For eighty years the Pueblo peoples bore it.
Since Oñate's iron boot had crossed
The Rio Grande in fifteen-ninety-eight, the orbit
Of the Spanish mission's holocaust
Of culture ground the sacred dances down:
The kivas sealed with stone, the masks
Of the kachinas burned in every town
From Taos to Hopi—and the tasks
Of the forced conversion fell upon
The backs of the Pueblo men, who dragged
The timbers for the churches at the dawn
And the dusk of every day, and gagged
Upon the blasphemy of building altars
To a foreign god atop the buried
Kivas where the ceremony falters
In the darkness—underground, the married
Rhythm of the rain-prayer and the corn-song
Continued, whispered, hidden from the friar's ear,
And the Pueblo peoples bore the wrong
With the patience of the mesa, year by year.
But patience has a depth, and the well runs dry.
The drought came first—the sixteen-seventies'
Relentless failure of the desert sky
To deliver rain, the subtleties
Of the climate's cruelty compounded by
The Spanish demand for tribute-corn
That the starving pueblos could not supply—
And the Apache raids, like a thorn
In the weakened body's side, drove the frontier
Missions to their knees—and the friars
Responded with the whip, the sheer
And escalating violence of the liars
Who blamed the drought on the Pueblo's sin:
The kachinas, the old religion's hold,
The dancing that continued within
The hidden kiva's fold—
And in sixteen-seventy-five, the Spanish
Arrested forty-seven medicine men,
Hanged three, and meant to vanquish
The spiritual resistance—and then
Popé of Ohkay Owingeh emerged.
He had been among the whipped—the scars
Upon his back were the text that urged
The revolution: knotted cords, like stars
Strung on a counting thread, were sent
To every pueblo from Taos south
To the Piro settlements—the intent
Encoded in the fiber's mouth:
Untie one knot each day, and when
The cord is smooth, the rising comes.
August tenth, sixteen-eighty: the men
Of twenty-four pueblos, to the drums
Of the kachina's summoning, rose as one.
The Spanish were caught between the sky
And the earth they'd stolen—the sun
Of the Pueblo fury did not die
At the mission door but burned it down:
Every church from Taos to Isleta
Was razed, and the friars in every town
Were killed—twenty-one Franciscans, the feta-
L cost of eighty years of the whip—
And the settlers fled to Santa Fe,
Where the governor watched his grip
On New Mexico dissolve like clay
In the acequia's flood.
The siege of Santa Fe—
Two thousand Pueblo warriors ringed the villa,
Cut the water supply, and the fray
Of the final Spanish stand—guerrilla
Sorties from the palace—bought only
The time to gather the surviving settlers
And retreat south, lonely
And humiliated, the fettlers
Of empire reduced to refugees,
Down the Rio Grande to El Paso's dust—
And the Pueblo peoples stood at ease
Upon their own land for the first
Time in eighty years.
And Popé ordered the undoing.
Wash off the baptism in the river.
Take the Christian name and the accruing
Of the foreign saint and deliver
It to the water's current—take back
The old name, the true name,
The name the kachinas know. The track
Of the Spanish road, the frame
Of the mission church, the iron bell—
Destroy them all. Let the kiva
Be unsealed, let the dancers tell
The rain-prayer to the receiver
Of all prayers: the cloud, the corn, the earth.
Twelve years of freedom. Twelve years
Of the old ways restored, the rebirth
Of the ceremony—and the tears
Of the internal strife, for Popé
Became, some said, a tyrant of his own—
The unity that the revolt's ballet
Had demanded could not be sown
In peacetime, and the pueblos quarreled,
And the drought continued, and the raids
Increased—and the freedom, garland-
Garlanded with hope, was the shades
Of a sovereignty too fragmented to hold.
In sixteen-ninety-two, Diego de Vargas
Returned—but the reconquest's mold
Was broken differently: no chargers
Thundering through the plaza, no
Mass execution—for the Pueblo had proved
That they could expel the foe
Entirely, and the Spanish moved
With negotiation, not the sword alone:
Promises of lighter tribute, amnesty,
And—the crucial, the cornerstone—
The tolerance of the Pueblo dynasty
Of ceremony: the kachina dances
Would continue. The kivas would remain.
The old religion's advances
Would not be the mission's bane
But the unspoken compromise
That made the reconquest possible:
The Pueblo kept their prayers, their skies,
Their gods—the ostensible
Conversion was the surface, and beneath
The Christian altar and the Franciscan's chant,
The kachina danced, and the wreath
Of the corn-prayer rose from the suppliant
And unconquered kiva to the clouds.
This is the Pueblo victory—
Not in the twelve years' freedom's shrouds
Alone, but in the contradictory
And stubborn survival that followed:
The kachinas dance today in Zuni
And Hopi and Acoma, and the hallowed
Ceremony that the Spanish cruelty
Could not erase—because one generation
Proved it could be erased, and the proof
Was the leverage of the negotiation
That kept the sacred underneath the roof
Of the conqueror's church, alive and whole.
Honor Popé—the scarred medicine man
Who knotted the cord of the Pueblo soul
And untied an empire's eighty-year plan
In a single August dawn—who proved
That the colonized can expel the colonizer,
That the sacred is not removed
By the missionary's enterprise or
The soldier's boot—and the kachinas dance
Still, in the plaza and the kiva's round,
Because one revolt gave the chance
To negotiate what could not be unwound:
The prayer, the mask, the rain, the corn—
The life that was here before the cross,
And will be here after, every morning born
From the land that remembers its own loss.