American History Hit - The Pueblo Revolt

Episode Date: August 10, 2023

On August 10 1680, the Pueblo people began the most successful uprising against colonial power in North America.For 11 days, Spanish colonisers were driven out, taken prisoner or killed, their horses were stolen and Christian churches were burnt to the ground. They did not manage to return for the following 12 years. The Pueblo people rebuilt their society and ensured the survival of their traditions, languages and religions.Matt Liebmann joins Don today to discuss the revolt and to share some of his findings from archaeological research in New Mexico.Matt is Professor of Archaeology in the Department of Anthropology at Harvard University, he has conducted collaborative research with the Pueblo of Jemez since 2001.Edited and produced by Sophie Gee. Senior Producer was Charlotte Long.Discover the past on History Hit with ad-free original podcasts and documentaries released weekly presented by world renowned historians like Dan Snow, James Holland, Mary Beard and more.Get 50% off your first 3 months with code AMERICANHISTORY. Download the app on your smart TV or in the app store or sign up at historyhit.com/subscribeYou can take part in our listener survey here. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Want to explore even more history? Sign up to History Hit, where you will discover history from around the world. From the American Revolution to prehistoric Scotland, there is plenty to discover. With your subscription, you'll unlock hundreds of hours of exclusive documentaries with a brand new release every week, exploring everything from the ancient world to World War II. Just visit historyhit.com slash subscribe to bring the past alive. In the brutal heat of summer, August 1680, near the area that will one day be Santa Fe, New Mexico, a runner lopes across the desert landscape. In hand, he grasps several lengths of cord,

each of them segmented by knots. The Pueblo leader, Poppe, has dispatched the runner and others around the region with urgent instructions for the leaders of other Pueblo peoples. Each day, one knot shall be untied. When the cords are finally cleared of their knots, the time for Action will have come. The uprising against the Spanish will be underway. Horses will be stolen. Churches will be burnt to the ground. Spaniards across the region will die. The Pueblo Revolt will begin. Hello, listeners. We're glad you clicked on American history hit. Lucky to have you. I'm Don Wildman. Throughout the centuries of colonial history in North America, there is a long list of bloody conflicts between Native peoples and European colonizers. We have Montezuma and the Aztecs

against Cortez and the conquistadors in what becomes Mexico. King Phillips' war is waged against the newcomers of New England. Pontiac's rebellion comes on the heels of the French and Indian War in the mid-1700s. And of course, there are the dismally exhausting wars fought by numerous tribes against the United States forces north and south and across the American West. But one rebellious episode fundamental to this torturous history is still relatively obscure for most,

while it stands like a stone pillar for native tribes. It is called the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, also known as Poppe's Rebellion, and it involved a highly organized and effective insurgency by the Pueblo peoples of the American Southwest, today's New Mexico, generally speaking, against their Spanish oppressors. It was anchored in the region around what became Santa Fe, New Mexico, and would result in a powerful victory for those native warriors, if only a temporary one. The Pueblo Revolt is one of those events of great and lasting significance that often gets referred to indirectly in other discussions. We covered it a bit in a past episode about the history of the horse in the Americas. So today we're addressing the events directly, those which define the struggle and the individuals behind it all, with the expert guidance of archaeologist and anthropologist Matt Lieben, Peabody Professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology in Harvard University's Native American program.

He is author of Revolt, an archaeological history of Pueblo resistance and revitalization in 17th century, New Mexico, of course, among many other publications and scholarly achievements. Matt Liebman, we are privileged so you could join us. Thanks, Adam. I'm so happy to be here. Let's first, in the most general sense, address this area of the world for Native peoples in the 1600s. Pueblo is a word we all learned in grade school. It translates as a town or a village. It's built of Adobe.

It's very cleverly constructed structures. but it also refers to a larger nation of people living in these settlements, correct? It does, right. So the Spaniards coined the term Pueblo to define the indigenous peoples who are living in, as you mentioned, villages, usually sedentary agriculturalists, so they're growing corn. And that's to define them in opposition to the nomadic peoples who also inhabit the southwest peoples, we today refer to as the Dene, the Navajo, the Apache, the Ute peoples. So Pueblo was really a Spanish term that was setting the farmers of the Northern Rio Grande against the nomadic peoples.

And so Pueblo revolt would refer to that widespread nation of villages and settlements taking action together, united. Numerous tribes, many villages. Who are we talking about? Who are these peoples? There are lots. Probably the most famous that listeners would recognize are the Hopi and the Zuni Pueblos. but there are today 19 pueblos in New Mexico. There are also the Hopi villages in northern Arizona,

and one pueblo is Letta del Sur in Texas, right near El Paso. On the eve of first contacts with Europeans, there were probably 100 different pueblo villages that were occupied in this area, and they spoke seven different mutually unintelligible languages, six of which are still spoken today and are the primary languages in many of the 19 Pueblos in New Mexico today. And I'm right to point out to listeners how sophisticated this society really was, correct?

I mean, the Pueblos have an amazing and very underappreciated history, I would say, as people's dating back thousands of years. We have archaeological monuments to their culture that are among some of the most fantastic, really in the world, I'd say, Chaco Canyon in northern New Mexico being the kind of jewel in the crown. But anybody who's traveled throughout the southwest through the national parks has probably seen some of the fantastic Pueblo archaeological sites that are there today. And yes, their societies are very complex, lots of forms of social organization that were not apparent to the Spaniards upon their initial arrival, but they are not organized in the same

ways that many European hierarchical societies are organized. There are lots of internal societies and governing structures in the village. And those traditions continue today, so it's important to note that these villages are still around and carrying forward those same very complex systems of governance today. It's what's interesting about the lead up to this revolt. The actual society we're talking about, Pueblo peoples had created a settled civilization in these communities for hundreds of years, centuries before Columbus, centuries before even Cortez in 1519. This was a developed and developing society, just like the Aztecs, the Maya, just out there in this case, in the arid lands of the southwest. When did the Spanish finally make it north to the region?

And how were they greeted when they arrived? Do we have records of this? We do. So the first foray comes up in 1539. There are rumors swirling around Mexico City about cities of gold that lay to the north. And this is an old medieval Spanish legend, about these seven cities of Sibelos. So the viceroy of New Spain sends Franciscan friar north. His name is Marcos Deneza. And his traveling companion is an enslaved moor from North Africa named Esteban. Now, Esteban had just gotten off of an epic eight-year journey as part of a crew that shipwrecked in the Gulf of Mexico after making a disastrous colonial foray in Florida. They end up washing up on Galveston Island in Texas.

And then he walks for seven years across huge chunks of Texas, northern Mexico, possibly into New Mexico, before making their way back down to Mexico City. This is the famous Cabezza de Vaca expedition. So Esteban leads this. He goes out in front of the friar to make initial contacts. So the Pueblo people like to say, the first white man we met was a black man. And that's their reference to Esteban, who leads up in 1539. He goes to a village of the Zuni Pueblos. He's actually executed within

24 hours of his appearance. And the friar goes back and reports this to Mexico City. And then that sparks the Coronado Entrada of 1540, where Vasquez de Coronado comes up from Mexico with a much larger contingent and spends about two years tromping around. The southwest makes it all the way out onto the plains probably all the way as far as Kansas before looping back down to Mexico City. And he is seeking vengeance, or what is the practical purpose of this incursion? I mean, they are seeking gold, right? They're looking for the new Mexico. So Mexico being the reference Tenocht Tilan, right? So they're pretty straightforwardly out for riches. They're trying to find the next big place. By that time, we have Tenocht Tilan, the 1520s. Then we have the Ancas in the 1515.

40s, and so they're looking for the next great empire that they can sack. Next gold rush, yeah. They also have Franciscan priests along with who are looking to convert souls as well. You're referring to a place of Toclon, which is the name of Mexico City back then and the great civilization that had been created by the Aztecs in that area. You know, I did a television show, brief digression here about the famous theory of the Aztecs that they were sourced as a culture in Utah and then made their way down. to what becomes to Nost Glan, and then come back, you know, because Montezuma sends all these

hundreds of soldiers back with gold. And that's the kind of mythology of this migration. How sourced in truth is that? Oh, man. So with any origin story like this, and I would extend this to, you know, biblical origin stories or classical origin stories and legends, there are probably historical elements in there. But I can't say that archaeologically we see a clear path where we see a migration of peoples from Utah down. It's fascinating history. It really is. I mean, I'll tell you where I learned that was at the archaeological museum in Mexico City, which is a must see for anybody in this world. It's a mind-blowing museum that absolutely changed my life, you know, and I heard about it for decades, and suddenly I saw it, and I understood why. One of the greatest, definitely.

Much of the campaign in the new world is also about Christianization, but it couldn't be as simple as all that. This broader strategy, what is that about? I've always wondered, I mean, it seems like a whitewash of history to call it that, but was that really at the heart of the matter? Great questions. Well, so initially, so New Mexico becomes colonized. I'm talking about permanent colonial settlements in 1598, Don Juan de and Yate, is basically given the ability to go to this region and see what he can extract. So he sets up a permanent colony, brings settlers, and there again, mainly there because they're looking to strike it rich. And after 12 years,

it has become apparent that they're not going to find the goal that they were out looking for. And so, Oneate wants to pick up stakes and head back down to Mexico City. And it's really the Franciscan priests who make an appeal to the crown that say, you know, we've baptized all these people were responsible for educating them in Christianity. So in 1610, New Mexico converts from a proprietary enterprise to one that's funded by the crown. And so from that point on for the rest of the 17th century, there's these sometimes conflicting, sometimes mutually reinforcing goals where you have the Franciscans who are trying to baptize and Christianize. And you always have entrepreneurs, often coming up from Mexico that are hoping to extract the resources of New Mexico to enrich themselves.

It's about 100 years of colonization that had occurred by the time of the event we're speaking up today. By the time of that rebellion, which happens in 1680, Pueblos have been subjected to abuses and would you call it criminal treatment? What are the checks on these colonizers? I mean, is there any kind of policy guiding them or do they simply take these places over, lay down the law, and punish those who don't obey? You know, again, we're talking about an 80-year period, you're right. And so the motivations change over time. So there are some Franciscans and Spanish colonial authorities who are extraordinarily heavily handed and who exact punishments that include capital punishment. They're executing people for practicing traditional religion. They are doing their best to repress any traditional practices, burning ritual Pueblo paraphernalia, filling the kivas, these ritual chambers in which much of their religious practice took place. So that is happening. There are other periods, especially early on, where, you know, I think both sides are feeling each other out. Pueblo society, and particularly what we would call Pueblo religion, has always been very accommodative.

So Pueblo religion centers around what many people know as these spirit beings called Kachinas. And there's a long history of sharing ritual knowledge between different. Pueblo. So at Hopi there is a Hamas Kachina. At Hama's there is a Hopi Kachina and this relates directly to their interactions in the past. Some people would go so far as to say there is inspiration for contemporary Pueblo religion that comes out of Mesoamerican religion. So Ketzalquadal, there's an equivalent in Pueblo Society, a horned serpent, Tlaluk, the famous rain god of Mexico. There are similar elements that we can see in the

artifacts that make their way into New Mexico. So there's a thousand-year history of their religion taking in, you know, whatever new tool you can add to the toolbox. So I think when priests show up in the late 1500s and they're talking about this guy, Jesus and this woman, the Virgin Mary, these are two more figures that the Pueblos can add to their pantheon. So what we see early on, you know, I'm talking about the 1620s, we see the erection of these massive mission churches throughout New Mexico, and those are not being constructed by the friars. Those are being constructed by Pueblo peoples who are being instructed by the friars. So I think there's a lot of initial buy-in in the 1620s. Now, I think there's a fundamental difference in conception in that the

Spaniards were evangelical monotheists, right? And so there's only one God, and this becomes the source of a lot of their consternation about the Pueblos, whereas the Pueblos have many different entities which are playing a role in their spiritual life. And so that's what sets up a lot of the conflict. Sure. Reminds me of the Haiti. Yes. The voodoo practices and the adoption of Christianity into West African religious symbology and so forth. The mistreatment goes on for what are generations, I guess, and suppose, I'm speaking generally, of course, you're saying it's a pocketed kind of thing. But I suppose there must have been resistance all along. But in the 1670s, there is a Spanish governor who is particularly difficult, and it's his brutality that triggers this revolt.

It involves a man named Poppe, as I mentioned, and he's with the Okayowinga people, which I suppose is one of these city states, I guess. He's a holy man and a war captain there. Have I gotten the facts right so far? You have. So he is from a Tewa-speaking Pueblo that many people may know a San Juan Pueblo, their traditional name for themselves is Okao Winge. And Paupe is one of about 75 ritual practitioners, the term the Spaniards use as echiseros, which is equivalent to like a sorcerers. And the governor rounds up all of these holy men, brings them to Santa Fe, publicly whips them, and the plaza of Santa Fe, executes, I think, four of the leaders to send a message to the pueblos that they are not to be practicing their traditional religion, that Christianity

is supposed to be the law of the land. So Pope is imprisoned there in Santa Fe. The Pueblo people are so upset at the fact that their leaders have been rounded up and imprisoned, that they protest this and eventually the leaders are released. And Popei leaves Santa Fe doesn't actually return to his home Pueblo of Okaoengue, interestingly. He goes all the way to the north to Tos Pueblo, which is the northernmost outpost of the Spanish Empire at this time.

You can get no further than Touse. I think that's not a coincidence. And there he goes into a kiva and kind of a retreat in which he says that these spirits bring to him a message of revival. He receives a prophecy, essentially, when he's in this kiva. You can equate this with Sitting Bull at Little Bighorn, the Sundance of Sitting Bull. Any of these great resistance leaders have had these moments of both religious and militaristic turns. The backdrop of this is interesting to me. There is a prolonged drought going on at this point.

point. There's natural events happening here that are difficult. As a result, lack of food resources, both the Native American and the Spanish are seizing crops. It's just a very difficult time with a lot of pressures going on. The population in this period from the mid-1500s into the 1600s drops significantly, I mean, from upwards of 80,000 to 15,000 in this general period of time, loss of culture, all the rest of it. This is informing the tension, isn't it? Right. So we can see that probable populations drop by, in the Hamas Valley where I work, it's about 87% in a 40-year period. And this follows on the heels of the erection of the Spanish missions. So much for the blessings of Christianity, huh?

Yeah, well, and presumably this is due to the introduction of diseases from the old world, although warfare is there. And I'm one who's not a big fan of this notion that it's, oops, we accidentally introduced germs and it was all a big accident. What you're pointing to is the fact that they were living in a period of basically enforced famine. So the Pueblos have a practice of maintaining seven years of corn to ensure for times a drought. The Pueblos have been living in the southwest for, as I said, a thousand years. These are people who are used to dealing with droughts. Sure. And they know how to deal with lack of rainfall. And their strategy was to have enough stored food to make it through those tough periods. When the Spaniards appear on the scene, they basically collect all of that stored food.

This is one of their means of taxation of the Pueblos. And so the missions become the storehouses for food. And this is actually one thing the Spaniards used to force Pueblo people into the missions, because if they want to eat in these scarce times, they have to go get the food in the missions. And so the fact that they are on the brink of starvation, and as you mentioned, there's a massive drought in the late 1660s, early 1670s that puts further stresses on them, this also, I think, predisposes them to be even more susceptible to the diseases that are introduced. I mean, Europeans are getting smallpox and things like that as well, but when you have the nutrition and you're not already on the edge of starvation, the effects are not as drastic. So there is the

starvation. There's also not just the drought in the decade leading up, but we know that in 1680, there's actually a very late freeze that year that probably killed the crops in the late spring in May, June. We can see this in frost rings in the tree ring record. And so it's tempting to speculate that that may have played a role in pushing them over the edge as well. A huge role in all kinds of epics of this time is climate change up and down the Americas. Step back in time with me, Tristan Hughes, on the ancients from history hit as we unearthed, Pompey's buried secrets in a special mini-series. You'll discover what life was like in this town

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There were a series of other smaller rebellions going back to the 1620s, but they were always among discrete Pueblo. So it was one village at a time rising up and either burning their mission or sometimes killing the priest. things like that. The brilliance of Pope's vision was that he managed to unite all of the village. There were about 45 Pueblo villages at that time. Never before had they coordinated in a unified

action like this, partially because there's linguistic diversity. As I mentioned, there's seven different languages being spoken among them. Pope's brilliance was, so he has this vision, this prophecy, he says, the spirits tell him you can bring about a revived world. You can go back to the way things were before the Spaniards came, the crops will grow again, the people will be healthy. And they said, the way to do that is you need to first get rid of the Spaniards and second, go back to your traditional ways of life. And so the first part of that equation, getting rid of the Spaniards, Popey comes up with this ingenious mnemonic device where he ties knots in a rope and sends runners around to each village and says untie one knot each day. And on the day that

the last knot is untied. That's when we're all going to rise up together. So he manages to coordinate across the linguistic boundaries by using this chord symbol to coordinate the rebellion. So it works like a calendar. I mean, each one of those knots is another day. Okay. Exactly. In fact, two of the runners got caught with the ropes two days before it was supposed to go off. So the Spaniards figured out something's going down. And so then Popey sent out another group of runners to tell people, okay, tomorrow's the day. We're just going to do it then. And on August 10th, 1680, they all rise up together. And do they rise up in their own particular pueblos, or is it a unified force against each one or some combination thereof? It starts in the individual villages. So in many

cases, they kill the resident priests. So most often, it was an isolated priest in this village. They are not there with soldiers, there's not a huge Spanish force on the ground. That is concentrated in and around Santa Fe. That's where the governor and the colonial offices are. So it starts in the individual villages, and then after they rise up there, the villages move and lay siege to Santa Fe. And so there's a nine-day siege of Santa Fe where the Spaniards who have survived whole up in the palace of the governors. People who have visited Santa Fe, have maybe seen this. It's still there around the plaza in Santa Fe. And the Pueblo's essentially attempt to starve them out.

They cut off the water supply going into the palace of the governors. The Spaniards make a couple of initial forays, like trying to break their way out. And eventually, they negotiate a very short truce that allows the Spaniards to leave Santa Fe and march down the Rio Grande. And eventually, they set up a colonial capital in exile in modern-day Warray. Mexico. So at that time, it's called El Paso del Norte. It's actually across the river from modern-day El Paso. How long does this operation go on? How long is the rebellion? So it's this roughly two-week siege on Santa Fe, and then the Spaniards are gone. So the question

becomes, what do we mean by the rebellion? Because after the Spaniards leave, Poupe makes a tour of the Pueblos. He kind of delivers his prophecy to everyone and says, this is the way things are going to be from now. And we've got to go back to the way our Our ancestors did things that will bring back the crops, but the Spaniards are gone. And so this starts the period where we kind of lose the trail through historical documents. We can read about what happens up through the revolt and until the Spaniards move down the Rio Grande. They come back very briefly in 1681 in an attempted reconquest that lasts only a couple of days, really, and then they go back to El Paso. And so what I do is I try to use archaeology to figure out what's happening in the Pueblo world in that time period.

between the revolt and eventually the Spanish return in 1692 to attempt to reconquer the region. This new spirit, this sort of unified spirit, has an effect on the culture or does it not? Is Popeye recognized as a leader of a larger nation or does it go back to just a simpler city-state scenario? It's really interesting. There has never been as far as we can tell, or I should say, in the four centuries prior to this uprising. we don't have any clear evidence for pan Pueblo unified hierarchical leadership. As you're saying, it's on this individual village level.

So Paupe is the first example that we can see arguably in at least 400 years of that. And the interesting thing about him going on this tour around the Pueblo is to deliver his prophecy is that's actually a common practice for the Spanish governor. Whenever a new governor was installed in New Mexico, they would take a tour of all the villages to tell them that they were there. So here we have Popeye saying you've got to get rid of the Spanish influence and go back to traditional ways. But the way he's delivering that message is actually through a practice that would have been recognized as something the Spanish governor had done. So that's kind of a very non-Pueblo thing to do. Yeah. I should cite some figures just for

reference points. The Pueblo revolt killed about 400 Spaniards, drove out the remaining 2,000 settlers out of the province, kept the Spanish out of New Mexico. Mexico for 12 years. And as a result, establishes a whole different power dynamic upon their return. Can you explain that? So when the Spanish do return, it's a whole new game for them, right? It is. I mean, the Spanish return. It is sometimes, I think, less so these days, but has traditionally been referred to as the bloodless reconquest in 1692. Diego DeVargas comes back. It is not bloodless by any means. And over the next two years, between 1692 and 1694, there's a series of battles for the to retake control of the region.

Parenthetically, there is something we call the second Pueblo revolt in 1696 that is similar to the 1680 revolt. But upon their return, the Franciscan priests are forced to make accommodations to Pueblo life that they had not done prior to the revolt. They know now that if they take the same heavy-handed approach to repressing Pueblo religion, that they're not going to last long. So what we can see is that in the churches that are constructed in the wake of the revolt are much, much smaller, they're not built to dominate the landscape. They are integrated within Pueblo architecture.

So you can see that they're less attempting to stamp their footprint on the village and more trying to accommodate Pueblo ways of life. And I do think that has a long-term effect that still reverberates in Pueblo culture today. Pueblo culture is around in the form that it is because of the accommodations that they forced through the Pueblo revolt. Your work is primarily in four different sites, as I understand it, over the years. And you're specifically tracking how that culture changed, right, in those 12-year periods? Correct. That's what I'm trying to do, yeah. Yeah, I mean, in brief, can you give me an abstract of what that work has served up? Sure. So as you mentioned, I studied four villages that are in the Hama's region for people who know the Pueblos.

And they actually date to four different years of foundation during this period. I'm lucky to work in an area with things like dendrochronology, tree ring dating, and have these Spanish documents occasionally that allow me to really zero in the time of occupation in a way that most archaeologists are not able to do. So I'm able to reconstruct history here in terms of years and sometimes even months, whereas most archaeologists are used to dealing on the timescale of centuries or millennia. So I'm very, very lucky in that. And the pattern that we see in the Hamas region, I do think holds for the larger Pueblo region.

So what we see is in 1681, the Hamas people burned their mission village. So this is a village that had been established by the Spaniards with the church. They burn their own village to the ground. You might wonder, why would you burn your own village to the ground? Well, it's because Popeye was telling them you need to go back to the ways of your ancestors and expunge the Spanish influence from your life. So they associated this village with life under colonial rule. This is a village established by the Spaniards, dominated by a mission.

So they burn that to a ground, and they move back to one of their ancestral villages on a low mesa. And they construct a village very much along the template of what they would have conceived of as a traditional Pueblo village. So one that doesn't have Spanish influence. In 1683, something happens, not entirely clear what. It may have been raiding by one of the nomadic tribes around that sends a splinter groove off to form a, second village. So in 1683, we can see that village goes up, very much the same architectural footprint of that first one. So they're still embodying these tenants that Popeye had given them to live life according to what they conceived of as traditional ways. We can also see this in the pottery

that's being made during this period. So they're shifting so that there are shared styles among lots of different Pueblo people. That's this kind of Pan Pueblo. We're all in this together. And in terms of the design elements, they're often hearkening back to designs from the 1400s, early 1500s, the time before the Spaniards were on the scene. By the time we get to the next site that I look at dates from 1689, this is a site that's formed when the Spaniards make a very brief one-day attempt to come back into the region and they attack a neighboring village called Zia Pueblo, which is about six miles south of Hamas today. So this is a village formed by people who are fleeing from a Spanish attack. They also form a new village. But I can see from the pottery at that village that they are not engaging in the same larger trade network that we saw at the earlier site. So I can see that in that period we're seeing a political fracturing so that unity that was forged by Popeye is not able to hold up.

And by the way, we're pretty sure that Popeye is deposed sometime early in the 1680. He actually comes on too heavily handed. He's too much of a dictator and the people don't like that. And so he's pushed out of power. And there are other Pueblo leaders that come to power. It's a really fascinating laboratory, isn't it? The whole world down there in terms of understanding the effect of colonization, European colonization on these native peoples,

it's representative of what can happen elsewhere, but very unique because it's an incredibly unique society down there. It's fascinating to listen to you talk about this because I'm always interested in archaeology in terms of a storytelling process. You really are building that story as you go along, right? That's the core of your work. Yeah, and I'm incredibly fortunate to, one, work in a place with incredible preservation, right? So the southwest is very arid climate. Archaeologists love to live in arid climates because we have things like tree rings that preserve. So I can, when we have a roof beam in a room, it can tell us maybe the year that that room was constructed. And then we can

get, as I mentioned before, we can even go within those tree rings to see things like when there's a deep frost or when there's a forest fire or these other details. You know, if they can somehow tell kids in high school how fascinating your work is, I swear if they could just communicate down the road how great this gets later on, history classes would be so much more attentive. It's amazing. It really is. I mean, I really put that on us as archaeologists. We're not always expert communicators. So we could also drone on and on and on about ceramic styles and, you know, about the fine details of radiocarbon dating and that tends to turn people off. So I think the stories are there,

but we could probably do a better job of presenting it. The final chapter of this story is very interesting and very pertinent to American history. These are the territories that are gained by the United States in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which is what settles in the Mexican-American War of 1846 and 48. Two years of war, back when wars could really pay off, boy, we gain a territory more than 500,000 square miles, two-thirds the size of the Louisiana purchase, which had doubled the U.S. in landmass. It is a massive expansion. How did the former colonization of these lands by the Spanish dictate how these native tribes would react to these new Americans coming in? That's a great question. Well, they were used to colonial rule,

and I would argue that they are still, purple people still live under colonial rule today. And so they had adapted means to interact with colonial power. So the governmental structure that's still in place in many pueblos today is there is a governor who is appointed by a religious council every year. There's a number of other offices as well, but the governor's kind of at the top. And that person is designated to be the liaison with the outside world. And so they had that structure in place that allows them to interact with U.S. government officials when they come on. And this is one reason why the Pueblo peoples are generally still located today. The reservations today are in the places that they had occupied for hundreds of years,

in distinction to tribes like Cherokee and the Choctaw. People who were displaced on the Trail of Tears, other tribes from the east that were pushed west, you know. So they were more conditioned. to working with culture and white man as a result of this and had a capacity for dealing with it, unlike perhaps other tribes elsewhere? They had hundreds of years of experience, and in fact, when oftentimes I've heard non-native visitors or scholars express their amazement that it's amazing that after 500 years, your cultures

are still so vibrant and alive. And people say, we're not amazed that we're still here after 500 years. We're amazed that you guys are still around after 500 years. Everybody learned how to grow corn, that's why. Yeah, yeah, exactly. We took on many of the practices that they had pioneered for centuries. The takeaway is don't run out of corn. Exactly.

Matt Liebitton is the Peabody Professor of American Archaeology and Ethnology, Department Chair at Harvard University. He has conducted collaborative research with the Pueblo of Hames since 2001, and formerly served as tribal archaeologist in that area. Thanks, Matt, for joining us. I really appreciate your wisdom and perspective. really cool. Thanks, Sam. Really great to talk to you. Thank you for joining us on another episode of American History Hit. Please hit like and follow wherever you get your podcasts and feel free to leave a glowing review.

If you have any ideas for episodes, we'd love to hear from you. Send us an email at A-H-H at historyhit.com. See you next time.