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Zuni Pueblo
Photograph taken in 1926 by Jessie Nusbaum.
The sun sets over a shallow river near Zuni Pueblo in New Mexico. A large mesa is silhouetted in the distance across from the buildings of the pueblo. Courtesy of the Western History/Genealogy Department, Denver Public Library.
Zuni Pueblo
by William H. Wroth
The Pueblo of Zuni is located in the McKinley and Cibola counties in western New Mexico. It is the largest Pueblo in the state both in population and size, with approximately 10,000 members and a land base of about 450,000 acres. Most of the population is centered in the main village of Zuni and the nearby community of Blackrock. Archaeological evidence from the nearby site of Hawikuh demonstrates that the Zuni people (who call themselves A:shiwi in their language) have lived in this place since at least A.D. 1300, and there is an unbroken continuity of settlement in the area from at least A.D. 650 which may have been the ancestors of the Zunis. The Zunis themselves say they have lived there for thousands of years. Their traditional history states that they emerged from the underworld somewhere west of their present location (Grand Canyon and the Mojave Desert have been suggested) and wandered until they found Itawanna (the “Center Place,” the center of the world), which is their present home. The Zuni language is called by linguists a “language isolate” because no connections with other languages have been found. Attempts to connect it with some California Indian languages have not been convincing. The uniqueness of the Zuni language adds support to the idea that they have lived in the present location for millennia.
The Zuni people first encountered Europeans in 1539 when Fray Marcos de Niza set out from Mexico with the former Black slave Estavanico hoping to discover the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola. Estavanico had been shipwrecked on the Narváez expedition off the coast of Texas in 1528 and had, with Alvar Nuñez Cabeza de Vaca, wandered for ten years across Texas and the Southwest as far as southern Arizona, before returning to Mexico City. Their tales of the fabled Cibola, which was thought to be Zuni, led to the Niza expedition. In northern Mexico Niza sent Estavanico ahead, but when he reached Zuni, he was regarded with suspicion and is said to have been imprisoned and ultimately executed.
The myth of Cibola was further promoted by Niza upon his return to Mexico and led to the 1540 expedition of Francisco Vásquez de Coronado. Coronado found the Zunis living in six villages, including Hawikuh and Halona (the present site of Zuni Pueblo). The Zunis attempted to stop Coronado, but after a brief battle they retreated due to the military superiority of the Spaniards who had fire arms, armor, and horses. Coronado was disappointed to find that Zuni was not the fabled Cibola; no riches were to be found. Two other Spanish expeditions reached Zuni in the late 1500s with little impact on the people, but in 1598 Juan de Oñate launched his colonizing expedition to New Mexico. He reached Zuni in November and duly obtained their formal submission to the Spanish crown, as he had with most of the other Pueblos, but no Spanish settlement was made at Zuni by Oñate due to its distance from Santa Fe.
Zuni was virtually left alone by the Spaniards until 1629 when the first churches were built at Halona, Hawikuh and two other settlements, but only three years later in 1632 the Zunis killed two of the resident friars at Hawikuh, Fray Francisco Letrado and Fray Martin de Arvide. There is no firm evidence of further missionary work at Zuni until after 1660. Because of its remote location Zuni was vulnerable and subject to nomadic Indian raids. In 1673 the Apaches attacked Hawikuh, burned down the church, and killed many Zunis and the resident friar, Fray Pedro de Avila y Ayala.
In 1680 the Zunis took part in the Pueblo Rebellion. They burned the churches at Hawikuh and Halona and killed Fray Juan de Bal. Another friar at Hawikuh was said to have escaped death, and according to Zuni traditional history he was adopted into the tribe. In 1692 Diego de Vargas began the Re-conquest of New Mexico. At Zuni he found all the residents had taken refuge on nearby Dowa Yalanne (Corn Mountain). Vargas is said to have found that the Catholic ritual objects taken from the destroyed churches had been carefully preserved on Dowa Yalanne. Most of the Zunis remained at Dowa Yalanne through the 1696 rebellion. In 1699 they finally returned to the Pueblo, but abandoned all the villages except Halona because the population had been greatly reduced both by the hardships of living in exile from the Pueblo and by the ravages of diseases introduced by the Europeans. The disruption caused by years of refuge on Dowa Yalanne and the consolidation of six villages into one after 1696 produced a major re-organization of Zuni society and most likely contributed to the complexity of Zuni social and ceremonial organization in the historic period.
Due to its remoteness, to serve in Zuni was considered a form of exile for the Franciscan friars in the eighteenth century. It was also a form of punishment for criminals who were drafted as soldiers and sent to Zuni to protect against Apache and Navajo raids. Three of these unruly Hispanic soldiers who were stationed there in 1703 came into conflict with the Zunis because of their bad behavior, and were promptly killed. After consolidation of the population at Halona in 1699, the Zunis soon enlarged this settlement to encompass both sides of the river which ran through it. They also established nearby summer farming villages near their peach orchards where they planted crops and grazed cattle. These villages also served as places to conduct their own religious ceremonies without interference from the resident friars. In the nineteenth century the Zunis established three more outlying farming villages, Ojo Caliente, Nutria, and Pescado, all of which are still in use today.
Through the eighteenth century the Zunis continued to suffer from sporadic raiding by the Apaches and in the nineteenth by the Navajos. Zuni warriors occasionally joined with Spanish troops in retaliatory expeditions, and after 1846 they frequently assisted United States troops in their campaigns against the Navajos. In July and August 1850, Navajos attacked Halona in two successive raids, killing the Lieutenant Governor of the Pueblo in the second one. The Zunis counterattacked in September, killing 30 Navajos. In October while many men were away from the Pueblo, a large group of Navajos laid siege to Halona for sixteen days and stole much of the corn crop. Periodic raids by the Navajos continued until the establishment of Fort Wingate in the 1870s. In spite of this record of conflict with the Navajos, many of the latter maintained friendly relations with the Zunis. Even though it was forbidden by the Spanish and American authorities, there was much trading between the two tribes. Since pre-Hispanic times, Zuni Pueblo had been an important center in a widespread trading network, ranging from the California coast eastward to the Plains and south to northern Mexico.
Through the eighteenth and first half of the nineteenth centuries, the Zunis continued to be quite isolated from Hispanic New Mexico. No Hispanic communities were founded near Zuni until after 1860 when settlements began 30 miles to the east of the Pueblo. The Catholic Church had difficulty in keeping friars at this remote outpost. According to Ecclesiastical Visitor Father Juan Bautista Guevara writing in 1818, no priest had lived at Zuni for the previous seven years, and visits by the priest at Laguna Pueblo were infrequent, no more than two or three times a year. The replacement of the Franciscan friars by secular priests in the 1820s resulted in a shortage of priests to administer the many communities through New Mexico, and Zuni was left without clergy for the rest of the century. By the late 1800s the church at Zuni Pueblo was in a ruinous state. Franciscan friars returned to western New Mexico with the establishment of St. Michaels Mission on the Navajo Reservation in 1898, and by 1905 they had begun a long slow process of restoring the church, which was not completed until 1969.
After the American occupation of New Mexico in 1846, Zuni Pueblo had occasional visits from American authorities and surveying expeditions, but it was still very difficult to travel there until the Atlantic and Pacific Railroad was finished and the town of Gallup, 40 miles north of Zuni, established in 1881. Two kinds of American visitors soon came to Zuni: anthropologists studying the Indians and land sharks trying to take their lands. Pioneering ethnographic studies were done by the James and Matilda Stevenson expedition beginning in 1879. Its personnel included the young ethnologist Frank Hamilton Cushing. Cushing lived for several years at Zuni, learned the language and was admitted into the Bow Society. In addition to recording and translating (often inaccurately) many myths and stories and much ethnographic information, he helped the Zunis in their dealings both with the United States government and with the land sharks. Cushing, however, is remembered today with mixed feelings by the Zunis. An informant of Dennis Tedlock characterized Cushing’s entrance into the Bow Society thus: “The others [the Zuni members] said their prayers from their hearts but he read his from a piece of paper.”
In 1882 Cushing learned of a land grab by two Army officers from Fort Wingate who tried to take Zuni land at Nutria for their cattle ranch, and he aided the Zunis in regaining ownership of the disputed land. One of the officers, however, was the son-in-law of Senator John A. Logan of Illinois. Logan was angered by Cushing’s interference and pressured the Smithsonian to order him to leave Zuni and return to Washington in April 1884. The Zunis were not always so fortunate in maintaining their lands. Most of the large area which was traditionally recognized by neighboring tribes and Hispanic settlers as Zuni territory was lost to them in the late 1800s, including all their lands in today’s Arizona, but through the twentieth century they gradually regained some portions of their lands, increasing the reservation to its present size of ca. 450,000 acres.
In the twentieth century the Zunis, along with other Pueblos, gradually changed from the traditional theocratic form of government in which spiritual leaders made decisions to the secular tribal council form of government. The Zuni government is now modern in every respect and takes care of all the normal functions of any municipal government: water and sewage systems, law enforcement, schools, new housing, road maintenance, etc. In 1970 the Indian Service of the federal government formally gave control of the Zuni reservation to the tribal council. All of these changes have not lessened the role of important religious ceremonies such as the annual Shalako dances, and in fact the making of traditional crafts such as jewelry has been expanded to become a major source of income for the Zuni people.
Sources used:
Adams, Eleanor B. and Fray Angelico Chavez, eds. The Missions of New Mexico, 1776. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1956.
Eggan, Fred and T. N. Pandey. “Zuni History, 1850-1970.” In: Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 9: Southwest. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1979.
Ferguson, T. J. and E. Richard Hart. A Zuni Atlas. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1985.
Ferguson, T. J and Barbara Mills. “Settlement and Growth of Zuni Pueblo: An Architectural History.” In: The Kiva, vol. 52, no. 4 (1987).
Hughte, Phil, A Zuni Artist Looks at Frank Hamilton Cushing: Cartoons by Phil Hughte. Zuni, NM: A:shiwi A:wan Museum and Heritage Center, 1994.
Kessell, John L. The Missions of New Mexico since 1776. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1980.
Ladd, Edmund J. “Foreword” in Nancy Yaw Davis, The Zuni Enigma. New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 2001.
Tedlock, Dennis. The Spoken Word and the Work of Interpretation. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1983.
Woodbury, Richard S. “Zuni Prehistory and History to 1850.” In: Handbook of North American Indians, Volume 9: Southwest. Washington: Smithsonian Institution, 1979.
Related Materials:
Smithsonian film on Pueblo Resistance
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