Pueblo revolt, the seizure of lands near the U.S.-Mexico border, and the loss of the tribe’s Indigenous language allow community members to assert sovereignty, belonging, and indigeneity in the face of these criticisms by Indian and non-Indian audiences.

Catholic Settlement of Río Arriba

This chapter tells the story of Spanish conquest and evangelization of the region known today as New Mexico. The focus is on the Franciscan order and its changing strategies to plant churches and make converts out of the native peoples. Popular Catholicism that grew up and around Pueblo and Spanish villages is also covered. The Pueblo Revolt is covered, along with the early history of New Mexico’s famous Penitentes.