Feast of Souls: Indians and Spaniards in the Seventeenth-Century Missions of Florida and New Mexico

6: Reckoning

CHAPTER SIX Reckoning Conquered by you, the New World has conquered you in turn. — Flemish scholar Justus Lipsius to a Spanish friend, 1603 T he seventeenth-century Spanish missions in Florida and New Mexico were contested ground. Despite imposing colonial governance over the Guales, Timucuas, Apalachees, and Pueblos through military conquest, the Spaniards could not compel mission Indians to adopt Christianity. While some natives did become practicing Catholics for their own motives, many others either rejected their conquerors’ faith or incorporated its tenets into Indian theologies.As long as Spaniards negotiated the conditions of mission life and the terms of religious adherence with natives, relations in mission towns were civil if not amicable. But when forced to choose between native and Spanish beliefs, most Indians opted for tradition and only returned to the missions at sword point. From the outset, Indian contact with Spanish settlers followed somewhat different paths in Florida and New Mexico. Florida’s Guales and Timucuas witnessed Spanish brutality against French Huguenots in , and wisely chose to ally themselves with the newcomers from España. They avoided provoking the Spaniards by siding with them. When the cloak of Spanish alliance proved heavy, Guales threw it off. Spain’s violent suppression of the rebels proved the seriousness of the newcomers’ intentions. Pueblos in New Mexico lacked an immediate example of Spanish military ruthlessness, but the memory of former Spanish expeditions into Pueblo territory gave them pause. Like the Guales, some 145 Pueblos challenged Spanish soldiers directly when colonial demands grew burdensome. The rebels were summarily defeated in . Where Florida’s Timucua Indians assumed that they were partners with the powerful Spaniards, the Guales and Pueblos understood that they were subject peoples. Southeastern natives, familiar with the responsibilities inherent in chiefdoms, cooperated with Spanish settlers and accepted demands for labor; independent Pueblos resented colonization and acquiesced to Spanish commands only because they were forced. From the beginning, the Indian-Spanish relationship seemed more adversarial in the Southwest. Yet the central component of early Spanish colonization of Florida and New Mexico was not martial or even economic, but religious. During the first decades of colonization, the royal government in Spain retained the two settlements on the extreme frontiers of their vast New World empire for evangelical reasons alone. The two colonies were not profitable; in fact, the operations of Florida and New Mexico were financial drains on the king’s coffers. But exaggerated reports indicating thousands of Indian conversions mitigated the economic disaster and secured the colonies’ survival with crown money. Evangelical Spanish Catholicism provided the backbone for the colonies’ organization. Franciscan missionaries moved to existing native towns and attempted to convert native peoples. Once they were faithful Christians, the mission Indians could become loyal subjects of the Spanish empire. Of course, Spanish colonists could not realistically wait for the friars to complete their task; fields needed planting, municipal structures needed building, sheep and cattle herds needed tending. Mission Indians found themselves in a missionary co-op of sorts. Natives worked while they learned Christian doctrine. For the Spaniards assumed that Christian supremacy and the prize of Christian heaven justified the colonial process, and evangelical missions became the primary mechanism by which they subdued the frontier. This is not to say that economic imperatives for Florida and New Mexico were unimportant, or that the goal of economic solvency was secondary. But it did mean that the economic aspirations Spanish authorities had were entirely dependent upon Franciscan missions. Colonial survival was contingent upon the missions’ success, and Spanish officials readily believed the early friars’ heady sanguinity. Missionaries described miraculous events, cited heavenly intercession in the conversion of the“heathens,”and described native populations devoid 146 Chapter Six of religion and eager for Christian guidance. The Franciscans’ loaded reports were intoxicating to Spanish audiences, who felt that the poor economic fortunes of Florida and New Mexico would reverse under God’s divine sanction. But the “salvation” of a multitude of Indians cultivated more optimism than success. The friars’ superficial descriptions and misshapen expectations left the Spaniards ill equipped to handle the ensuing native discontent in the frontier missions. In the first decades of frontier colonization, the doctrinas and visitas that the Franciscans administered reflected Spanish hopes more than reality. For the native inhabitants of Florida and New Mexico, mission villages were hometowns, not religious training grounds under the stewardship of foreigners. Changes in the Indians...