Pueblo Indian Religion

The rich religious beliefs and ceremonials of the Pueblo Indians of Arizona and New Mexico were first synthesized and compared by ethnologist Elsie Clews Parsons. Prodigious research and a quarter-century of fieldwork went into her 1939 encyclopedic two-volume work, Pueblo Indian Religion. The author gives an integrated picture of the complex religious and social life in the pueblos, including Zuni, Acoma, Laguna, Taos, Isleta, Sandia, Jemez, Cochiti, Santa Clara, San Felipe, Santa Domingo, San Juan, and the Hopi villages. In volume I she discusses shelter, social structure, land tenure, customs, and popular beliefs. Parsons also describes spirits, cosmic notions, and a wide range of rituals. The cohesion of spiritual and material aspects of Pueblo culture is also apparent in volume II, which presents an extensive body of solstice, installation, initiation, war, weather, curing, kachina, and planting and harvesting ceremonies, as well as games, animal dances, and offerings to the dead. A review of Pueblo ceremonies from town to town considers variations and borrowings. Today, a half century after its original publication, Pueblo Indian Religion remains central to studies of Pueblo religious life.

For Native Americans, religious freedom has been an elusive goal. From nineteenth-century bans on indigenous ceremonial practices to twenty-first-century legal battles over sacred lands, peyote use, and hunting practices, the U.S. government has often act

Provides an overview of the past and present lives of the Pueblo Indians, covering their daily activities, customs, family life, religion, government, history, and interaction with the United States government.

The peaceable Pueblo Indians seemed an unlikely people to rise emphatically and successfully against the Spanish Empire. For eighty-two years the Pueblos had lived under Spanish domination in the northern part of present-day New Mexico. The Spanish administration had been led not by Coronado’s earlier vision of god but by a desire to convert the Indians to Christianity and eke a living from the country north of Mexico. The situation made conflict inevitable, with devastating results. Robert Silverberg writes: "While the missionaries flogged and even hanged the Indians to save their souls, the civil authorities enslaved them, plundered the wealth of their cornfields, forced them to abide by incomprehensible Spanish laws." A long drought beginning in the 1660s and the accelerated raids of nomadic tribes contributed to the spontaneous revolt to the Pueblos in August 1680. How the Pueblos maintained their independence for a dozen years in plain view of the ambitious Spaniards and how they finally expelled the Spanish is the exciting story of The Pueblo Revolt. Robert Silverberg’s descriptions yield a rich picture of the Pueblo culture.

"Pueblo Indians and Spanish Colonial Authority in Eighteenth-Century New Mexico investigates the tactics that Pueblo Indians used to negotiate Spanish colonization and the ways in which the negotiation of colonial power impacted Pueblo individuals and communities"--Provided by publisher.