The Pueblos

Traditional social and religious practices are fairly well understood for the western Pueblo peoples because distance and the rugged landscape of the Colorado Plateau afforded them some protection from the depredations of Spanish, and later American, colonizers. Less is known of the pre-conquest practices of the eastern Pueblos. Their location on the banks of the Rio Grande made them easily accessible to colonizers, whose approaches to assimilation were often brutal. Many Pueblos, both eastern and western, took their traditional practices underground during the colonial period in order to avoid persecution; to a great extent they continue to protect their traditional cultures with silence. Their secret societies, each of which had a specific theme such as religion, war, policing, hunting, or healing, have proven quite difficult to investigate. Undoubtedly, however, they were and are important venues for social interaction and cultural transmission.

The Pueblo peoples lived in compact, permanent villages and resided in multifamily buildings (see pueblo architecture). The women of a household cared for young children; cultivated spring-irrigated gardens; produced fine baskets and pottery; had charge of the preservation, storage, and cooking of food; and cared for certain clan fetishes (sacred objects carved of stone). The men of a household wove cloth, herded sheep, and raised field and dune crops of corn (maize), squash, beans, and cotton. A wide trade network brought materials such as turquoise, shell, copper, and macaw feathers to the Pueblo tribes; many of these exotic materials appear to have come from Mexico.

The family was a key social grouping; extended family households of three generations were typical. The western Pueblos and the eastern Keresan-speaking groups reckoned kinship through the female line (matrilineally), while the remaining eastern Pueblos reckoned kinship patrilineally or bilaterally, through both parents. Residence usually coincided with kinship; among the matrilineal Zuni, for instance, a husband joined his wife’s natal residence (matrilocality). A Zuni household would typically include a senior woman, her husband, and their unmarried children, plus the couple’s married daughters, sons-in-law, and their children.

Related families formed a lineage, a kin group that could trace its ancestry directly to a known figure in the historical or legendary past. Lineages were often conceived of as timeless, extending backwards into the remote past and forward through generations yet unborn. Among the western Pueblo and the eastern Keresan-speakers, several related lineages were combined to form a clan; many villages had dozens of clans, which were often named for animals, plants, or other natural phenomena.

Instead of using clans, some Pueblos grouped lineages directly into two units called moieties. This was particularly prevalent among the eastern Pueblos, many of whom organized themselves into paired groups such as the “Squash People” and “Turquoise People” or the “Summer People” and “Winter People.”

Clans and moieties acted as corporate groups; they were responsible for sponsoring certain rituals and for organizing many aspects of community life. Among the matrilineal Hopi, for instance, each clan owned specific fields and ritual paraphernalia and the oldest active woman functioned as the clan’s administrative leader. Her brother assumed the responsibilities of ceremonial leader, supervising annual reenactments of events that were part of clan history or tradition. At San Juan pueblo in the east, the kinship system was bilateral, and the fluidity inherent in a bilateral system was reflected in the moiety system as well: one was born into membership in one’s father’s moiety, but upon marriage a young woman became a member of her husband’s division. At San Juan the leaders of the Summer and the Winter moieties were each responsible for village administration during their respective season (spring and summer were grouped together, as were autumn and winter). Many activities were limited to just one of the seasons; trading and hunting, for instance, could only take place under the authority of the Winter moiety, while the gathering of wild plants was limited to the period of the Summer People’s administration.

Clan and moiety systems were important tools for managing the delegation of ritual and mundane tasks, but were also important in achieving harmony in other ways. Membership in these groups was symbolically extended to specific animals, plants, and other classes of natural and supernatural phenomena, metaphysically linking all aspects of the social, natural, and spiritual worlds together for a given tribe. In a concrete political sense, as well, the common (though not universal) custom of clan or moiety exogamy, or out-marriage, smoothed social relations by ensuring that households included members of different corporate groups.