All-Pueblo Council
The continued assault on tribal lands and traditional practices did not come as a surprise to the Pueblos. By the 1920s, these politically distinct and linguistically diverse communities concentrated along the Rio Grande Valley in present-day New Mexico had grown accustomed to dealing with the unwanted presence of outsiders. Indeed, the All-Pueblo Council had been in existence since 1598, the year the Spanish colonial project began in earnest. During the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, Pueblos fended off invasive salvage anthropologists, challenged assimilationists, and confronted local, state, and federal interests on taking possession of Pueblo land. No sooner had the Pueblos defeated the Bursum Bill, which aimed to dispossess them, than they had to fight for their spiritual lives. This document, signed by seventy-four delegates from fourteen Pueblos, exposes a matrix of subjection that threatened Pueblo notions of being and belonging. But it also reveals a sophisticated strategy of using the values, principles, and institutions of an oppressive system against itself. Consider, in particular, their use of a rights-based discourse that would have been familiar to non-Indians.56
The Council of All the New Mexico Pueblos, assembled at Santo Domingo Pueblo this Fifth day of May, 1924, issues the following declaration, addressed to the Pueblo Indians, to all Indian, and to the people of the United States.
We have met because our most fundamental right of religious liberty is threatened and is actually at this time being nullified. And we make as our first declaration the statement that our religion to us is sacred and is more important to us than anything else in our life. The religious beliefs and ceremonies and forms of prayer of each of our Pueblos are as old as the world and they are holy. Our happiness, our moral behaviors, our unity as a people and the peace and joyfulness of our homes, are all a part of our religion and are dependent on its continuation.
To pass this religion, with its hidden sacred knowledge and its many forms of prayer, on to our children, is our supreme duty to our ancestors and to our many hearts and to the God whom we know. Our religion is a true religion and it is our way of life.
We must tell how our religious freedom is threatened and is denied to us. We specify first the order issued by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs to Indian Superintendents, dated April 26th, 1921. In that lengthy order, the Commissioner gives a list of “Indian Offenses for which corrective penalties are provided.” He places upon local Superintendents the duty of determining whether Indian religious observances “cause the reckless giving away of property”; are “excessive”; promote “Idleness, danger of health and shiftless indifference to family welfare.” “In all such instances the regulations should be enforced.” And one of our present Superintendents of the Pueblos thus states his attitude in a printed Government report: “Until the old customs and Indian practices are broken up among this people we cannot hope for a great amount of progress. The secret dance is perhaps one of the greatest evils. What goes on I will not attempt to say but I firmly believe that it is little less than a ribald system of debauchery.”
We denounce as untrue, shamefully untrue and without any basis of fact or appearance, and contrary to the abundant testimony of White scholars who have recorded our religious customs, this statement, and we point out that the Commissioner’s orders, quoted here, to be interpreted and enforced by the Superintendents, is an instrument of religious persecution.
We next refer to the circular addressed “To all Indians,” signed by the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and dated February 24, 1923. He states, “I could issue an order against these useless and harmful performances, but I would much rather have you give them up of your own free will and, therefore, I ask you now in this letter to do so. If at the end of one year the reports which I receive show that you are doing as requested, I shall be very glad, but if the reports show that you reject this plea, then some other course will have to be taken.” And on February 14th, 1923, the Commissioner addressed all Superintendents commending to their attention the proposals of certain Christian missionaries, stating that “the suggestions agreed in the main with his attitude.” Among these suggestions were the following:
“2. That the Indian dances be limited to one each month in the daylight hours of one day in the mid-week and at one center in each district; the months of March, April, June, July and August being excepted (no dances these months).
“3. That none take part in these dances or be present who are under 50 years of age.
“4. That a careful propaganda be undertaken to educate public opinion against the (Indian) dance.”
We Pueblo Indians of course have not consented to abandon our religion. And now the Commissioner of Indian Affairs has just visited the Pueblos, and he went to Taos Pueblo and there he gave an order which will destroy the ancient good Indian religion of Taos if the order is enforced. He ordered that from this time on the boys could no longer be withdrawn temporarily from the Government school to be given their religious instruction. These boys would stay longer in school to make up for the time lost, and there is no issue about the Indians not wanting their children to be educated in the Government schools. But if the right to withdraw the children for religious instruction be withdrawn, then the Indian religion will die. The two or three boys taken out of school each year are the boys who will learn all the religious system of the tribe, and they in turn will pass on this knowledge to the generation to come.
When issuing this order to the Taos Pueblos, the Commissioner denounced the old customs and religions and he used harsh words about us who are faithful to the religious life of the race. He called us “half-animal.”
And now we will call attention to the fact that when our children go to school, as they all must do and we want them to do, they are compelled to receive the teachings of the Christian religion no matter what the parents or the clans may desire. And the parents, the clans and the tribes are not even given the privilege of saying which branch of denomination of the Christian religion their children shall be taught. Thus a division is made between the parents and the children. And now if we are to be, according to the Commissioner’s new order, forbidden to instruct our own children in the religion of their fathers, the Indian religion will quickly die and we shall be robbed of that which is most sacred and dear in our life.
We address the Indians and the people of the United States, and we ask them to read the guarantees of religious liberty which we have received. We came into the United States through the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, and that treaty guaranteed to all the Inhabitants of the Southwest, that until such time as they were made citizens of the United States “they should be maintained in the free enjoyment of their liberty and property, and secured in the free exercise of their religion without restriction.” And we call attention to the covenant, which was a treaty, made between the United States and the People of New Mexico, whose words are embodied in the enabling act making New Mexico a State in the Constitution of New Mexico.
“And said convention shall provide by an ordinance irrevocably and without the consent of the United States and the people of said State:
“First: Perfect toleration of religious sentiment shall be secured, and no inhabitant of this state shall ever be molested in person or property on account of his or her mode of religious worship.”
We conclude this statement by asking the citizens of the United States: Shall the Commissioner of Indian Affairs be permitted to revoke these guarantees which the Congress of the United States itself could not revoke under the Constitution? We are but a few people in the Pueblos. We have inherited and kept pure from many ages a religion which, we are told, is full of beauty even to the White Persons. To ourselves at least, our religion is more precious than even our lives. The fair-play and generosity of the American people came to the rescue of the Pueblos when it was proposed to take away their lands. Will the American people not come to our rescue now, when it is proposed to take away our very souls?
We request and authorize the various organizations friendly to the Indians’ cause to act with and for us in this crisis. This appeal has been written with the help of representatives of these organizations though what it says is our own thought and our own plea.
Most of all we say to all the Pueblos who we represent—to all the ten thousand Pueblo Indians, and likewise to the Hopi and Navajo Indians: This is the time of the great question. Shall we peacefully but strongly and deathlessly hold to the religion of our fathers, to our own religion, which binds us together and makes us the brothers and children of God? There is no future for the race of the Indians if its religion is killed. We must be faithful to each other now.