Four Square Leagues: Pueblo Indian Land in New Mexico

Epilogue

321 Epilogue A cross much of the United States, the history of Indian land tenure is a sad tale of treaties broken, homelands lost, and forced migration to federally designated reservations far from the sacred sites of the ancestral homelands of the tribes, the places sung about and recounted in myths and origin stories. In New Mexico, the story of Pueblo land tenure was different . Although many Pueblo villages that existed at the time of the arrival of the Spanish in New Mexico disappeared within the next century, those that survived generally managed to maintain their control of lands surrounding their villages. A policy developed of respecting Pueblo rights to a “league”—an area of four square leagues, centered on the Spanish mission church in the village —a policy unknown elsewhere in Spain’s dominions. In writing this book, we have attempted to discover the origin of the concept of the Pueblo league and how it was put into practice in New Mexico. Among the questions we have sought to answer were whether these grants of four square leagues represented a minimum or a maximum entitlement to each pueblo and how those land grants relate to Pueblo landholdings today. In order to respond to such queries, we have examined thousands of pages of the documentary record over the last twenty years. The case studies presented in this book are the result of this research. We now believe that evidence exists that before the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, at least some Pueblo lands were delineated and monumented, a fact recalled by village elders in later years. After the reconquest of New Mexico in the early 1690s, as Pueblos and their Hispano neighbors came into conflict over land, the practice of measuring a Pueblo league was recorded over and over again EPILOGUE 322 throughout the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. From the outset, Pueblos were actively involved in measuring and monumenting their land. They participated in the process of verifying the accuracy of the cordel, measuring the land, and setting their own boundary markers. Pueblo Indians taught their children where the boundary monuments were, even hiding some of them underground so they could be found if the other, more visible markers were removed, as they sometimes were. It is also now clear that Spanish authorities occasionally granted more land to Pueblo Indians, in small tracts between pueblos, for example, and in very large tracts as grazing grants. Such a picture emerges only because the Pueblo league was tested in court on numerous occasions, most often in the case of Pueblos trying to defend themselves against encroachment by their Hispano neighbors. Several pueblos were also able, even during the Spanish period, to enlarge their recognized landholdings through purchases of additional land from Hispano settlers. In a remarkably short period of time, some Pueblos became adept at maneuvering within the Spanish system of land tenure, engaging with their Hispano neighbors in the business of buying and selling land under the rules of the Spanish legal system. In the main, Pueblos defined their ownership of the land as communal, so that no individual Indian could sell it, although there were occasional exceptions, some of which resulted in conflict between adjoining pueblos or with non-Indians. There can be no doubt that some Pueblos grasped the complexities of the Spanish and Mexican legal systems, and some, notably Cochiti, Santa Ana, and Santa Clara, went to extraordinary lengths to pursue justice. When the situation required it, Pueblo Indians traveled to Chihuahua, Durango, Guadalajara, and Mexico City to present their cases in courts of appeal in an effort to establish ownership of their Pueblo league or of land they purchased from Hispanos. Pueblos usually won these legal battles, especially when a protector of Indians represented them, but their victories won in courts of appeal were not always respected in New Mexico, and favorable rulings were not necessarily implemented. Encroaching Hispanos often flatly refused to leave Pueblo land, invoking the time-honored privilege accorded all Spanish citizens to obey but not comply with orders (obedesco pero no cumplo). Under Mexican rule, the Pueblos faced new challenges as their land came under attack by Hispano settlers and government officials who asserted that 323 EPILOGUE the 1812 Cortes of Cadiz sanctioned privatization of “unused” Indian land within the Pueblo league. Pueblos again filed petitions with the government in Santa Fe or Mexico City and achieved legal victories that were not...