While this book at first seems to be occupied with the question "What happened during the Pueblo Revolt?", the question it actually seeks to answer is "Why does the Pueblo Revolt remain such a mystery?" Some readers may be frustrated by the number of times the author says something like "This is one of archaeology's deepest mysteries" or "Sources on this topic are unfortunately scarce," I think he makes a good case for why the mysteries and knowledge gaps of the Pueblo Revolt, and the ways in which both modern and historical peoples have approached those mysteries, are interesting in and of themselves. The author does a careful job of centering his sources in the narrative, contextualizing historical Spanish writers and describing the methods that produced later scholarly work in detail. In particular, he focuses on the complicated act of being a Puebloan who studies and writes about Puebloan history or archaeology, including testimony from several such scholars he interviewed. He also does a good job of acknowledging bias and perspective in the sources and scholarship he used to write this book, including the limitations of his own "Anglo" outsider perspective. This is a good book for learning about how scholarly communities have interacted with the pueblos for the sake of research, both historically and recently, and learning about a variety of different perspectives on the Pueblo Revolt--but it might leave you with more questions than you started it with. ( )

This is a “popular” history, distinguished by the author injecting first person observations into a recounting of the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 to 1692, when Spanish settlers were temporarily forced out of New Mexico. The account of the Spanish side of the affair is straightforward; various native groups somehow organized a simultaneous uprising (despite having mostly mutually unintelligible languages), kill all the Franciscans they can get their hands on, wipe out isolated settlements, and besiege Santa Fe until the Spaniards negotiate a withdrawal. What’s simultaneously frustrating and thought-provoking is the author’s discussion of his attempts to get the story from the Puebloan side.


The first frustrating thing here is the author’s apparent assumption that there will be useful history on the Puebloan side: that Pueblo oral tradition has preserved reliable accounts of the Pueblo Revolt for three hundred years and change. I say “apparent” because Mr. Roberts sometimes expresses delicate skepticism of the accounts given by Puebloan guides to visiting tourists. I suspect he’s stuck here; he’s an author of books on Native American history and if he doesn’t treat his subjects gently he’ll never get to talk to any of them again. To allow the astute reader to get this point, he recounts various incidents where anthropologists and archeologists deceived their native hosts into telling them things or giving them objects that were not supposed to passed to outsiders.


He also recounts a number of cases where Puebloan (and Zuni and Hopi, who are strictly not Puebloan) xenophobia has increased in the last 20 years or so. Archeological sites that were once open are now closed off as “culturally sensitive” and previous informants now won’t answer his letters or return his calls. A particularly interesting point is that while we have dictionaries of ancient Egyptian and Sumerian, which were last spoken millennia ago, there are thousands of people living in New Mexico that speak a language no one but them knows. (I personally encountered this once - I was asked to contribute words for numbers in Egyptian for a grade school project collecting numbers in various languages. I had a Puebloan “friend of a friend” and casually asked her if she could write out the words for numbers in Tewa.. She (who had never behaved like this before) became frighteningly indignant, vehemently proclaiming that the whites had stolen everything else from her people and now they wanted the language too. I was taken aback but reading Mr. Roberts experiences gives me some idea of what was going on).


That leads to the thought-provoking part inspired by Mr. Roberts book: to what extent to “we” owe respect to Native American traditions, religions, and practices that are contrary to “our” notion of what’s right and proper? Roberts discusses a tantalizing rumor that the Puebloans have preserved a large stock of colonial Spanish documents and artifacts that were looted - well, taken as legitimate war prizes - during the Pueblo Revolt. His attempts to discuss this things, or even get otherwise friendly Puebloans to confirm or deny that such things existed, were met by blank refusal. Is this a loss for science and history or proper respect for another culture? There have been lots of other cases - Kennewick man is probably familiar to most of you. “We” have, without doubt or question, treated natives atrociously in the past; does that justify granting them privileges that would not be extended to other groups now? (A group of AIM members recently camped out in a Denver city park without a permit, in preparation for their protest at the Columbus Day parade. They explained that they had received permission from the local tribe and didn’t need any from the “colonial occupiers”. They were unmolested. I wonder what would happen if an anti-abortion group tried the same thing and explained they had permission from God?)



I’m not claiming I have the answer to this problem. I have a vague uneasy feeling that I probably do “owe” something to native Americans, but I can’t really justify it philosophically. The best I can come up with is that the religious beliefs of native peoples are an “archeological artifact” in and of themselves, and therefore some extraordinary effort to preserve them is probably justified. ( )

Entertaining and engaging, yet it falls short of the previous book in that there is much too much subjectivity in the book. Roberts (whose other books I've enjoyed) is more focused on shooting down the Hispanic influence and reactions to the Pueblo Indian issues than trying to rationalize in a serious manner their ineptness, which honestly is not hard to do. ( )

Usually I give these a 5 star - if I could get the non-fiction obscure story read - it has to be good for the rest of you. (in my opinion!)
However, you'll be upset with me, if you pick this up and expect an easy read. Took me a few "renews" and "recheck outs" to get thru all this history.
Nonetheless - truly ENJOYED this view into heretofore unknown history.
Won't travel thru this part of the southwest, without a much different perspective now.
( )