Thunder and Herds by Lawrence L. Loendorf

1 Indeed, the new trend among the Rio Grande Pueblos to formally reinstate indigenous toponyms-to take down signs for “San Juan Pueblo,” for instance, and replace them with signs for “Ohkay Owingeh”-might be interpreted as contributions to this reimagining. Pueblo critics, in other words, are challenging us to reimagine the eighteenth century as a time of indigenous history-making, the goal being to rewrite this early chapter of the “Historic period” as a veritable “Pueblo V period,” that much neglected extension of the Pecos Classification recently championed by Matthew Liebmann (2012a). From this perspective, we are still looking at a “Pueblo New Mexico” in which Europeans participated but as neither the sole nor even the primary authors. An aspirational colonialism is merely that. Certainly the metal-clad immigrants from the south rattled their sabers, made proclamations, and founded settlements (many of which, during the mid-eighteenth century, remained so weak as to be periodically abandoned), but asserting dominance is not the same thing as achieving dominance. With respect to the eighteenth century in particular, some Pueblo commentators are quick to point out that Spaniards were economically and militarily dependent on indigenous communities, with little actual power to impose their will (see John G.

Some of the strongest critiques have emerged within Pueblo communities, many of which now openly reject the language of “Spanish conquest.” Europeans, they observe, may have invaded the Southwest at the end of the sixteenth century-and then again at the end of the seventeenth century following the Pueblo Revolt-but they never “conquered” the region in any meaningful sense of the term. Increasingly, however, this position is coming under fire. A European colony, it is assumed, is still a European colony, even if it is a very small and powerless one. But this rarely prevents scholars from drawing a circle around the region and labeling it Spanish. Traditional accounts of the eighteenth-century world in the American Southwest often make reference to “Spanish New Mexico.” Spaniards may have been wildly outnumbered by the surrounding indigenous communities, and their political control may have been patchy and tenuous.

Thunder and Herds by Lawrence L. Loendorf