The Twelve Years Nobody Teaches

In September of sixteen ninety-two, the Spanish returned to Santa Fe. The building they reclaimed had been Pueblo headquarters for twelve years. What had happened inside it during those twelve years is a question that the written historical record cannot fully answer, because the Pueblo people who governed from it did not keep their records in writing.

Between August ten, sixteen eighty, and September sixteen ninety-two, the Pueblo peoples of Northern New Mexico governed their own territory without Spanish colonial authority, for the first and only extended time since fifteen ninety-eight. This is the longest period of Indigenous self-governance in what is now the United States following European contact. That fact appears with regularity in academic history. It appears rarely in public history.

What the Pueblo people did with those twelve years is documented primarily in Pueblo oral tradition. The ceremonies that Spanish colonial priests had prohibited were restored. The kivas that the missionaries had attempted to suppress were reactivated. The objects of traditional practice that had been hidden during decades of colonial rule were brought out again.

Po'pay, who led the Revolt, died around sixteen eighty-eight, roughly four years before the Spanish returned. His governance was not without conflict. Some Pueblo oral traditions describe him as a liberator; others note that his post-Revolt authority was at times severe, enforcing the return to traditional practice with a rigidity that created its own tensions. The full complexity of those twelve years is held in oral tradition, in the knowledge of the Pueblo communities whose independence it was.

When Diego de Vargas arrived in sixteen ninety-two, the reconquest was negotiated rather than simply imposed. The Spanish came back with formal recognition of Pueblo land rights and reduced religious coercion. The events of sixteen eighty had permanently changed the terms.

The twelve years are not nothing. They are the proof that expulsion was possible.