New Mexico Indian Tribes and Communities in 2050

Veronica E. Velarde Tiller, Fred Harris

• Publisher: University of New Mexico Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780826356185
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: North American History
• Index: History

In this E-short edition from New Mexico 2050, Veronica E. Tiller—a Jicarilla Apache who is the editor and publisher of the renowned reference guide Tiller's Guide to Indian Country —surveys the history and present-day roles of Indian tribes in New Mexico. Considering the key issues impacting Native Americans—including climate change, water resources, energy development, education, and health—Tiller reveals what New Mexicans can do to ensure a more satisfying and rewarding future for all.

New Mexico Indian Tribes and Communities in 2050

Veronica E. Tiller

Nine hundred years ago, the ancestors of today’s Pueblo tribes of New Mexico moved out of their homelands in the Chaco Canyon area of northwestern New Mexico due to severe drought conditions. Indian historian Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz describes the civilization they left behind:

The famed Anasazi people of Chaco Canyon on the Colorado Plateau—in the present Four Corners region of Arizona, New Mexico, Colorado and Utah—thrived from 850 to 1250 A.D. Ancestors of the Pueblos of New Mexico, the Anasazi constructed more than 400 miles of roads radiating out from Chaco. An average of 30 feet in width, these roads followed straight courses, even through difficult terrain such as hills and rock formations. The highways connected some 75 communities. Around the 13th century, the [ancestral Pueblo] people abandoned the Chaco area and migrated, building nearly a hundred smaller agricultural city-states along the Rio Grande valley and its tributaries. . . . Pueblo trade extended as far west as the Pacific Ocean, as far east as the Great Plains, and as far south as Central America.1

Early in 2014 the prospect of climate change once again presented New Mexico’s Indian tribes, along with the state itself, with starkly alternative futures. Only this time, the tribes were a very distinct minority of the state’s population, and there were no longer any well-watered and uninhabited expanses where they might relocate. January 2014 was the driest January recorded for New Mexico since 1895—4 percent of normal. And 2014 is but the latest in a string of years that have left the entire state in conditions ranging from abnormally dry to extreme drought.

History and Government

The Navajos, two Apache tribes, and nineteen pueblos all made present-day New Mexico their homeland for hundreds of years before the first Europeans entered the area. These tribes existed as distinct peoples with vibrant cultures, thriving economies, and enduring means of governance. While Spanish, French, and Mexican authorities claimed varying degrees of suzerainty over New Mexico from the fifteenth to the mid-nineteenth centuries, until the United States claimed sovereignty in 1848, these tribes held actual possession of their lands and maintained political control over their territories and their peoples. The exercise of their sovereignty included engaging in defensive and offensive wars and establishing trade with each other and with non-Indians under the European powers who claimed jurisdiction over their lands by right of discovery or by conquest. The continued social, cultural, and political autonomy of these tribes is perhaps the single most constant thread that runs through New Mexico’s history for the last five hundred years.2

Today, these tribes all play an active role in the governance of New Mexico, not only through self-governance but through their involvement in the affairs of the state and the federal government. Members of New Mexico tribes have served on public school boards, in the state legislature, as members of state regulatory bodies, and as members of federal advisory committees charged with developing regulations to implement national federal policies in housing, energy, education, the environment, and law enforcement, among other programs.

The Pueblo Tribes of New Mexico

Spanish explorers traversed present-day New Mexico as early as the 1530s, hoping to discover the kinds of riches they had found and plundered among the Aztec and Inca Empires far to the south. These ventures failed to turn up the fabled Seven Cities of Cibola but did permit the Spaniards to claim the vast expanse of the American Southwest for the Spanish crown. Francisco Vásquez de Coronado occupied the Rio Grande Valley in an extensive campaign that lasted some two years in the mid-sixteenth century and resulted in the destruction of some Pueblo villages and the complete annihilation of their people. By 1600 the Spanish were well and firmly entrenched in New Mexico, with permanent villages of their own, and were increasingly encroaching on lands occupied and farmed by the Pueblo Indians.

Although Spain recognized the Indians’ right to the lands they actually occupied and tilled, their practice of exacting forced labor and tribute from the Pueblo Indians resulted in resentments that culminated in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. Pueblo leaders met at Taos Pueblo in early 1680 and laid plans for a coordinated uprising against the Spanish, whose cruelties over the course of nearly a century were no longer tolerable. As if on signal, the Pueblo Indians rose up in the fall of 1680 and not only challenged their putative overlords but drove the Spaniards all the way back into Mexico.

In 1692 the Spaniards returned to the Middle Rio Grande Valley in sufficient strength to reassert their authority as conquerors and to impose their will by force. They maintained this role until Mexico gained its independence from Spain in 1821. During this period, Spanish authorities issued grants to land in New Mexico that have survived in some form to the present day. Many pueblos were issued grants to an area of one league in each direction from the center of the pueblo. These “Spanish land grants” were recognized by the Mexican government and later by the United States under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo of 1848.3

When the Mexican-American War of 1846 was concluded by the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the United States asserted full sovereignty and federal jurisdiction over the lands ceded by Mexico, including the Indian lands, but agreed to respect the rights that had been acknowledged by Mexico and Spain before that. This treaty by no means ended conflicting claims to Pueblo Indian lands, and when New Mexico was admitted to the union in 1912, the new state was required to disclaim any right to Indian lands within its borders. This disclaimer was soon challenged with respect to Indian lands by the novel proposition that the Pueblo people were not really Indians entitled to federal protection since they lived in settled villages. The Supreme Court of the United States rejected that argument and vindicated federal supervision and protection of Pueblo lands in the case of United States v. Sandoval (231 U.S. 28 [1913]).4

Disputes over the extent and exact boundaries of these Pueblo lands continued well into the late twentieth century, however. Today the nineteen remaining New Mexico Pueblo tribes continue to occupy the lands and villages where the Spaniards encountered them almost five hundred years ago and are governed largely by their ancient traditions, although a few of them have adopted constitutional forms of government, as authorized by U.S. federal law in 1934. The executive duties are discharged by a governor and lieutenant governor, assisted and guided by tribal councils that are either elected or appointed by traditional leaders.

Navajo Nation

While the Spanish, Mexican, and American authorities claimed to recognize the rights of Pueblo tribes to the lands they occupied and farmed, the same could not be said for the rights of the Navajo and Apache tribes within what is now New Mexico. Long before any European set foot in the Americas, the Navajo people, the Diné, defined their homeland as that territory bounded by four sacred mountains. Mount Blanca (Dawn or White Shell Mountain) near Alamosa, Colorado, defines the eastern boundary. Mount Taylor (Blue Bead Mountain), north of Laguna, New Mexico, delineates the southern boundary. The San Francisco Peaks (Abalone Shell Mountain) near Flagstaff, Arizona, mark the westernmost edge of Dinetha. Mount Hesperus (Big Mountain Sheep) in the La Plata range of the Colorado Rocky Mountains anchors the northern boundary.5

The Diné have been in the southwestern United States since they migrated south from western Canada around 1300 AD. The Navajos resisted Spanish and Mexican domination prior to 1848 and waged defensive wars against U.S. attempts at subjugation following the Mexican-American War. In 1864, following a literal scorched earth campaign, the U.S. military succeeded in bringing the Navajos under submission and forcibly dep...

Table of contents

• Contents
• New Mexico 2050?
• Preface
• New Mexico Indian Tribes and Communities in 2050
• Epilogue
• Contributors
• Index