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This chapter examines the ways in which Pueblo Indians sought to define their own political status during the U.S. territorial period. According to the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, which ended the U.S.-Mexico War, Pueblo Indians were U.S. citizens. As Pueblo Indian Agent John Calhoun (and later governor of New Mexico) reasoned, this meant the right to the franchise as well. But, problems arose over Pueblo voting rights, as some non-Indians concluded that if they voted, it would mean that the Pueblos gave up their status as distinct, sovereign Indigenous communities. For their part, the Pueblos continued to act as Indian republics, and their independent political status was seemingly confirmed by the gift of the so-called Lincoln Canes in 1863. A series of legal cases, culminating in U.S. v. Joseph (1876), ultimately defined the Pueblos as non-voting citizens. Throughout the territorial period, the Pueblos asserted that they did not desire U.S. citizenship, instead preferring to retain their mixed systems of town government, in place since the Spanish period, and their semisovereign status under the U.S. Office of Indian Affairs.

This chapter traces the development of Repúblicas de Indios (Indian Republics) among the Pueblo Indians of Spanish New Mexico. It demonstrates how the Pueblos implemented Spanish directives mandating annual elections of officers, such as governors and lieutenant governors, to form an Indian town council, or ayuntamiento/cabildo. The Pueblos ultimately transformed those elections to bring them more in conformity with traditional Pueblo leadership selection practices. This chapter interrogates the importance of Pueblo officers, the governor system, and the annual elections that put them in office. These elected Pueblo officers represented their communities in dealings with the Spanish church and state. While there were abuses of office, Pueblo governors and other leaders overwhelmingly worked for the survival of their people and to retain their sacred homelands.

This chapter illustrates the Pueblos' struggle for land and sovereignty. Long before the arrival of Spaniards, Mexicans, or Americans, the Pueblo Indians were building towns and cultivating fields along the banks of the Rio Grande and its tributaries. With the hubris of a colonial power, Spain had assumed the right to distribute ownership of this land and granted each pueblo title to its surrounding area. Mexico honored these Spanish land grants; and at the close of the Mexican–American War in 1848, the United States promised, in the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, to do so as well. That promise became more difficult to honor as the territory's population grew, creating heightened competition for the region's scarce water and irrigable land.

This chapter discusses Mabel Dodge Luhan's four-volume autobiography, in which she recounted her long quest for a place that would satisfy her inner hunger. “Only religion will fill me,” she remembered thinking. “Someday, I will find God.” Like a number of early twentieth-century artists and intellectuals, Luhan eventually found this sense of fulfillment in New Mexico and especially in her encounters with the Pueblo Indians. She recalled that during her first excursion north from Santa Fe, the earth itself had seemed to resonate with her inner sense of the divine. Watching “the hills, the canyons, the cottonwood trees,” she wrote, “I heard the world singing in the same key in which my own life inside me had sometimes lifted and poured itself out . . . ‘Holy! Holy! Holy!’”

Colonial Mexico’s Marian legends of conquest shaped New Mexico’s first century. Juan de Oñate’s soldiers believed that during their most significant fight with Pueblo Indians, the battle of Acoma, Mary supported them, while colonists in seventeenth-century Santa Fe venerated a Madonna named La Conquistadora. Mary also become part of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, which expelled the colonists from New Mexico until the 1690s. Settlers believed they fought to save the colony with her patronage, Franciscans believed she had predicted the catastrophe, and Pueblos proclaimed that Mary was dead and their old gods were alive. The man who re-imposed Spanish control, Don Diego de Vargas, often framed his efforts to reincorporate the Pueblos into Christendom as the Virgin’s return. He used a banner decorated with an image of Los Remedios to make Mary’s patronage of his enterprise real to the Pueblos and returned the statue of La Conquistadora to Santa Fe.

In 1680, Pueblo Indians and their Navajo and Apache allies in northern New Mexico rose up in arms against Spain, under whose rule they were living for eighty-two years. The Pueblo Revolt, also called the first American Revolution, is an American story of freedom and resistance to tyranny. This chapter analyses the Pueblo Revolt to highlight the ambiguities that prevail over what is and what is not prehistory. Once the Pueblos expelled the Spaniards from their midst, the question is whether they returned to a prehistoric condition during the period when there is no literate agent to record events, or after the Spanish returned, whether the Pueblos are thrust into their previous condition of being within history and outside of prehistory. The chapter also explores the concept of placemaking, sometimes defined as the social practices of constructing place, as well as the power of place and concludes by assessing the legacy of the Pueblo Revolt in terms of history and archaeology.

Multiple water sovereigns coexist in New Mexico. These sovereigns have different conceptions and worldviews of water, its purpose, and its role in their respective lives. The state water code of 1907 defined water as a private property right, yet many New Mexicans continue to question this notion. Adjudication was the state’s tool to find, redefine, and specify water as an individual good attached in space and time to property owners in New Mexico.