[singing in Zuni] Though New Mexico's 19 Pueblos share similarities, each is a unique sovereign nation.

For thousands of years, the Pueblo people survived through intermittent migration and resourceful stewardship of their environment.

Integral to this survival was a highly evolved way of life.

Each person, animal, and plant was significant.

Actions by humans could protect or disrupt the cosmic order.

Their precarious existence was maintained by ritual and ceremony.

[music] Often perceived as a mere footnote in American history, Pueblo resistance to Spanish settlement of New Mexico is a complex story of survival and resilience.

Early anthropologists constructed a view of Pueblo people as overwhelmed by superior force and passively accepting colonization.

Modern research and indigenous histories tell a different story.

This is a story of Pueblo resistance.

Colonialism impacted every community.

No one was left pure.

It scathed every community and it changed everything.

I think of colonialism as a fine dust that enters our throat into our eyes, doesn't let us fully see, breathe.

But the fact that they came together again, there's no greater act of resistance than surviving.

[music] I don't know how it happened that they reconstituted themselves because if you think about it, there were over 100 Puebloan communities in the colonial period.

There are 19 left today.

What does it mean for any society in the world to experience a 90% loss of population?

How does any society continue from that moment, continue to have their own language, customs, traditions?

[music] Zuni before 1539 was occupied by the A:shiwi.

We had a special relationship with the land and the environment.

The A:shiwi people did not begin in 1539.

We were there in our homelands where Zuni Pueblo is now.

We've been there for hundreds of years.

And when Coronado came, the A:shiwi occupied six villages, and that was probably where the legend of the seven cities of gold came from.

When people hear about the Coronado expedition, we were ground zero.

[thunder] In 1492, Spain was on the verge of greatness.

Los Reyes Católicos, the Spanish kings, had just united Spain, the kingdoms of Castile, Leon, and Aragon.

The framework for Spanish colonization was a series of Papal Bulls that were issued in the 1400's where you have the pope basically saying, "You have permission to take over any place that you find and subjugate those people on behalf of the king of Spain or Portugal."

What's motivating the crown and the church is God, glory, and gold.

There were religious motivations to spread Spanish Catholicism.

Then you have the political motivation to create an empire.

With 1492, the Spanish move west, and they encounter a whole new world, the Americas.

From about 1519 until 1535, that's the era of the Spanish conquistador in Mexico.

Cabeza de Vaca's failed expedition to Florida set sail for Mexico in 1528 and shipwrecked near Galveston Island.

There were four survivors, Cabeza de Vaca, two other Spaniards, and Esteban de Moor, a Moroccan slave.

Esteban, who is recognized as the Moor but was North African, sold on the auction block in Morocco.

Himself captured and caught up in global slavery.

They spent the next eight years living with various Indian tribes while trekking west through Texas, northern Mexico, and the American Southwest.

Esteban had a facility for languages and prospered by trading among the Indians.

Reaching the Spanish colony of Culiacán in 1536, their journey fueled false rumors of wealthy civilizations to the north.

Esteban was assigned to guide the Franciscan friar Marcos de Niza in his search for Cibola, the mythic seven cities of gold.

Pueblo communities would have heard about these strange people long before they arrived.

Everybody was connected, there were many, many trade routes going to the south.

In the days before the main contact, Zunis had sent messages to these strangers that were coming.

The Zunis used t'suklana, the conch shell, to send a message to these incoming people.

In 1539, the Zuni people had their first exposure to a foreign individual, Esteban the Moor, who was carrying a red painted rattle and that was claiming to be a medicine leader, a spiritual leader, that was a threat to our existing practices.

Look down into the valley and imagine Estebanico, his eyes meeting the eyes of the A:shiwi people, and how that encounter changed everything.

The warriors, the leaders, they met with Esteban outside the village.

When he came in with his rattle, people saw him as a snake and his rattler at the end of the tail, that it was a poisonous tail.

He asked for goods, for semi-precious stones and most importantly women, and that was not acceptable.

And so they imprisoned him, they released him, they shot arrows in him.

And they allowed the followers, these indigenous people from the south, to return from the direction that they came.

Fray Marcos and the rest arrived a few days later.

Fearing the same fate as Esteban, they observed the village from a safe distance.

Fray Marcos fabricated his report of a city with more gold than the Incas.

A year later, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado led by Fray Marcos, departed Culiacán with 350 soldiers, 2,000 Indios amigos, war dogs, and over 1,000 horses, mules, and other livestock to explore Cibola.

As they're going through Mexico, they're basically stealing all the food of indigenous people.

They come into New Mexico and they do the same thing.

There was some villages that fled to the hills, some villages pulled up the ladders and yelled threats at the Spanish and threw rocks at them, and other villages brought food out to them.

A large amount of the food that was taken from communities was simply fed to livestock.

Arriving at the Zuni settlement of Hawiku, Coronado found the fabled Cibola was not cities of gold, but traditional Pueblo villages of stone and mud.

The Spanish soldiers were furious.

They thought of killing Fray Marcos de Niza.

The day came when these people came in to the village of Hawiku.

The A:shiwi leaders communicated by drawing a line on the ground by using cornmeal as a spiritual symbol, the sacredness of the land, the sacredness of the cornfields, the village, and the peoples.

That message was not taken seriously.

That very first meeting with Estebanico was an act of resistance.

Immediately, Zunis knew there was going to be conflict, and there was a pitched battle that started off the very first thing that the Spanish did.

The Spanish are able to put down the Pueblo people who are resisting their invasion.

They read the "Requerimiento" to them, the document created by legalists in Spain to justify attacking, enslaving, and taking land from native peoples.

The "Requerimiento" was read in Spanish, a language foreign to the Zuni and not understood.

So you can imagine that Spanish are coming to a place like Hawiku, and Zuni standing out there There's a notary public there making sure that it was read three times.

And in there it says, "But should you resist, we will make all efforts to destroy you and enslave you as we would do to a rebellious vassal, and it will not be our fault.

It will be your fault for opposing us."

Wounded by Zuni defenders, Coronado recovered and proceeded east to the province of Tiguex.

There was resistance right off the front.

They had runners constantly from one tribe to another depending on what's going on.

So, when first contact was made, Zuni or other closest Pueblos sent their runners to let the rest of the Pueblos know that, hey, these newcomers all of a sudden showed up here.

And that's how word got out.

The Tiguex province was comprised of 12 or 13 Pueblos.

The Spanish made their headquarters outside the large Pueblo of Ghufoor.

The impact on Pueblo resources was immense.

Spanish troops and livestock depleted the landscape of crops, vegetation and firewood.

This winter was an unusually cold and snowy winter, and they did not have sufficient clothing.

They did not have sufficient food.

They brought all this livestock with them and the idea that the livestock was going to be food, but it was also supposed to help them settle.

Coronado forced natives from their homes and commandeered their food and clothing.

They kept a supply of corn on hand anywhere between two to seven years.

And so immediately they're taking those extra three, four years of food from communities, and they chronicled it themselves.

They said, "They took the very blankets off the backs of women, leaving them stark naked and holding their babies and weeping, trying to keep them warm."

When the Pueblos demanded punishment for a Spanish officer accused of raping a Pueblo woman, Coronado refused.

The husband of the woman from Tiguex complained and was told, "Well, pick this guy out of a lineup."

The person who had committed it had changed his clothes, and so the Tiguex man was unable to point out which person it was, but was able to identify the horse.

But that was not enough evidence for Vasquez de Coronado.

Resisting this injustice, the Tiwans killed 60 horses and mules.

The first act was to strike back at Spanish animals.

And of course, in Spain, striking back at horses, this is important property.

In retaliation, Coronado declared war on the Tiwans.

Coronado has some people's hands chopped off and the tip of their nose cut off.

Assaulting and raping, taking people as captives.

Burning Tiguex folks at the stake, setting dogs on them.

They fought back, but eventually had to retreat into a Pueblo, which the Coronado group then put under siege.

Xauian, a tribal leader of Ghufoor, tried to establish a united Tiwa resistance, moving the Tiwans to a fortified village on the mesa of Moho.

Fierce warriors stood on the ramparts to fight the invaders with rocks and arrows.

When their stronghold ran out of water, the Tiwans tried to escape.

While shielding women and children Xauian was killed.

That's when the Coronado entrada just came in and that was the end of it.

(battle sounds) From the mountains, Tiwans waged guerrilla warfare, which finally forced the Spanish to retreat.

Plains Indians living among the Pueblos told Coronado of a magnificent civilization to the east.

Enlisting one of these Indians as guide, he set off to find the kingdom of Quivira.

After 77 days crossing treacherous plains, they arrived at a humble village in Kansas.

Coronado wrote, "The account they gave me was false.

They wanted me to go there where we and our horses would die of hunger and thirst."

The guide confessed he had conspired with the Tiguex in a plot to lead Coronado to his death.

The resistance came with a price.

The guide was executed.

(dramatic music) During Coronado's absence, the Tiwans reclaimed their Pueblos.

Alerted to his return in September of 1541, the Tiwans purposely burned their fields and resumed their guerrilla attacks.

This is not just about Spanish coming in and conquering.

This is about a conflict between two totally different ways of seeing the world, two totally different ways about how you interact with environment.

It's an example of different views of landscape causing a major conflict.

The Entrada was a failure.

This isn't what they thought it was going to be.

There isn't a great deal of wealth.

It's far away.

The priest was lying.

And they had been mostly forgotten to the annals of history because these were war criminals who were viewed as failures and had been sort of discarded by their own governments at that time.

Coronado withdrew to Mexico in 1542 where he was tried for atrocities against the Indians but was convicted of lesser crimes.

The Spanish would not return for 39 years.

During this period, the Pueblos established larger Pueblos as a better defense against future invasions.

By the 1580s, the expense of importing African and Asian slaves to Mexico prompted illegal slavers to venture north again.

One of these expeditions was led by Gaspar Castaño de Sosa In January, 1591, hearing tales of a large mountain Pueblo to the north, he traveled to the Rio Pueblo Valley.

There, he found Picuris Picuris is purposefully here in what they call the Hidden Valley because it brought together defensiveness backed up against the mountain.

There were warriors who were positioned on the high peaks around Picuris as sentinels.

And if they sensed any danger was on the way, they would use mica that's essentially like a big mirror and reflect them from the mountain tops into the Pueblo to tell them they need to beware.

Castaño de Sosa looks up this hill at this astounding fortress.

And one person comes out of a gate, looks at these foreigners, and walks back inside, closes the gate.

De Sosa spent the night outside the Pueblo.

By morning, the Picuris had prepared to resist, hauling stones to the rooftops and strategically positioning warriors.

Intimidated by this show force de Sosa left.

We were the last Pueblo to be discovered.

That's what they tell us is that they saw how big we were so they had to back off.

This was a place that is a center of commerce long before we have European groups coming into the area.

We had multi-story buildings, some say seven to nine story buildings, estimated 3 to 4,000 people living here.

Like Picuris, the Pueblo of Jemez was a sophisticated center of trade on the edge of the Pueblo world.

For Jemez people, they've been living here for thousands of years.

The land around them, their language, the spirits that they pray to, their ancestors, all that is who Jemez people are.

And when this new group of people arrives, they're basically wanting us to drop part of that for their way of life.

And many Jemez people saw that as a threat.

In 1598, Juan de Oñate arrived in New Mexico with the stated mission of opening new lands to Christianity.

The son of a silver baron in Mexico, Oñate's true purpose was to find precious metals and enslave Indian labor.

He did not find gold or silver, but did find a large population of Indians.

After subduing the Pueblos, he created "Encomiendas" a system of tribute to the Spanish paid through food and forced labor.

Resistance can take the forms of feigned ignorance and confusion, so where colonized subjects will often claim to comprehend and be compliant, and then in fact their actions don't follow up on that.

The story of Doña Ines, a Tano woman, reveals a rare glimpse into the mind of a colonial era Pueblo captive.

Doña Ines had actually been captured in 1591 by Gaspar de Sosa, who was a Portuguese slaver on an illegal expedition up into the Galisteo basin.

In one of those Pueblos, San Cristóbal, he captured a young child, took her back into Mexico, While recruiting soldiers and families to join his expedition, Oñate did ask for one individual by name.

A woman that he referred to as Doña Ines.

The intention was to use her as a translator for a community that she had been separated from.

According to the records, she did not recognize her family or community.

Maybe she didn't want to become an instrument of empire.

Maybe she did recognize her family, her community, but she wasn't about to be used in that way.

Our elders, our ancestors of that time.

had a constant awareness.

of the prophecy that informed them of change, survival, and loss.

I can only imagine what our ancestors were experiencing visually.

That these shiny objects were visible coming into the Acoma Valley, from a canyon just southeast of Acoma.

The men in armor on horseback.

Something so foreign to them, but perhaps not so foreign to the knowledge keepers at that time.

And this is where the change began.

A nephew of Oñate, Juan de Zaldívar, he goes with some Spanish soldiers west to the Pueblo of Acoma, which is high on a stone peñol, very difficult to get to the top of that rock and easy to defend.

They want tribute.

The Acomans are not all that keen on giving away their food and blankets, so they invite some of the soldiers, including Juan de Zalvidar up to the top of the rock, and they attack them, killing about 12 of them, including Juan de Zaldívar.

Oñate sends his soldiers to destroy their village.

About 800 to 1,000 Acoma men, women and children are killed.

The ones that survive, the women and children, are put into servitude.

After that massacre, they were marched into Kewa for a trial, and that trial resulted in basically the condemnation and the enslavement of the entire community.

Men who were over the age of 19 lost a foot.

The elders were given to other communities.

The children under the age of 12 were sent down into Mexico, and both the female and male were quote, distributed amongst the settlers.

Every single individual at Acoma was enslaved.

We became forced to respond, respond for reasons that were foretold long, long before, to protect the people, to protect the culture, our way of life.

At Santo Domingo in July of 1598, Juan de Oñate and his colony enter into an agreement with the Pueblo people.

But now you have the Oath of Obedience and Vassalage.

Oñate and his chroniclers reported that the Pueblo people were very happy to accept Roman Catholicism.

They were very happy to become subjects of the King of Spain.

Well, that's what the documents say.

Most of everything that exists from that time period are in the form of Spanish documents.

And those Spanish documents, they're either coming from the church or they're coming from the secular government.

We're talking about a kind of set of records that is incomplete, to say the very least.

They make their way north to what's now Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo.

They renamed it San Juan Pueblo and they establish a Spanish community there.

What you have by the early 1600's in New Mexico is a very shaky colony.

About 50 of the families remain.

This is where Oñate gets into trouble.

He tries to subdue and stabilize the New Mexico colony.

The colony was bleeding money, basically.

It was not a profitable enterprise.

And the way that it continued on is for the reaping of souls and to expand our missionary project.

They supervised the construction of 60 mission complexes.

And these are massive stone, adobe structures.

That's not just a church, but it's a convento on the side with workshops, granaries, and the amount of labor and effort that went into that, that was completed by Pueblo people is a massive project.

When the Spaniards show up under Onate, he's bringing an entire colony that needs to be supported.

And so they go to the Pueblos and take those stores of corn, and the missions become the centers of redistribution.

Then basically they're saying, "We can give you some food, but you have to come here and be a good Christian, and you have to convert, and you have to follow the Catholic ways in order to get the food."

The Spanish had exacted tribute from Pueblo communities, a fenega of corn, a manta of cloth and or a set number of hides.

Small families paid the same as large ones.

To subvert the system, Pueblos built larger rooms to accommodate more families under one roof.

Eventually, the Spanish caught on to this deception.

They changed the tribute from being annual household tribute to quarterly individual tribute.

Otherwise, if they didn't do this, their families were taken away into servitude, and you get the "Repartimiento" system, where if you can't pay your taxes you worked it off in the fields, or you became servants, or even taken to the silver mines down in Mexico.

There was not a single event in that colonial period that did not result in the captivity and bondage of indigenous people.

Children were captured and taken away from indigenous communities.

they would be severed forever from those communities.

Those children ended up in other communities and would become the ancestors of communities today.

The missionaries were guilty of violent abuse, whipping and beating their parishioners.

Indians were larded with turpentine and set on fire or trampled with horses.

Over and over again, the priests are getting assassinated in public communities because they are not living a very exemplary life.

Many Franciscans broke their vows of celibacy to violate native women.

Men who resisted this abuse were exiled or murdered.

Reporting to Mexico a priest wrote, "The Pueblos are full of children fathered by friars."

What happened here at Jemez Historic Site, the village of Gisewa, the priests said to the Jemez people, "We'll release your families if you build us this church."

So the Jemez people had no choice in the matter.

This church, is a very large structure, very wide walls in some places, 6 to 7 feet wide.

Couple years later after this church was built, the Jemez became fed up with how they're being treated.

So they started resisting.

So one of the closest villages is located on a very high mesa top, about 1,000 feet above.

So they would hike down with hiking sticks made out of dry cholla cactus.

It's very flammable.

They laid them underneath the choir loft.

They piled them up next to the beams and then they burned the church down.

By 1607, Juan de Oñate removed from New Mexico.

He's put on trial for abusing Pueblo Indians, especially what happened at Acoma, and for abusing colonists.

By the 1670s, things got really difficult in New Mexico.

The Pueblo people were experiencing a lot of pressure politically, economically, and religiously.

The church and the state are in competition with one another.

And the Pueblos are caught in the middle.

The governors would tell the Pueblo people, "It's okay to have your religious practices.

It's okay to do your dances."

And the Franciscans would say, "No, you cannot do that."

The Franciscans, they had terrible fights with the governors and there's very colorful stories about the governor's chair being thrown out of the church in Santa Fe.

Every step of the way, every Pueblo community was using these two factions against each other, exerting agency, ensuring that they played them off of each other, and being a full-fledged player in this church-state conflict, saying, "Oh no, we can't work on the church because the governor needs us to pick piñon nuts.

Oh no, we can't pick piñon nuts because we have to plaster the church, right?

And using that as a form of resistance, maybe not overt violent resistance, but resistance, nonetheless.

Another form of resistance that we see frequently is mimicry and mockery.

They wanted to produce colonial subjects that were mimicking Spanish colonial life ways.

So they'd see people ostensibly performing good Catholic practices.

And in fact, sometimes that could be mockery, where people are putting on a good show as though they're acting as good Catholics, but also subtly making fun of the kinds of things that they're being asked to do.

There's signs of subversive resistance in rock art that showed ostensibly reverence to Spanish culture or religion, when in fact it was a subversive way of accommodating both.

Motifs that might appeal to the Spaniards because the Spaniards would look at them and see crosses.

That symbol could have meant something very different to a Pueblo people.

There's a governor that comes in Treviño, who is aligned with the church, and they work together to suppress Pueblo culture, religion, customs, and to enforce the role of the church.

There was a campaign to destroy Pueblo kivas, to destroy traditional practices.

There was a roundup of Pueblo ritual paraphernalia and Pueblo ritual practitioners by the Franciscans.

In a large bonfire, they burned over 1600 sacred ceremonial objects that were integral to Pueblo religious practice.

Of course, to the Spaniards, traditional Pueblo religion is idolatry.

They equate it to devil worship.

They were evangelical monotheists in which you can only have one God and there can only be one way of doing things.

Whereas Pueblo communities treated Catholicism as not something that subtracts from everything that's already believed about the world, but as something that you just add on for additional benefit.

The Spanish thought they were bringing God to the Pueblos, but they didn't realize we already knew God before they came.

At the time of Oñate, the Pueblo population was estimated to be 50,000.

By the 1670s, their numbers had plummeted to 17,000.

33,000 Pueblo people were gone.

With the complete suppression of their culture, Pueblos feared even more misfortune.

In the 1670s, you have a period of intense famine, many, many people dying from disease, whole villages being ravaged, destroyed.

They were also being raided more and more by the nomadic tribes, because we had that corn that we saved.

And now that we're giving that food to the Spanish as part of our encomienda, the taxes, and then those tribes still need that food.

And so they started raiding more.

And the Pueblo people at this time became more reliant on Spanish for protection, more technologies, agricultural techniques, acequia systems, metal tools.

Once they couldn't protect them from these nomadic tribes, then you see that reliance and that, I guess that trust with the Spanish kind of start to go down.

In the 1670s, Pueblo people, especially their religious leaders, started to go back into their kivas and practice their religion.

This was forbidden.

If anybody was caught in a ceremony or a dance or doing something that's not Catholic, they were punished.

The priests had some of the soldiers gather these religious leaders and some of their cohorts and brought to Santa Fe and made an example of.

Some of them were executed and some of them were whipped.

One of them was a man named Po'pay.

He came from Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo.

Po'pay is captured and held a prisoner in Santa Fe and is ostensibly slated to be executed for sorcery, for basically being a religious leader from a Pueblo community.

A large force of Tewa people went to Santa Fe and basically threatened the governor saying, "If you don't release these people, "we're going to release them ourselves."

Po'pay is released and upon his release, that's where he goes into a kiva.

When he emerges, he tells folks that he had a vision by three spirits while he was in the kiva and he says the spirits could shoot lightning from their fingertips and they gave him the vision that said, "You can bring about a renewed and more prosperous world.

You can bring back life like it was before the Spaniards."

Po'pay then jumps off from that point, being one of the ones who starts up the 1680 revolt.

The drought was deeply impacting every single community, but at the core of why the Pueblo Revolt happened was because of the extraction of labor and the impact that colonialism was having on Pueblo people.

Slavery was core to that.

And so at a collective level, they rose up.

The breaking point was the winter before because the Pueblos were harvesting their food for the winter and the Spanish came in and took it all.

And it was time to rise and say no more.

It's really not until the Spaniards apply the label Pueblo Indians.

So they're identifying them as the town dwelling settled, agricultural peoples.

Po'pay is actually able to take that notion of a Pan Pueblo identity and harness that against the Spaniards.

That was one of the keys to his success.

Before the Pueblo Revolt, there are a series of independent revolts in different Pueblo villages dating back to the 1620's at places like Jemez, at Zuni, at Taos, but those are always independent resistance movements that are put down pretty quickly.

Po'pay has become sort of the famous leader, but every single village had their own leader.

And many of those are lost in time.

Protected by secrecy, but not lost to history, are the revered Pueblo leaders who formed the united resistance.

We didn't join the Pueblo Revolt, we were the Pueblo Revolt.

Luis White Elk, Tu'pa'tu, like we say in our language, White Elk, he was the leader of the Pueblo Revolt.

There's a period in time when we were not allowed to talk about White Elk.

We were not allowed to say anything about him.

But now, come to this time and age, we need to pay homage and there needs to be a respect so that he can be represented properly.

Those Pueblo leaders gathered during the night.

They secretly met and constructed a plan on what needs to happen, how they were using the runners.

And those runners were Catua and Umtua.

The Pueblo Revolt was originally planned for the 11th, but some of the runners got caught in somewhere north of Santa Fe and they were forced to tell them the plans.

The Spanish couldn't believe that that could be the plan.

And so they didn't take any serious steps or anything and they went to go celebrate the feast of San Lorenzo at Tesuque Pueblo.

So they already knew the runners got captured in all likelihood, the news is out.

The priest showed up and had his soldiers and others.

And that was the first strike, Tesuque, struck the first blow.

The first ones who got killed, in many cases were the priests, immediately there was 21 of them that got killed.

Then Po'pay tried to change the dates to the day before to the 10th.

And so they sent more runners to tell the Pueblos that we're gonna move the date.

But those runners never got to Jemez and some of the Western Pueblos.

So the revolts at Jemez happened at midnight on August 11th.

And so it's a whole range of day after day, some more villages join in, they kill their priests, they burn the church.

So it wasn't an instant unanimous decision and others may not have even gotten the news.

Some conquistadors coming up and we intercepted them and we killed them.

We got on their horses, we went all the way to Santa Fe.

We marched in wearing their regalia and having their heads as well.

(horses walking) The Jemez people revolted against the Spanish.

They killed the priest there at the Pueblo,Walatowa.

They sent warriors to help with the siege in Santa Fe.

And the Pueblo warriors surround Santa Fe.

They cut off their water, food supplies, and ultimately let the Spanish refugees leave Santa Fe to head south.

Immediately after the revolt and the Spaniards retreat, Po'pay makes a tour of the Pueblos.

When he arrived in Jemez about a year after 1681, he saw that the church was still standing.

And one thing that he wanted Pueblo people to do was to live like their ancestors did.

So the Jemez people actually burned that church down a year later.

Some people were very ambivalent about some of the changes that Po'pay wanted to introduce.

And there's some hints in the documents that Po'pay was a very strong leader and really demanded that people bend to his vision.

Post Pueblo Revolt, there was a time of silence.

a time of reflection, and likely a time of great prayer and ceremony to ensure that our people would recover.

Kivas were rebuilt, where long hours were spent in prayer and ritual.

The people purged themselves of Catholic baptism by bathing in the Rio Grande and washing their heads with yucca root.

Catholic marriages were dissolved and Castilian language was banned.

Spanish religious objects and cultural items were destroyed.

From what they tell us after the revolt is that we were always in fear of retaliation.

But I'm sure there was a period of a few years that it was relief.

We were getting back together.

We were rebuilding what was destroyed.

because at that time, we were probably less than 200 tribal members.

Temporary migration was a traditional tactic of Pueblo resistance.

We made the decision to go to Kansas, where we call Contelejo, we just basically build another village.

Some say three to 10 years that we were there.

It was just the trauma.

We move into a period where all we have is oral tradition and the archeology to try to fill in the gaps here.

The Spaniards are off the scene.

They make an abortive attempt at reconquest in 1681.

The Spaniards do come back once in 1687 and once in 1689 and attack the southernmost villages of Santa Ana and Zia in which 600 people were killed according to the Spaniards.

And when the Spaniards come back in 1692, it's clear that there are divisions among the Pueblos.

They are no longer functioning as this unitary group.

Things fell apart very quickly into sort of regional or relational alliances and different Pueblo communities start fighting with each other.

There are attempts to retake New Mexico, but they fail.

It's not till 1692 that the Viceroy in Mexico City appoints Diego de Vargas to be governor of New Mexico, and he's ordered to reconquer and recolonize New Mexico.

He then recruits about a hundred Spanish soldiers and comes up the Camino Real established by Oñate and goes to Santa Fe to speak with the Pueblo people.

What he finds is that they've turned Santa Fe into a fortified Pueblo.

And he is allowed to enter Santa Fe and enter into negotiation with the Pueblo people.

Some Pueblo accounts say de Vargas threatened them with cannons when they refused to submit.

Under threat of siege, the Pueblos agreed to negotiate.

Proclaiming victory, de Vargas held a ceremony of peaceful submission in the plaza.

Rumors of another revolt prompted de Vargas to go back to El Paso.

Returning in 1693 with more soldiers and settlers, bloody battles ensued.

Vargas and his men take Santa Fe by force of arms.

Vargas had 70 unarmed Pueblo warriors executed in the center of Santa Fe.

The narrative that has been created surrounding de Vargas' reconquest is of a peaceful reconquest or a bloodless reconquest.

But when you take a look at Vargas' journals themselves, or you take a moment or two to talk to Pueblo people, what you find is that this time period was not bloodless at all.

It was actually very violent.

Following the reconquest of Santa Fe in 1694, de Vargas attacked the rebellious Jemez Nation.

Along with 120 soldiers and militia, de Vargas had the aid of Pueblo allies from Zia, Santa Ana, and San Felipe.

These tribes had suffered tremendous loss resisting the Spanish.

With hundreds killed and their women and children held by de Vargas as collateral, they were forced to join their former enemies under the leadership of Zia War Captain Bartolome de Ojeda.

There are centers of resistance that have clearly decided that they're not going to cooperate.

Jemez at Cochiti and at Black Mesa for the Tewa people.

Zia and Santa Ana peoples in the attack on Jemez, they show him how to get up the back of the Mesa, which is what allows him to break through the Jemez defenses.

Preparing for battle, the Jemez held a ritual dance at the towering Mesa refuge of Asti'alakwa On July 24th, at dawn, the assault began.

By midday, Spanish forces breached their fortification.

As colonials set fire to the village, women and children watched their husbands and fathers launch themselves off the cliffs, choosing death over surrender, the ultimate cost of resistance.

According to Jemez, many warriors who jumped did not die.

At the moment the men leapt, a saintly apparition appeared to ease them gently through the air, floating like butterflies and landing on their feet like birds in the valley below.

Not mere myth, De Vargas himself gave testimony to at least one survivor.

Eight people burned alive.

Total of 80 people died, and the Jemez peopple were defeated.

De Vargas captures 342 women, children and elderly persons, and he essentially holds them hostage, and they had corn stored for what would have sustained them for years there, and Vargas takes all of that corn back to Santa Fe, and he starts to take the women, children and elders back, as well.

"And you need to give me 50 warriors to march on Black Mesa."

At Tunyo, in San Ildefonso, commonly referred to as Black Mesa.

There's steep cliffs, which provided a natural defense.

There was nine public communities who sought refuge on top of the mesa.

And there was very violent clashes during a nine-month period.

There's a story about a trail on top of the mesa through a steep cliff where folks had to sneak past Spanish guards who were camped down near the river base to get water so our folks can survive.

Pueblo folks were fighting with stones and bows and arrows.

And the Spanish had powerful harquebus.

But the range on those weapons wasn't very far.

Vargas never captured the mesa.

He never made it to the top of the mesa.

The end to the siege here at San Ildefonso at Tunyo was a negotiated end.

And that ushered in a new era of Spanish-Pueblo relations.

and Pueblo independence and sovereignty.

That's when the new Laws of the Indes started to really take more shape, especially in New Mexico, where you have the protector of the Indios, basically a lawyer dedicated to protecting indigenous rights, headquartered in Santa Fe.

The lawyer in Santa Fe would come and say, "Hey, you're not allowed to interfere with Pueblo life because they're direct vassals of the king and you shouldn't mess with them because under the Laws of the Indes you're not allowed to do that."

And so that's an example of how that resistance went through the 1700's and utilizing the systems, the colonial apparatus against itself very effectively.

While the Pueblo Revolt is considered the most successful native rebellion against Europeans in North America, it is the unified resistance to assimilation and oppression that ensures the survival of Pueblo nations for centuries to come.

It took many, many years, centuries to re-establish ourselves as a sovereign nation.

The Pueblos are all existing pretty much in the same places today, as they were in the 17th century.

And I think the revolt is crucial in bringing that about, making clear that they were not going to give up their traditional belief systems.

It's cumulative, this history.

These histories have implications for us as Pueblo people today.

But we're constantly in conflicts over water, over land, over the right to exercise our sovereignty.

It has effects on how policy is created, and that has very real effects on our day-to-day lives as Indian people.

For modern Pueblos, this era of resistance is more than a footnote in history.

It forged a common purpose among the Pueblos to defend their sovereign rights through legal actions and political activism.

These bonds endure today.

It's a continuous challenge to resist those forces that be that look to diminish the power and the authority and the ability of tribal nations to continue who they are.

We follow our native religion to the fullest.

Our ancestors were resilient.

They were courageous.

We stood up to those people.

We carried on our religion covertly to make sure that it continued.

We carried on our language.

We kept speaking our language.

We didn't stop.

It continues.

We still fight.

This new world is careless.

This new world moves on as though it doesn't have a heart or a mind or the intelligence.

But we're here today.

We're still saying that we have to take care of Mother Earth.

That's the impact since first contact.

Generations of traditional and contemporary artists express Pueblo culture through many art forms that personify resilience and resistance.

Through five centuries of colonization, the strength of Pueblo nations has been their enduring resistance to assimilation and erosion of sovereignty.

Pueblos resist today by speaking their languages, living their core values and maintaining their traditional way of life.

Still warriors, Pueblo people continue the fight to protect their ancestral lands and culture for future generations.

We must try everything that we can to continue that story of who we are, that started at the beginning of time, that faced the impositions of colonialism and continues to face those impositions.

We should not shy away from making our contributions to that resistance.

[peaceful music]