Pod Insights Stuff You Missed in History Class SYMHC Classics: Pueblo Revolt About this episode This 2014 episode covers the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, in which Native Americans rose up against Spanish colonists and missionaries at the turn of the 17th century.
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2:08 Tracy V. Wilson? Happy Saturday. In this week's episode on Francisco Menendez and Fort Mose, we talked about how in the United States, Jamestown and the British roots of the United States tend to get way more attention than St. Augustine and the nation's Spanish roots, unless maybe you live in Florida where St. Augustine is. And we also said both of those get a lot more attention than cities that were established and continually occupied by indigenous peoples such as Acoma Pueblo. So today's Saturday classic has connections to Acoma Pueblo and its history, as well as to other Pueblos that have also been continually occupied for centuries. It's our January 29, 2014
2:49 Tracy V. Wilson? episode on the Pueblo Revolt. If I were writing this episode today, after more than a decade of working on the show, instead of in 2014, when I had been co-hosting it for less than a year, I would probably take a totally different approach to the introduction. It is true that the idea of history being written by the victors is something that gets thrown around a lot, but it is not as true in practice as we make it sound in this intro. Another good counter example is the lost cause mythology surrounding the US Civil War. We did a whole episode on that that ran as a Saturday classic on March 8, 2025. So enjoy.
3:31 Holly Frey? Welcome to Stuff You Missed in History Class, a production of iHeartRadio.
3:43 Tracy V. Wilson? Hello and welcome to the podcast. I am Tracy V. Wilson.
3:46 Speaker 05 And I'm Holly Frann.
3:48 Tracy V. Wilson? So Holly,
3:49 Speaker 05 Yeah.
3:49 Tracy V. Wilson? How often have you heard somebody say, "History is written by the victors"?
3:53 Speaker 05 I can't even count how many times I've said it.
3:54 Tracy V. Wilson? I know, we've said it a lot on this podcast. Today, we're going to talk about a pretty giant exception to that conventional wisdom, which is the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. And in this revolt, Native American peoples, who are collectively known as the Pueblos, rose up in unison against Spanish colonists and missionaries who had started settling the area at the turn of the 17th century.
4:19 Speaker 05 These settlers were Catholic and had begun systematically converting the native population and had also forbidden the practice of the pueblo's traditional religions. So on August 10th, 1680, the pueblos in multiple villages rose up simultaneously against the settlers. They threw off the colonial government and lived outside of Spanish rule for the next 12 years. This was probably the most successful indigenous uprisings in North American history, but because the pueblos were not keeping written records of their history at the time, it was a largely oral tradition. Most of the history on this one was actually written by the losing side. Where we do have written records of the Native
5:00 Speaker 05 American point of view, it's in the form of testimony that was given orally by pueblo peoples and written down by Spanish priests. So it's clearly not an unbiased account where we do have the Native American perspective on things. This is what we're going to talk about today. This huge revolt of which we have very little record Of the victor's side. Yeah. So for background, before the arrival of European settlers, the part of the world that's now northern Mexico and the southwestern United States was home to several tribes of native peoples who fit very broadly into two groups. And one group was the more mobile hunter-gatherer peoples, and that included the Navajo and the Apache.
5:44 Speaker 05 And the other group included the Native Americans, who were living in established permanent settlements that Spanish colonists dubbed pueblos. So pueblos are communal living situations with terraces and flat roofs. They are built around a central court and above an underground ceremonial chamber called a kiva. Once the Spanish coined the term pueblos, the various peoples who lived in them came to be collectively known as the pueblo Indians. And the pueblo peoples are most likely descended from the Anasazi, and they include the Hopi and the Zuni, among others. Pueblos do still exist today, and one of them, the Acoma Pueblo, is believed to be the oldest continually inhabited place in the United
6:27 Speaker 05 States. People have lived in it since about the year 1200. So although the pueblo peoples lived in similar-looking structures, this wasn't and isn't one homogeneous group of people. The pueblos spoke seven different languages in the 1600s, although some may have spoken Spanish as well. Each individual pueblo governed itself and had its own customs and its own cultural nuances.
6:54 Holly Frey? Spain made its way to this part of the world with the intent to conquer land and convert the people living there to Christianity. And last but not least, on their agenda was finding a bunch of treasure. And some of that would fold back in to fund their first and second agendas.
7:11 Speaker 05 Right. And in a lot of views, the the primary agenda was really treasure.
7:17 Speaker 05 But the treasure, there was in some, some components of it, like the treasure had an end besides just treasure in itself.
7:24 Holly Frey? Right.
7:24 Speaker 05 And that was conquering and converting. Spanish settlers made contact with the pueblo peoples in the early 1500s, when Marcos Denez, who was a Franciscan friar, claimed the whole region for Spain. The infamous conquistador Coronado also made his way through in 1540, and conquistador Juan de Onate made a voyage there with 400 settlers in 1598. At that point, he established New Mexico as a Spanish colony, and that's really when Spanish colonization of the area started in earnest.
7:57 Holly Frey? And the whole vast hordes of treasure idea didn't pan out for New Mexico, and Spain wanted to abandon the area. But the Franciscans made a case for their mission work, being far too advanced to just come to an end abruptly. So they continued on with the aim of converting the indigenous population and ministering to the ones that they had already been successful in converting.
8:20 Speaker 05 In addition to trying to convert the indigenous population to Catholicism, the Spanish authorities also forbade traditional religious practices. So when they arrived in a pueblo village, the Spanish would start by destroying the kiva, which was used for for religious and cultural ceremonies, and also was kind of like a gathering place. Sometimes they would build the church directly over the kiva site. The Spanish also destroyed masks and other items that were associated with cuchinas, and these were spirit beings worshiped in traditional pueblo religions. The Native Americans who resisted the Spanish were often subject to imprisonment and torture.
9:03 Holly Frey? And in a recurring theme regarding the colonization of the Americas, the settlers introduced measles, smallpox, and typhus. Up to 80% of the pueblo population actually died in the years after first contact due to disease.
9:18 Speaker 05 Yeah, this was not wholly a one-sided thing. There was, there were also diseases brought back to Europe from the colonies.
9:26 Holly Frey? Yeah.
9:26 Speaker 05 But not, not nearly with the lethal ramifications as happened in the Americas.
9:32 Holly Frey? 80%.
9:33 Speaker 05 A lot.
9:34 Holly Frey? Huge.
9:35 Speaker 05 Yeah. The Spanish also implemented taxation in their colonies and the rates of taxation were so high that over about a decade, the Spanish went from asking the pueblos for food to, you know, help them get started with their colony, to instead the pueblos asking the Spanish for food that had been taxed away from them.
9:55 Holly Frey? And to add to all of this, a drought started in 1666 that lasted for four years. Before the arrival of the Spanish, the pueblo people survived drought by keeping stockpiles of food and trading with one another. It was very cooperative, but the Spanish had taxed them so heavily that no one had a stockpile and trade among the pueblos was prohibited. Raids by the Apaches on the remaining meager stores made things even harder. So basically all of their resources were stripped from them.
10:24 Speaker 05 Right.
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14:11 Speaker 05 And then there was an epidemic of an unknown and deeply deadly disease in 1671.
14:17 Holly Frey? And all of this, of course, had a measurable effect on the pueblo population. Over the 75 years between the real start of Spanish settlement and the revolt, the number of pueblos dropped from about 100 to about 40. Existing today are about 20.
14:34 Speaker 05 In the minds of many pueblo peoples at the time, life was getting harder and harder, specifically because they were not being allowed to perform their religious observances. Like, a Western idea of this might be that God was exacting vengeance because he was not being worshipped enough.
14:51 Holly Frey? Right.
14:52 Speaker 05 But this was more a worldview that those observances were crucial to maintaining their quality of life and the way that the world was supposed to work. And without those observances going on, that things were going off the rails.
15:05 Holly Frey? Well, yeah, their entire culture had been upended and most of their traditions stripped away.
15:11 Speaker 05 Right.
15:11 Holly Frey? So, yes, that will pretty much ruin your life. Your structure has been completely taken away. Spanish authorities cracked down harder on dissent after the Acoma revolt in 1599. And in this revolt, the Acoma pueblo attacked a party of Spanish people who asked them for supplies.
15:33 Holly Frey? So, uh, Spanish authorities had cracked down harder on dissent after an event that actually took place sometime before in 1599, and that was the Acoma Revolt. And in this revolt, the Acoma Pueblo attacked a party of Spanish people who had asked them for supplies. The Spanish then burned down the town and massacred every male living there who was over the age of 25. And in the aftermath of this revolt, floggings, public executions, and sentences of slavery became more common. So after that whole thing had happened, the Spanish, basically, their approach to anything was gonna be swift and cruel.
16:13 Speaker 05 And pretty decisive, yeah. Yeah. So, uh, over the development of, you know, the, the diseases and taxation that we've just talked about, other revolts were also going on. But because the Pueblos were so spread out, most of them were really too small to be effective. And in some cases, Native Americans who were loyal to the Spanish had tipped them off to what was happening. So there was resistance going on through this whole time, but it wasn't really strong enough to gain a foothold.
16:41 Holly Frey? It was a little piecemeal.
16:42 Speaker 05 Yeah.
16:43 Holly Frey? Uh, in 1675, Spanish authorities rounded up 47 pueblo religious leaders and convicted them of sorcery and conspiring to rebel. These leaders were beaten publicly and they were sentenced to slavery. Four were sentenced to execution, though one of them committed suicide rather than be executed.
17:03 Speaker 05 One of the imprisoned holy leaders was a man named Popay, and he was from San Juan Pueblo.
17:09 Holly Frey? Popay and the other leaders were released that same year. Uh, Popay went to the northernmost pueblo, Taos Pueblo. There, he reported being visited by three spirits who gave him a prophecy. Abundance would return to the Pueblos if they purged their world of Spaniards.
17:25 Speaker 05 So the Spanish described this event as having had a conversation with the devil. And most of the Spanish writing about the revolt from the time characterizes it as the work of the devil, not as a result of Spanish oppression or of the Pueblo's grievances against the Spanish colonists.
17:42 Holly Frey? So, over a period of years, Popay started to organize the pueblo people, who were living in villages that spanned up and down the Rio Grande Valley, and they sprawled out over more than 300 miles of territory from east to west.
17:55 Speaker 05 So, to address the language barrier that we referenced earlier, which was one of the things that had prevented all these different pueblos from uniting in the past, Popay gave each of the villages a knotted cord, which he delivered to them using runners. And the villages were supposed to unknot one knot from the cord every day. And on the day that the last knot was untied, that would be the day that everyone was to rise up against the Spanish.
18:22 Holly Frey? And also given to the runners were pieces of deer skin that were marked with pictograms. Popay rehearsed their meaning with the runners before they left.
18:31 Speaker 05 So, the plan was to simultaneously attack the Spanish in all these different villages using weapons that people had stockpiled and hidden, and then to destroy the churches and kill the priests, and then to kill the Spanish or drive them out of their towns. From there, the pueblos planned to converge to turn their attention to the Spanish capital at Santa Fe.
18:53 Holly Frey? Two of the runners that Popay sent out were captured, giving the Spanish advance warning of what was going to happen. Additional runners were dispatched to tell all the pueblos to move the revolution earlier. News didn't make it to all the outlying pueblos in time, and a few pueblos appeared to have declined to participate in the plan.
19:11 Speaker 05 Yes, there are some descriptions of this that make it sound as though this was a completely unanimous action on the part of the pueblos. And for a lot of reasons, it wasn't. Some of them seemed not to have gotten the news from the runners in time. Others seemed to have consciously made the decision, for whatever reason, either because they were sympathetic to the Spanish or were allied with the Spanish, decided not to attack the people who were living there at that point. So regardless of all of that, on August 10, 1680, many of the pueblos, along with allies from the Apache and the Navajo, attacked in more than 20 villages.
19:53 Speaker 05 Together, they killed 401 Spanish soldiers and civilians, including 21 Franciscan priests. And that was about 2/3 of the ecclesiastical force living in New Mexico at the time. We have absolutely no casualty count on the Native American side. We have no idea how many pueblos died during the fighting.
20:12 Holly Frey? At least one priest, who was Father Juan Grayrobe at Zuni Pueblo, reportedly survived by putting aside Catholicism and taking up pueblo practices. And he eventually married a Zuni wife. There's a lot that's actually unclear about this story, though, since it's pieced together from multiple testimonies that were given orally by Native Americans and then written down by Spanish priests. So the veracity of any element of it is a little bit questionable.
20:40 Speaker 05 Yeah, we've sort of established that this is probably what happened. Later, in a part that we will get to in a bit, the Spanish did return and apparently found this particular pueblo still practicing a lot of elements of Catholic religion, led by Father Juan Grayrobe, who had kind of assimilated into the pueblo culture.
21:04 Holly Frey? Fascinating. That could be a podcast in and of itself, I would imagine. If we had better records.
21:09 Speaker 05 If we had enough records to do that, which we really don't. Once the fighting was done in the villages, about 2,500 warriors attacked the colonial headquarters at Santa Fe. And survivors in Santa Fe and from the surrounding villages all fled to the governor's palace and they were laid siege to. Eventually, the pueblos cut off the water supply. Another group of refugees fled to the Isleta Pueblo, which was 70 miles to the south and apparently had not taken part in the fighting. The lieutenant governor was there with a group of survivors.
21:46 Holly Frey? And eventually, on August 21st, the governor decided to abandon New Mexico. He and the survivors, who had taken refuge in Santa Fe, managed to flee down the Rio Grande. And exactly whether this is because they were allowed to go or were just a strong enough presence not to be messed with is still a matter of some debate. The lieutenant governor decided to abandon New Mexico as well.
22:09 Speaker 05 Yeah, we pretty much know that they all left and the Native Americans allowed them to leave. But we have no record of the rationale for why everyone was allowed to leave at this point.
22:21 Holly Frey? Yeah, if they cut a deal or if they just were strong enough that they were like, we're just gonna let this happen.
22:25 Speaker 05 Yeah. Along with some of the pueblo peoples who were loyal to Spain, everyone went to El Paso del Norte, which today is Juarez, Mexico.
22:34 Holly Frey? And for 12 years, the pueblos were actually free from colonial rule.
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23:13 Tracy V. Wilson? Guess who's back in the house? The old gays return for season two of Silver Linings, their hit podcast from iHeart's Ruby Studio in partnership with ViiV Healthcare. Just wait until you hear what hosts Robert McMillan and Jess A. have in store this time around. They strut back down memory lane navigating life, love, loss, and everything that shaped them along the way. And as usual, someone just might break into song. From leather bars to bathhouses, dance floors to drag brunch, nothing stays off limits. These are the kinds of insights that can only come from experience. So listen to your elders, honey, and discover the silver linings you can take with you. All sass, zero filter, and decades of perspective from four friends proving that queer joy
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25:36 Speaker 05 So after the revolt, Pope toured the pueblos and instructed people to really throw off all Spanish influence. Many people underwent a ritual bathing that was meant to wash away their baptism. Christian marriages were also voided until a traditional pueblo ceremony could be performed.
25:54 Holly Frey? And the pueblos burned down villages that the Spanish had built, including Spanish-built pueblos that the native peoples had been living in. They basically wanted to eradicate anything the Spanish had touched.
26:04 Speaker 05 Yeah. They burned down mission churches and smashed the bells. They whipped statues, gouged out the eyes of religious paintings. But this really didn't happen in every single pueblo. This is another thing that a lot of times in modern accounts, you will see this as a universal thing that happened in every single pueblo to the same extent. But there's really a lot of variety in exactly how much each pueblo village did or did not reject Catholic influence at this point.
26:32 Holly Frey? And some of their tribes, some of the tribes actually moved their pueblos to more defensible vantage points to better defend themselves in case the Spanish returned.
26:40 Speaker 05 Many of the new pueblos that were built after the revolt were built immediately adjacent to other villages that dated back to the 12th or 13th century. So it sort of seems as though that in addition to going back to their traditional ways, they were also going back to the places where their ancestors had lived.
26:57 Holly Frey? But Spanish influence was not entirely destroyed. Some Spanish introductions to pueblo culture, including raising cattle and sheep, had become part of the way of life there. And Popay decreed that people should go back to planting corn exclusively, but some continued to plant wheat and barley, which had also been introduced by the Spanish.
27:18 Speaker 05 There were also pueblo people at this point who identified as Christians and who didn't want to give up their religion. These people would salvage and hide what they could, or incorporate Christian themes into their traditional spiritual practice. So you can see some kind of merging of the two influences in the archaeological record in some places.
27:40 Holly Frey? The Spanish started to attempt to retake the pueblo area in 1681. There were skirmishes and sieges that went on for years.
27:50 Speaker 05 Popay died in 1688, and there really wasn't another charismatic leader to take his place and try to unite all the people of the different pueblos. And even before his death, his leadership had really weakened. He wound up dying in disgrace. There's some suggestion in the testimonies that was taken orally from the pueblo peoples, that there were pueblos that went along with Popay because they were scared of him and not because they actually wanted to rebel. It's kind of hard to figure out whether that is really what people thought, or whether that is sort of an addition of the Spanish translators. But the fact that he did die in pretty much not a state of respect or reverence makes it seem like maybe there was...
28:35 Holly Frey? There's some merit to that angle.
28:37 Speaker 05 Yeah, some merit to that part of it. Also, the sort of back to the old ways that he was advocating did seem like in some times that it was sort of back to the old ways as envisioned by Popay. Some of the pueblos that were rebuilt after the revolt have more in common with Popay's particular people than with the pueblos that they were replacing.
29:01 Holly Frey? And weakened by years of fighting and a loss of a central leader to coordinate their efforts, the Pueblo peoples once again fell to the Spanish, and that was in 1692.
29:10 Speaker 05 At this point, though, the evangelical policy of the Catholic Church did become somewhat less oppressive in terms of religious expression. So there were still missions and churches being built, missionaries still tried to convert people, but they didn't really stand in the way of the Pueblo peoples' free religious expression at that point. So while there was still a whole colonial system going on, the Pueblo peoples did have more of an ability to carry on their historical traditions and their spiritual traditions.
29:42 Holly Frey? But unfortunately, that did not stop things from being bloody in the reconquest process. So while there were some peaceful surrenders, in other places, the Spanish actually went house to house and burned people in their homes.
29:56 Speaker 05 That's pretty bloody all around.
29:58 Holly Frey? Uh huh.
29:59 Speaker 05 Historical archaeologist Matthew J. Liebman frames this whole revolt as a revolution and not a revolt. And he draws some parallels between it and the American Revolution. Basically, in both cases, there were farming people who were unhappy with the leadership, who organized at night to rise up and get rid of an oppressive colonial government that they were unhappy living under.
30:20 Holly Frey? And today, there are about 75,000 people of Pueblo descent still living.
30:27 Speaker 05 Yes, we're not talking about people who existed only in the past. As we said earlier, one of the Pueblo's is one of the most, or one of the oldest continually inhabited places in the United States.
30:37 Holly Frey? Yeah, so the culture endures to some degree.
30:39 Speaker 05 It does. It endures, and a lot of the Pueblo's that still exist are still inhabited in a way that's similar to how they were inhabited at this point in history. A lot of them are places that people can visit if they are interested in learning about. There are a lot of resources online to kind of get a sense of what the etiquette is of going, like what people can, what visitors can and cannot witness and can and cannot do and participate in.
31:10 Holly Frey? We can add that to our list of history podcast road trips.
31:13 Speaker 05 Yes, the Pueblo trip.
31:15 Holly Frey? That would be very cool.
31:16 Speaker 05 There's a statue of Pope in the Statuary Hall in the United States Capitol. It's one of the seven Native Americans who were represented in the Statuary Hall. And as we've talked about, there are nuances to this story. So, you know, for that reason, it was a pretty controversial addition to the Statuary Hall. It was carved by Cliff Ragua of Hémes Pueblo, and it depicts him. He's, uh, he's holding the knotted cord that was used to help time everything correctly.
31:47 Holly Frey? Which is really a pretty ingenious timing device.
31:51 Speaker 05 Yeah.
31:51 Holly Frey? Simple, but effective.
31:53 Speaker 05 I, I also watched a, a video that pointed out that it's kind of weird where it's positioned because where, where the statue of Pope is, you can see over his shoulder, this, um, this big mural of Columbus, quote, discovering.
32:10 Holly Frey? Oh, heaven.
32:12 Speaker 05 Uh, but because of the way the statue happens to be positioned, he's, his face is kind of turned away from that.
32:18 Holly Frey? Interesting.
32:18 Speaker 05 Yeah. I, I don't think that was a deliberate, I think it just worked out that way.
32:23 Holly Frey? Fascinating.
32:25 Speaker 05 Yeah.
32:31 Speaker 05 Thanks so much for joining us on this Saturday. If you'd like to send us a note, our email address is [email protected] . And you can subscribe to the show on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.
32:53 Holly Frey? A rare disease diagnosis can change your life, but it doesn't have to define your future. In season seven of Untold Stories: Life with a Severe Autoimmune Condition, host Martine Hackett continues the conversation with people living with MG, CIDP, and the broader rare disease community, exploring what comes after diagnosis through stories of hope, progress, and connection. Produced by Ruby Studio in partnership with Argenx. Listen on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts.
33:25 Speaker 09 In military families, service is more than a job. It's a legacy. At American Military University, that legacy can help open new doors through education. If someone in your family served in the military, you could be eligible for reduced tuition. Take the next step with flexible online programs built for real life. Learn more at amu.apus.edu/military.
33:48 Tracy V. Wilson? You ever show up late to the game and your friends already saved your seat, your drink, even a plate? That's looking out. That's having your back. And that's exactly what AT&T does with the AT&T Guarantee. They know staying connected matters, so they actually guarantee a network that comes through when it counts. AT&T has connectivity you can depend on, or they'll proactively make it right, just like that friend who takes care of things before you even ask. AT&T: Connecting changes everything. Terms and conditions apply. Visit att.com/guarantee for details. This is an iHeart Podcast. Guaranteed human.
Previous Behind the Scenes Minis: Coffee, 'Pirats' and Sea Robbers Next Hercules Posey & the President’s House Page updated October 31, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated