This week we ask historians and attorneys Malcolm Ebright, Rick Hendricks, and Richard W. Hughes some questions about their remarkably detailed and pioneering book Four Square Leagues: Pueblo Indian Land in New Mexico, which explores the intriguing and tangled history of the relationships between pueblos and Spanish, Mexican, and American governments over property rights to ancient tribal lands.
New Mexico Mercury: Why did the occupying forces of New Mexico work so diligently and legalistically over the centuries to honor pueblo rights to ancestral land instead of just appropriating land and displacing inhabitants, as most conquering forces have done in other places?
Richard W. Hughes: The very strong Spanish policy in favor of respecting pueblos’ rights to their lands and waters was the result of a primarily religious debate that occurred among Catholic theologians and jurists during the 16th century, the main issue in which was whether the native inhabitants of the New World had souls that could be saved. The Spanish philosopher, jurist, and theologian Francisco de Vitoria and Fray Bartolome de las Casas (who, unlike Vitoria, actually spent several years in the New World, working primarily among the natives in southern Mexico) became the most prominent voices in favor of the Indians, and their position—that the natives were indeed human beings with souls that could be saved—was ultimately adopted by the Church. That meant that Spanish explorers and conquerors, who were invariably accompanied by a cadre of priests, mainly Franciscans, in the early era of Spanish rule, were bound to respect the possessory rights of the Indians. In furtherance of the Church’s position, the king of Spain promulgated numerous laws, ordinances, decrees, cedulas, etc., that specified the manner in which native rights were to be respected, and Spain actually adopted a policy of wardship over the Indians that was similar to the federal trusteeship that has existed between the American government and the Indian tribes and people in the United States. (Indeed, much of the early Supreme Court jurisprudence setting out the status of the Indians and their relationship to the government relied expressly on the writings of Vitoria and Las Casas.)
In New Mexico, moreover, other factors probably added to the willingness of the Spaniards to respect the land and water rights of the pueblos. First, New Mexico was extremely remote from the major population centers of New Spain, and its climatic conditions were considerably harsher. The Spaniards, especially in the early years of settlement, plainly had to rely on the pueblos for food, protection from marauding Navajos and Comanches, and other necessities. Second, the bloody Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which was prompted by religious and economic oppression by the Spanish priests, settlers, and authorities and which kept the Spaniards out of the territory for twelve years, demonstrated to the Spaniards that the normally peaceful pueblos could exert overwhelming power. When the Spaniards returned to Santa Fe in 1693, they adopted far more tolerant policies toward the practice of pueblo religion, and they were consistently respectful of pueblo land rights, affording the pueblos large areas of land that was free from Spanish encroachment.
NMM: Which pueblos lost the most land, and which preserved the most and acquired more? And what were the common key reasons for this?
RWH: During the Spanish and Mexican periods, it is not clear that any of the pueblos we know today suffered serious losses of lands, other than Pecos, which had essentially ceased to exist by 1835. Taos and Santa Clara both had substantial non-Indian communities residing within their lands, and that caused considerable friction, and Picuris eventually lost ground to non-Indian settlements around its village and on Picuris lands in Embudo, but most of the other pueblos seemed able to maintain their lands. (To be sure, the huge pueblos that had existed in the Galisteo Basin prior to the Pueblo Revolt had all essentially disappeared by the time of the Spanish return, or else they were dispersed by Spanish resettlement policies; but the precise factors that caused that diaspora are not well understood.) During the American period, however, as we explain in chapters 9 and 10 of the book, efforts by the territorial government and courts to prevent the Pueblos from securing federal protection of their lands eventually led to major losses of land, especially by Santa Clara, Taos, Picuris, and San Juan (Ohkay Owingeh). Additionally, the failure of the American government to acknowledge that the pueblos had rights to land outside of their Pueblo leagues caused the government to simply assume control over those lands, a policy that led to the dispossession for many pueblos of tens of thousands of acres. In the past fifty years, however, many pueblos, including Taos, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Cochiti, Santo Domingo, Santa Ana, Zia, Jemez, Laguna, Acoma, and Isleta, have managed to recover substantial portions of the aboriginal lands.
NMM: Why did you choose the pueblos you did and leave out, for instance, Zuni and Santa Domingo? Was it a matter of missing documentation, are more books in the works, or are there other reasons?
RWH: Santa Ana was selected because of the very unusual and important collection of original documents in the pueblo’s possession that detail the extraordinary story of its purchases of its El Ranchito lands. Malcolm and Rick will have to respond about the reason for selecting the other pueblos that are specifically dealt with in the book. There is no question that there would be interesting stories to tell about Santo Domingo, Laguna, Acoma, Isleta, and some others.
Rick Hendricks: Malcolm and I had previously done extensive research and written about some of the pueblos we chose, specifically Picuris, Sandia, and Santa Ana. We chose to include Cochiti, Jemez, Santa Clara, and Taos in the final version of the manuscript because we believed their stories illustrated different aspects of Pueblo Indian land tenure in New Mexico. In the course of writing the book we considered other pueblos for inclusion, and for various reasons we decided to leave them out. Early on we also discussed the possibility of doing a second book that would include the remaining pueblos, but we will make a determination about that at some future date, depending to some extent on the reception of this volume. We certainly think that the history of every pueblo’s land is worthy of being written. Ironically, the chapter about Ysleta del Sur Pueblo, which inspired the book, did not make the final cut.
NMM: The Pueblo league is a fascinating reality of post-conquest life in New Mexico. How did you first encounter its usage in the record, and what difficulties did you have tracing its history?
RWH: The fact that Spanish policy or law accorded each New Mexico pueblo a league of land that would be protected from Spanish encroachment as a minimum entitlement was apparently well understood even in the early years of the American administration of New Mexico, though we have no record of how that fact came to be understood by the American officials (primarily the surveyor general), other than as a result of their study of the Spanish archives. But the fact that the league was the accepted entitlement of every pueblo under Spanish law appears to have been well established when the Spaniards returned and reestablished their rule following the Pueblo Revolt, indicating that the policy originated at some point well before the Revolt. (Because nearly all pre-Revolt archives were destroyed during the Revolt period, however, we have no idea when or how the league came into existence.) The earliest post-Revolt records of land disputes arising between a pueblo and Spanish settlers (a 1703 dispute at Cochiti and a 1704 dispute at San Felipe) reflect that the league is a well-established doctrine. In the San Felipe documents, it is referred to as “granted by royal law to the Pueblo Indians,” though, as noted, we have no idea where that “royal law” came from. It may be that there is some early 17th century document in some archive in Mexico City or Guadalajara or Seville that may shed more light on this, but as of now we do not know of any actual source for this doctrine.
NMM: How did you structure your collaboration in researching and writing a fact-filled, highly detailed book like this?
RWH: Malcolm and Rick began working on the book nearly fourteen years ago, but they had not gotten far with it. I joined the project in 2009, primarily to prepare the chapter on the Cruzate grants, but I also had a special interest in the Santa Ana chapter, as I had spent many years working with the Santa Ana documents. I also realized that the book needed to deal with the very complex issues that arose after the United States acquired the Southwest, in order to give a full picture of how the pueblos ended up with the lands they have today, and I worked on those chapters. So, each of us focused on particular areas, but we all reviewed each other’s work and made edits as needed.
RH: Actually, this book has its own history, its own genealogy, you could say. In the late 1990s I was working as an expert witness for the law firm of Diamond, Rash, Gordon & Jackson, which was representing Yslete del Sur Pueblo, a Tiwa Indian community located within the city of El Paso. I was writing a history of the land grant given to Ysleta del Sur, and in 1998 I was given the additional task of preparing a study on the Pueblo league in New Mexico. I had recently met Malcolm and was aware of his body of work on New Mexico land grants. I asked the firm if we could add Malcolm to the team. In 2001 our study was complete, and it was published by the tribe as part of the Ysleta del Sur Pueblo Archives, a five-volume collection. On the basis of our study of the Pueblo league, Malcolm and I got an advance contract from the University of New Mexico Press. We interrupted work on the project when Malcolm asked me to collaborate on a book that became The Witches of Abiquiu, which was published in 2006. At the request of UNM Press, we got back to work on the Pueblo league book, and Richard joined us. Malcolm and I had previously worked for Richard as experts in preparing material, and in the course of that work we were privileged to have access to the Santa Ana documents.
Four Square Leagues: Pueblo Indian Land in New Mexico is available at bookstores or directly from the University of New Mexico Press at http://www.unmpress.com or 800.249.7737.
September 12, 2014