Today is the 340th anniversary of the Pueblo Revolt, and was supposed to be the day that Kathryn (my friend and assistant) and I started the mural project. The Revolt represents the potential of Indigenous Technology (IT) to help people resist oppression and create better, freer lives. The events of August 9-11, 1680 “shaped the world we live in today,” according to San Ildefonso Pueblo member and University of Pennsylvania archeologist Joseph Aguilar. The Revolt continues to reverberate throughout region and the entire continent: the evidence of Puebloan ingenuity and courage, as well as a case study of what people can accomplish when they devise the means to communicate and collaborate together. More broadly, it stands as an enormous achievement, for it was the only successful and lasting reclamation of Indigenous space and time from European colonizers in the history of North America.
The significance of this reset to a time before colonialism cannot be underestimated. Today, many Indigenous Americans live with the awareness of incredible loss, the effects of intergenerational trauma, and a righteous sense of indignation born from historical and present-day injustice. This knowledge and these feelings make up part of the legacies of conquest. Yet they are not new. They fueled Indigenous resistance movements on this continent for hundreds of years. From Metacomet’s War in the seventeenth-century, to Neolin, the Delaware Prophet in the eighteenth, up through the Ghost Dance Religion of the nineteenth, Indigenous Peoples have cherished the hope of a return to a time before the shattering of worlds brought with Europeans. Part of the lineage of the history of colonialism is a longing to return to a time before its violence became a way of life.
(Photo: James Q. Jacobs) A rock art panel in New Mexico likely depicts two Pueblo warriors (Eric A. Powell, Archeology, “The First American Revolution: Exploring the Legacy of the New World’s Most Successful Native Rebellion,” (March/April, 2017)
The twelve years after Puebloan Peoples drove the Spanish out of New Mexico were probably times of both rejoicing and struggle. Indigenous archeologists such as Aguilar, working with the Pueblos, are bringing to light new stories from that interregnum. Puebloans rightly suspected that the Spanish would return and try to take back their colony, and so they spent a considerable amount of effort constructing new fortifications and preparing for war. Some abandoned Spanish-founded missions and relocated back to original home places. Puebloan spiritual practices and cultural traditions resurfaced. Digs at several sites reveal evidence that Puebloans destroyed Catholic iconography.
There was healing, but there were also probably nightmares. The effects of colonization had marked the faces and bodies of the colonized. It is well known that Europeans brought deadly pathogens with them, for which Indigenous New Worlders had no immunity. Contentious debates continue about the population of the Americas on the eve of contact with Europeans, debates which inform our awareness of the devastation wrought from pandemic disease. Yet all agree that 95% of Indigenous Americans perished over the span of the fifteenth through the nineteenth centuries, from diseases such as smallpox, typhus, cholera, and dysentery. Think about that. 95%. As Charles Mann writes, at that rate New York’s population would be reduced to just 56,000 people — “not enough to fill Yankee Stadium.” This loss of life constituted perhaps the single most horrifying tragedy in human history.
(Photo: Author) Petroglyph found at Chaco National Historic Site
Part of the shattering of Puebloan communities was the ongoing effects of epidemic disease. Some diseases, smallpox for example, caused pustules that blistered, scarred, and left marks on the face and neck. Other diseases like dysentery left people so weak they could not walk or work. Typhus destroyed the liver. Diphtheria smothered the lungs. Scarlet Fever weakened the heart. Spanish depositions record that after killing Franciscan friars and other Spaniards, Puebloan people plunged into rivers to wash themselves, perhaps aware that physical contact with colonialism brought death in seen and unseen ways. The marks diseases left testified to both suffering and survival.
Thinking about the ravages of an unseen killer brings seventeenth-century Puebloan fears, losses, and experiences into the present, where COVID-19 is bringing death, wrecked lungs, and a deep sense of worry about the future. The two experiences of epidemic disease are in no way comparable. Yet, as I daily wash my hands, wear a mask, and stay in my house for the next two weeks, I will have a chance to ponder the remarkable resilience of New Mexicans. When I imagine multiple, simultaneous epidemics, COVID-19 and four or five other diseases all at once, my admiration for Puebloan Peoples’ will to survive and ability to adapt rises into awe. Amidst sickness, suffering, and death, Puebloans and other Indigenous Americans continued to marshall their I.T. in order to resist, persist, and ultimately prosper. As Aguilar opines, “We are living where we are and we are the people we are thanks in part to the Revolt.” The Pueblo Revolt was only a symptom of the deeper and more enduring continuity of this region and its people.
“Our Story Continues”
When I found out I was not going to be able to officially start the mural on such a symbolic and historic day, I asked Duane Arruti, the Chief Information Officer for UNM and Alesia M. Torres, its I.T. Director, to come down and write inscriptions on the wall about what the project meant to them. They made the first marks on the wall, which is only fitting, for they have been enthusiastic and open partners in this creative process, and the words they inscribed on the wall reflect their sincere aspirations for what public art, history, and technology can accomplish when done in community.
Duane Arruti, Chief Information Officer, University of New Mexico
Alesia M. Torres, IT Director, University of New Mexico
Their words are very personal, but also reflect their larger engagement with the layered meanings of information technology, painting, and history as forms of mark-making. History comes down to just that: marks on a wall, which will hopefully last to tell future generations stories about what particular moments of the past meant to the people who lived them.
Marks on a wall. Marks on a face. Both are archives.