Southwest cultural area (Native American history)

Category: Culture area

Language groups: Athapaskan, Keres, Kiowa-Tanoan, Uto-Aztecan, Yuman, Zuni

Tribes: Acoma, Apache (including Chiricahua, Jicarilla, and Mescalero), Cochiti, Havasupai, Hopi, Isleta, Jemez, Karankawa, Laguna, Nambe, Navajo, Picuris, Pima, Pojoaque, San Felipe, San Ildefonso, San Juan, Sandia, Santa Ana, Santa Clara, Santo Domingo, Taos, Tesuque, Tohono O’odham, Walapai, Yaqui, Yavapai, Zia, Zuni

The United States Southwest includes Arizona, New Mexico, and southern Utah and Colorado. The area features rugged terrain and an arid landscape in which agriculture provided an unlikely but solid foothold for the growth of settled populations among the deep canyons and dun-colored mesas. It remains home to many of the most culturally conservative tribes, notably the Navajos and the Pueblo Indians. Southwestern archaeological remains—carefully planned masonry or adobe communities—are major tourist attractions in the region.

Paleo-Indian/Archaic Era

The earliest commonly accepted evidence for humans in the Southwest is from people archaeologists call Paleo-Indians. It dates from the last thirteen thousand years. Widespread habitation probably began about 9000 b.c.e., when highly mobile bands hunted large game animals, gathered wild plants, and killed smaller game as opportunities arose.

By 6000 b.c.e., many of the largest game animals were extinct, and early southwesterners shifted to more generalized hunting and gathering. Archaic period Indians probably operated from central base camps in defined territories by 1800 b.c.e.Archaic culture ended with the adoption of maize horticulture, probably around 1500-1000 b.c.e., but the people were cautious about depending on these new ways, continuing to hunt and gather along with caring for the crops.

Hohokam and Mogollon Cultures

The cultures of the Hohokam and Mogollon, known from their archaeological remains, had developed from Archaic populations in southwestern New Mexico and southern Arizona by 200 b.c.e., the Hohokam in the valleys of the Gila and Salt rivers, the Mogollon in the uplands of those drainages. The Hohokam had irrigation technology by 700 c.e. There were 500 kilometers (slightly over 300 miles) of main canals in the Salt Valley alone, watering fields of corn, beans, squash, and cotton.

Raw or woven cotton was probably an important export in trade, as were elaborate shell ornaments, pottery, turquoise, jet, and obsidian. Copper bells, parrots, and macaws suggest trade ties to ancient Mexico, as do Hohokam ballcourts and platform mounds. Local exchange of goods and services, however, was probably the main cement that bound the culture together; they probably never shared a single government.

The Mogollon culture is known for making the earliest pottery yet found in the Southwest, about 300 b.c.e. They lived in small, egalitarian pithouse villages with specialized ceremonial rooms, depending on a combination of agriculture and hunted and gathered resources. By 700 c.e. they were trading regularly with the Hohokam, and the cultures mixed at the Mogollon western edge. The Mogollon began irrigation and water run-off control about that time and, particularly in their eastern and northern areas, began to build aboveground architecture, sometimes with large ceremonial structures. The Mimbres Mogollon variant produced finely painted figurative pottery, ceremonially “killed” for interment with the dead.

Both Hohokam and Mogollon cultures disappeared around 1350-1400. The people of southern Arizona reduced the scale of their agriculture, probably because of depleted desert soils and climate change. The Mogollon population split, some withdrawing into northern Mexico while others faded into their Anasazi neighbors to the north.

Anasazi Culture

Most Pueblo Indians today are descended from the Anasazi, a Navajo term meaning “ancient others.” Anasazi territory included the Little Colorado, San Juan, and northern Rio Grande drainages in New Mexico, Arizona, Colorado, and Utah.

The Anasazi relied on horticulture, hunting, and gathering wild foods. The earliest Anasazi, the Basketmakers, began about 100 b.c.e. as a semi-nomadic population, ranging out from pit house villages. By 400-700 c.e. they were building separate, large ceremonial structures (kivas) and grew beans, cotton, and maize.

The Anasazi began building their characteristic masonry apartment-house style pueblos about 700 c.e., along with irrigation and soil-control features. The bow and arrow replaced the spear, and the turkey was domesticated. Between 900 and 1100, the Anasazi built planned communities of up to eight hundred rooms throughout their territory. Probably the largest and best known are in Chaco Canyon, but outlying “great houses” of Chacoan style also dot the remainder of the San Juan basin. Another Anasazi variant of this period is represented at Mesa Verde National Park, Colorado. Both areas were largely abandoned by 1300, when prehistoric Puebloan peoples began concentrating in the areas where modern Pueblo tribes live today.

The Pueblos

There are twenty different tribes of Pueblo Indians today, representing four major language families and six languages. Three Tanoan languages (Tewa, Tiwa, and Towa) join Keresan, Hopi, and Zuni as language groups still actively spoken in their pueblos. A fifth language group, Piro, is now extinct in the Southwest.

The Tanoans and Keresans, called the Eastern Pueblo tribes, live mainly along the northern Rio Grande and its tributaries in northern New Mexico. They include the Tanoan pueblos of Jemez, Taos, Picuris, Isleta, Sandia, San Juan, Santa Clara, San Ildefonso, Nambe, Pojoaque, and Tesuque, as well as the Keresan towns of Zia, Santa Ana, San Felipe, Santo Domingo, and Cochiti. Two other Keresan groups, Acoma and Laguna, are farther west. Zuni and Hopi are the Western Pueblos.

Despite linguistic diversity, the Pueblos share similar architecture and organization of their apartment-house-style villages; horticulture of corn, beans, squash, and sometimes cotton; finely made painted pottery; the beliefs of their ancestor-based kachina religion; and philosophy in which personal aggrandizement is discouraged and group harmony is of paramount importance.

Eastern Pueblo men, women, and children participate in kiva ceremonies. Societies are usually organized by division into moieties (halves), each associated with one kiva. Each moiety has a chief, and power is rotated between moieties semiannually. Moieties also organize community labor for such tasks as caring for the irrigation systems that bring Rio Grande water to the fields. Although many Eastern Pueblo people practice Christianity, indigenous religion also survives in belief and practice, closely guarded and distinct from introduced practices. Many Eastern Pueblo villages are famous for their fine pottery; Keresans are skilled workers in turquoise and shell beads.

The two largest Western Pueblo groups, Hopi and Zuni, are organized into matrilineal clans and into kiva societies in the kachina religion. Usually only men participate in kachina ceremonies, dancing for rain and fertility. Both Hopi and Zuni are noted for fine jewelry and pottery.

Navajos

The Navajos, or Diné, as they call themselves, are the largest traditional Indian tribe in the United States and have the largest land holdings.

Navajo oral and religious history accords with archaeological evidence that they came to their present area between six hundred and eight hundred years ago, probably from Canada. They and the Apaches, also from the Athapaskan language family, were probably one group then. In 1598 early Spanish colonists in northern New Mexico encountered Apachean raiders and soon began to differentiate between corn-growing “Apaches de Navaju,” probably ancestors of the modern Navajo, and those who were mainly hunters and gatherers, still called Apaches today.

Differences between these two Athapaskan groups strengthened after the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which Pueblo Indians, aided by some Athpaskans, drove the Spanish colonists out of New Mexico for nearly twenty years. Fearing reprisal, many Rio Grande Puebloans fled to live with the Navajos. Pueblo traits, such as masked dancers, painted pottery, masonry construction, and probably weaving, along with Spanish livestock, entered Navajo culture. In the mid-eighteenth century, after the Puebloans had returned home, most characteristics now considered a part of traditional Navajo life crystallized, including sheep and goat pastoralism, extended family household units based on the mother-child bond, and the Blessing Way (Chantways) ceremony.

The old raiding pattern remained also, and Navajos often came into conflict with their Pueblo, Spanish, and later American neighbors. This situation led eventually to the capture of more than nine thousand Navajos by Kit Carson in 1863; they were then marched 300 miles to internment at Fort Sumner, or Bosque Redondo, on the brutal “Long Walk.” After five years of sickness and starvation, they were allowed to return to about 10 percent of their former range. Reservation lands have been increased many times since 1868. Navajos are known for their fine weaving and silversmithing.

Apaches

For the other southern Athapaskans, the Apaches, raiding as an economic strategy became increasingly important in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Although some Apache women planted corn, beans, and squash, the products of the hunt—whether wild or domestic animals—were far more integral to Apache life. Conflict between settlers and Apaches led to warfare, and then to the establishment of seven reservations, the Jicarilla and Mescalero in New Mexico and five Western Apache reservations in Arizona. Some of the Chiricahua and Lipan moved onto Mescalero lands; other Chiricahuas, those who had rebelled under Geronimo, were removed to Oklahoma. Most Apaches were settled by 1872.

O’odham

The modern descendants of the Hohokam people are the Akimel O’odham, or River Pima, and the Tohono O’odham, the Desert Pima or Papago, of southern Arizona. In the historic period, they have traditionally lived in rancherias (communities of family homesteads) near streams, irrigation canals, or wells. Homesteads usually consist of an elderly couple and the families of their married sons, who grow maize, beans, and pumpkins.

The O’odham had sporadic contact with the Spanish from 1540 on and adopted cattle, wheat, and fruit trees from them in the late seventeenth century. Contacts became increasingly negative, however, through the nineteenth century as ranchers and miners encroached on O’odham land, driving a few to become nomadic, living entirely on wild resources. Two main reservations were established in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

About four thousand Yaqui, a mainly northwestern Mexico tribe, also live in southern Arizona, having moved into the United States as a result of an early twentieth century sovereignty dispute with the Mexican government. Their traditional way of life was similar to that of the O’odham, though each rancheria belonged to one of eight towns. When Mexico wished to assert dominion over the eight towns in 1825, a rebellion began which has continued sporadically since.

Pai

The Yuman-speaking Pai, including modern groupings called the Walapai (or Hualapai) and the Havasupai, live along the most lowland drainage of the Colorado River and a tributary, the Gila. They are related to the Yuma, Mojave, and Maricopa and were once divided into numerous local groups of up to sixty persons who lived by hunting, gathering, and gardening. These small groups joined into larger units only at certain times of the year around particular resources—good gardening areas in summer or large stands of edible wild plants at ripening. At those times, marriages and friendship renewed connections between the groups. They were informally and flexibly organized, each local group coalescing around a respected leader who, though influential, was never in a position of command.

European and American contact with the Pai was sporadic and limited until the establishment of a gold field in their area in 1865 led to war from 1866 to 1869. They were ultimately placed on two reservations, the western and southern Pai together on the Walapai Reservation, and the northeastern band on designated Havasupai lands.

Bibliography

Crown, Patricia L., and W. James Judge. Chaco and Hohokam: Prehistoric Regional Systems in the American Southwest. Santa Fe, N.Mex.: School of American Research, 1991. A collection of articles on the complex archaeological societies of the Southwest.

John, Elizabeth A. H. Storms Brewed in Other Men’s Worlds: The Confrontation of the Indians, Spanish, and French in the Southwest, 1540-1795. College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1975. Outlines the early confrontations between Indians of the Southwest and the Spanish and French.

Kehoe, Alice B. North American Indians: A Comprehensive Account. 2d ed. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1992. Kehoe includes an informative overview of Southwest cultures.

Ortiz, Alfonso, ed. Southwest. Vol. 9 in Handbook of North American Indians. Washington, D.C.: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1983. Articles by the currently recognized authorities on aspects of the Navajos, Apaches, Pimas and Papagos, Pais and other non-Puebloan peoples of the Southwest. Well illustrated, excellent bibliography.