The Pueblo Revolt: The Secret Rebellion That Drove the Spaniards Out of the Southwest
Written by David Roberts
Narrated by David de Vries
4.5/5
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About this audiobook
The dramatic and tragic story of the only successful Native American uprising against the Spanish, the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
With the conquest of New Mexico in 1598, Spanish governors, soldiers, and missionaries began their brutal subjugation of the Pueblo Indians in what is today the Southwestern United States. This oppression continued for decades, until, in the summer of 1680, led by a visionary shaman named Pope, the Puebloans revolted. In total secrecy they coordinated an attack, killing 401 settlers and soldiers and routing the rulers in Santa Fe. Every Spaniard was driven from the Pueblo homeland, the only time in North American history that conquering Europeans were thoroughly expelled from Indian territory.
Yet today, more than three centuries later, crucial questions about the Pueblo Revolt remain unanswered. How did Pope succeed in his brilliant plot? And what happened in the Pueblo world between 1680 and 1692, when a new Spanish force reconquered the Pueblo peoples with relative ease?
David Roberts set out to try to answer these questions and to bring this remarkable historical episode to life. He visited Pueblo villages, talked with Native American and Anglo historians, combed through archives, discovered backcountry ruins, sought out the vivid rock art panels carved and painted by Puebloans contemporary with the events, and pondered the existence of centuries-old Spanish documents never seen by Anglos.
David Roberts
David Roberts (1943–2021) was the author of dozens of books on mountaineering, adventure, and the history of the American Southwest. His essays and articles have appeared in National Geographic, National Geographic Adventure, and The Atlantic Monthly, among other publications.
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Reviews for The Pueblo Revolt
34 ratings5 reviews
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5Very comprehensive on a large swathe of New Mexican colonial history. I am sure there are more recent works that delve into some of the controversies surrounding the anthropological and historiographical issues faced with reconstructing a narrative that we don't have many primary sources apart from those of the colonizers. However, it is a great starting point for anyone who is interested in this history.
- Rating: 5 out of 5 stars5/5While this book at first seems to be occupied with the question "What happened during the Pueblo Revolt?", the question it actually seeks to answer is "Why does the Pueblo Revolt remain such a mystery?" Some readers may be frustrated by the number of times the author says something like "This is one of archaeology's deepest mysteries" or "Sources on this topic are unfortunately scarce," I think he makes a good case for why the mysteries and knowledge gaps of the Pueblo Revolt, and the ways in which both modern and historical peoples have approached those mysteries, are interesting in and of themselves. The author does a careful job of centering his sources in the narrative, contextualizing historical Spanish writers and describing the methods that produced later scholarly work in detail. In particular, he focuses on the complicated act of being a Puebloan who studies and writes about Puebloan history or archaeology, including testimony from several such scholars he interviewed. He also does a good job of acknowledging bias and perspective in the sources and scholarship he used to write this book, including the limitations of his own "Anglo" outsider perspective. This is a good book for learning about how scholarly communities have interacted with the pueblos for the sake of research, both historically and recently, and learning about a variety of different perspectives on the Pueblo Revolt--but it might leave you with more questions than you started it with.
- Rating: 3 out of 5 stars3/5This is a “popular” history, distinguished by the author injecting first person observations into a recounting of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to 1692, when Spanish settlers were temporarily forced out of New Mexico. The account of the Spanish side of the affair is straightforward; various native groups somehow organized a simultaneous uprising (despite having mostly mutually unintelligible languages), kill all the Franciscans they can get their hands on, wipe out isolated settlements, and besiege Santa Fe until the Spaniards negotiate a withdrawal. What’s simultaneously frustrating and thought-provoking is the author’s discussion of his attempts to get the story from the Puebloan side.
The first frustrating thing here is the author’s apparent assumption that there will be useful history on the Puebloan side: that Pueblo oral tradition has preserved reliable accounts of the Pueblo Revolt for three hundred years and change. I say “apparent” because Mr. Roberts sometimes expresses delicate skepticism of the accounts given by Puebloan guides to visiting tourists. I suspect he’s stuck here; he’s an author of books on Native American history and if he doesn’t treat his subjects gently he’ll never get to talk to any of them again. To allow the astute reader to get this point, he recounts various incidents where anthropologists and archeologists deceived their native hosts into telling them things or giving them objects that were not supposed to passed to outsiders.
He also recounts a number of cases where Puebloan (and Zuni and Hopi, who are strictly not Puebloan) xenophobia has increased in the last 20 years or so. Archeological sites that were once open are now closed off as “culturally sensitive” and previous informants now won’t answer his letters or return his calls. A particularly interesting point is that while we have dictionaries of ancient Egyptian and Sumerian, which were last spoken millennia ago, there are thousands of people living in New Mexico that speak a language no one but them knows. (I personally encountered this once - I was asked to contribute words for numbers in Egyptian for a grade school project collecting numbers in various languages. I had a Puebloan “friend of a friend” and casually asked her if she could write out the words for numbers in Tewa.. She (who had never behaved like this before) became frighteningly indignant, vehemently proclaiming that the whites had stolen everything else from her people and now they wanted the language too. I was taken aback but reading Mr. Roberts experiences gives me some idea of what was going on).
That leads to the thought-provoking part inspired by Mr. Roberts book: to what extent to “we” owe respect to Native American traditions, religions, and practices that are contrary to “our” notion of what’s right and proper? Roberts discusses a tantalizing rumor that the Puebloans have preserved a large stock of colonial Spanish documents and artifacts that were looted - well, taken as legitimate war prizes - during the Pueblo Revolt. His attempts to discuss this things, or even get otherwise friendly Puebloans to confirm or deny that such things existed, were met by blank refusal. Is this a loss for science and history or proper respect for another culture? There have been lots of other cases - Kennewick man is probably familiar to most of you. “We” have, without doubt or question, treated natives atrociously in the past; does that justify granting them privileges that would not be extended to other groups now? (A group of AIM members recently camped out in a Denver city park without a permit, in preparation for their protest at the Columbus Day parade. They explained that they had received permission from the local tribe and didn’t need any from the “colonial occupiers”. They were unmolested. I wonder what would happen if an anti-abortion group tried the same thing and explained they had permission from God?)
I’m not claiming I have the answer to this problem. I have a vague uneasy feeling that I probably do “owe” something to native Americans, but I can’t really justify it philosophically. The best I can come up with is that the religious beliefs of native peoples are an “archeological artifact” in and of themselves, and therefore some extraordinary effort to preserve them is probably justified. - Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Entertaining and engaging, yet it falls short of the previous book in that there is much too much subjectivity in the book. Roberts (whose other books I've enjoyed) is more focused on shooting down the Hispanic influence and reactions to the Pueblo Indian issues than trying to rationalize in a serious manner their ineptness, which honestly is not hard to do.
- Rating: 4 out of 5 stars4/5Usually I give these a 5 star - if I could get the non-fiction obscure story read - it has to be good for the rest of you. (in my opinion!)
However, you'll be upset with me, if you pick this up and expect an easy read. Took me a few "renews" and "recheck outs" to get thru all this history.
Nonetheless - truly ENJOYED this view into heretofore unknown history.
Won't travel thru this part of the southwest, without a much different perspective now.