NOTE:
Bring all the relevant reading, discussion, and lecture material to bear when you think about questions and your answers.
In each case, the question asks you to discuss a slice of history, taking into account the large social, economic, and cultural picture. In order to answer the question adequately you will need to use specific incidents or examples to support your interpretation.
Dates are useful to help you remember and organize your information, but the significance of events and their interpretation form the core of good essay answers.
Major Themes:
Changes in Pueblo and Spanish economy, society, and culture as a result of contact with the other people.
The nature of Native American resistance and accommodation to the Spanish. Aspects of Indian history, cosmology, and culture that enabled them to resist or adapt. Aspects of the Spanish efforts at colonization that assisted the accommodation or resistance of Native Americans.
Different methods used by historians, anthropologists, and others to approach the problem of interpreting the past of people who did not write their own history.
Sample Questions:
Why do you think the colonization and conversion of New Mexico in the seventeenth century was so violent, difficult, and ultimately unsuccessful?
What could a Spanish Franciscan reader of the 1530s learn about how to work among Native groups in Texas from the Journal of Cabeza de Vaca?
Describe the significance of the Great Pueblo Revolt of 1680 for both the Pueblo Indians and the Spanish settlers.
Discuss the construction of Spanish colonial society in New Mexico during the seventeenth century and how it affected Pueblo-Spanish relations.
Compare and contrast the reasons (or lack of reasons) for Spanish colonization to 1700 in the regions of the Southwest (New Mexico, Texas, California).
What understanding of the current situation in the Río Grande Pueblos does Don Diego de Varga's journal of the 1692 entrada into New Mexico display?
Discuss the utility of Pueblo myth and memory for the study of Pueblo history before Spanish contact and during the early stages of colonization?