Fire in the Mind by George Johnson

Author:George Johnson [Johnson, George]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 978-0-307-76544-4
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2010-10-06T04:00:00+00:00

For the Tewa, mythology left off and history began when the Spanish arrived in the sixteenth century, marching up from Mexico, and began to write the Tewa into their own story. To the Spanish and their Franciscan priests, the spirits lived in the sky, not under the earth. Unaware of or uninterested in such designations as summer and winter people, these European visitors imposed a different duality on the natives of the northern fringes. The indios de los pueblos lived in villages like San Ildefonso and grew crops. Surrounding this civilized world were the indios bárbaros, the Comanches and Apaches, who moved from place to place and raided the pueblos for food. One group of Apaches, the Navajos, had come into the area only slightly before the Spanish.

It is not certain just when the people of San Ildefonso saw their first Spaniard. Coronado’s troops rode into Tewa country in the early 1540s, but it was not until 1598 that Juan de Oñate, who led the first group of settlers to New Mexico, visited San Ildefonso. From then on, linear time proceeded with a vengeance. The Ice Month was renamed January, after the two-faced Roman god Janus; the Wind Month became February, after a Roman purification rite; the Month When the Leaves Break Forth became March, named for Mars, the god of war; the Month When the Leaves Open became April, after an Etruscan name for Aphrodite; Corn Planting Month became May, after another Roman goddess. Before long even the Tewa themselves were renamed. By the time the American anthropologist Elsie Parsons arrived in the early twentieth century, it was not unusual for a San Ildefonso man to be named both Star Mountain and Santiago Alarides; a man called Starbird was known outside the pueblo as Juan Jesús Piña.

The changes were not simply a matter of laying new names on top of old ones. Time became divided with a finer and finer grain. While the Tewa had been content to segment the year into months, the Spanish gave every day a number and a name, and then the days themselves were mechanically sliced into horas, minutos, and segundos.

Before long, the Franciscans were trying to change the very names of the Cloud Beings to correspond with the Catholic Church’s holy saints. Throughout the pueblo world, kivas were burned or filled with sand; masks and other sacred relics were destroyed. In 1675, forty-seven pueblo religious leaders were accused of witchcraft and idolatry and brought to Santa Fe for public flogging. One of the leaders was Popé, the San Juan Indian who would lead the Pueblo Revolt five years later.

San Ildefonso was one of the strongest supporters of the revolution, killing two of the Franciscans who lived there. And when Diego de Vargas staged his Reconquest twelve years later, the pueblo was one of the last to succumb, the people fleeing to the top of Black Mesa, the lair of the legendary giant, to fight a worse monster. For two years after most other pueblos had surrendered, San Ildefonso staved off Vargas’s men.

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