page_title: Puebloans
section_title: European contact and revolt
hierarchical_section_title: Puebloans / History / European contact and revolt
caption_attribution_description: English: photo by Einar Einarsson Kvaran aka Carptrash 21:45, 15 November 2006 (UTC). The unveiling and dedication of the en:Popé statue in the National Statuary Hall Collection, September 2005. the man is sculptor Cliff Fragua. the woman is unidentified so far.
context_page_description: The Puebloans or Pueblo peoples, are Native Americans in the Southwestern United States who share common agricultural, material and religious practices. Pueblo, which means "village" in Spanish, was a term originating with the Spanish explorers who used it to refer to the people's particular style of dwelling.
  When Spaniards entered the area beginning in the 16th century founding Nuevo México, they came across complex, multi-story Pueblo villages built of adobe, stone and other local materials. New Mexico contains the most federally recognized Pueblo communities, but some Pueblo communities can be found in Arizona and Texas, mostly in the Sangre de Cristo Mountains and along the Rio Grande and Colorado rivers and their tributaries.
  There are currently 100 Pueblos that are still inhabited, among which Taos, San Ildefonso, Acoma, Zuni, and Hopi are the best-known. The term Anasazi is sometimes used to refer to ancestral Pueblo people but it is now largely dispreferred. Anasazi is a Navajo word that means Ancient Ones or Ancient Enemy, hence Pueblo peoples' rejection of it.
context_section_description: Before 1598, Spanish exploration of the present-day Pueblo areas was limited to an assortment of small groups. A group of colonizers led by Juan de Oñate arrived at the end of the 16th Century as part of an apostolic mission to convert the Natives. Despite initial peaceful contact, Spain's attempts to dispose of Pueblo religion and replace it with Catholicism became increasingly more aggressive, and were met with great resistance by Puebloans, whose governmental structure was based around the figure of the cacique, a theocratic leader for both material and spiritual matters.  Over the years, Spaniards' methods grew harsher, leading to a series of revolts by the Puebloans.
  The Pueblo Revolt that started in 1680 was the first led by a Native American group to successfully expel colonists from North America for a considerable number of years. It followed the successful Tiguex War led by Tiwas against the Coronado Expedition in 1540–41, which temporarily halted Spanish advances in present-day New Mexico. The 17th Century's revolt was a direct consequence of growing discontent among the Northern Pueblos against the abuses by the Spaniards, which finally brewed into a large organized uprising against European colonizers.
  The events that led to the Pueblo Revolt go back at least a decade before the formal uprising began. In the 1670s, severe drought swept the region, which caused both a famine among the Pueblo and increased the frequency of raids by the Apache. Neither Spanish nor Pueblo soldiers were able to prevent the attacks by the Apache raiding parties.
  The unrest among the Pueblos came to a head in 1675, when Governor Juan Francisco Treviño ordered the arrest of forty-seven Pueblo medicine men and accused them of practicing sorcery. Four of the medicine men were sentenced to death by hanging; three of those sentences were carried out, while the fourth prisoner committed suicide. The remaining men were publicly whipped and sentenced to prison. When the news of the killings and public humiliation reached Pueblo leaders, they moved in force to Santa Fe, where the prisoners were held. Because a large number of Spanish soldiers were away fighting the Apache, Governor Treviño was forced to release the prisoners. Among those released was an Ohkay Owingeh Tewa man named Popé. After being released, Popé took up residence in Taos Pueblo far from the capital of Santa Fe and spent the next five years seeking support for a revolt among the 46 Pueblo villages. He was able to gain the support of the Northern Tiwa, Tewa, Towa, Tano, and Keres-speaking Pueblos of the Rio Grande Valley. The Pecos Pueblo, 50 miles east of the Rio Grande pledged its participation in the revolt as did the Zuni and Hopi, 120 and 200 miles respectively west of the Rio Grande. At the time, the Spanish population was of about 2,400 colonists, including mixed-blood mestizos, and Indian servants and retainers, who were scattered thinly throughout the region. Starting early on August 10, 1680, Popé and leaders of each of the Pueblos sent a knotted rope carried by a runner to the next Pueblo; the number of knots signified the number of days to wait before beginning the uprising. Finally, on August 21, 2,500 Puebloan warriors took the colony's capital Santa Fe from Spanish control, killing many colonizers, the remainder of whom were successfully expelled.
  On September 22, 2005, the statue of Po'pay (Popé), the leader of the Pueblo Revolt, was unveiled in the Capitol Rotunda in Washington, D.C. The statue was the second commissioned by the state of New Mexico for National Statuary Hall; it was the 100th and last to be added to the collection, which represents the Senate. It was created by Cliff Fragua, a Puebloan from Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico. It is the only statue in the collection to be created by a Native American.
caption: Unveiling and dedication of Popé statue by sculptor Cliff Fragua in the Capitol in Washington DC, September 2005
exif: {"Image Orientation": "Horizontal (normal)", "Image XResolution": "100", "Image YResolution": "100", "Image ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Image Software": "Adobe Photoshop CS Macintosh", "Image DateTime": "2006:11:15 14:41:11", "Image ExifOffset": "164", "Thumbnail Compression": "JPEG (old-style)", "Thumbnail XResolution": "72", "Thumbnail YResolution": "72", "Thumbnail ResolutionUnit": "Pixels/Inch", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormat": "302", "Thumbnail JPEGInterchangeFormatLength": "5096", "EXIF ColorSpace": "Uncalibrated", "EXIF ExifImageWidth": "590", "EXIF ExifImageLength": "899"}