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

2006; Duke University Press; Volume: 86; Issue: 4 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/00182168-2006-061

1527-1900

John L. Kessell,

Archaeology and Natural History

The fact that rowdy captain Nicolás de Aguilar, arrested by order of the Inquisition in New Mexico in 1662, owned a copy of Fray Francisco de Pareja’s bilingual catechism in Spanish and the language of Florida’s Timucua Indians remains an intriguing oddity, since virtually no contact existed between Spain’s two seventeenth-century North American colonies. No governor, lesser official, or Franciscan friar appears to have served in both places. We have no firsthand comparison of the native peoples of Florida and New Mexico or of their responses to colonization. Hence, Galgano’s challenge.Feast of Souls takes its place in the parade of comparative studies animated by the Columbian quincentennial and graced recently by David J. Weber’s Bárbaros: Spaniards and Their Savages in the Age of Enlightenment (Yale Univ. Press, 2005). While Weber treats unincorporated Indians all over Spain’s American empire, mainly in the second half of the eighteenth century, Galgano confines himself to incorporated mission Indians in Florida and New Mexico during the preceding century.It may be too much to say, as Galgano does, that “without the presence of Indians, no Spaniard would have settled Florida or New Mexico” (p. 1). Guarding the homebound route of treasure fleets through the Florida Straits or the silver mines of northern New Spain offered reasons enough. Yet, it is difficult to image the development of these two economically depressed colonies without Indians or Franciscans. Reassuring us repeatedly that the native peoples of Florida and New Mexico “were active participants in the drama that unfolded in the seventeenth-century Spanish missions” (p. 64), the author seeks to discern and categorize the many ways they “negotiated” their cultural survival.More familiar with colonial New Mexico, I had convinced myself long ago that there was no other place like it. I wondered if Galgano’s suggestive, side-by-side ethno-historical examination would shake that belief. The unique trajectories of Florida and New Mexico — each of which the author surveys — rested on at least three foundational differences: ecological (humid coastal versus arid upland), political (loose native chieftainships versus autonomous pueblos), and geographical (ready maritime access versus landlocked isolation). The first of these dictated that European diseases would eventually wipe out the mission population of tropical, lowland Florida, while that of high-and-dry New Mexico, although repeatedly decimated, would survive in today’s plural society.At some point toward the mid – seventeenth century, there may have been 30,000 mission Indians in each province. “The Indians,” Galgano asserts, “were not naïve savages in awe of the missionaries’ theological arguments, but were savvy, discerning, religiously inclined people who understood the necessity of propitiating spiritual power, whatever its form” (pp. 71 – 72). Accepting Christianity’s attractive novelties and the accompanying material benefits, the incorporated Indians of both colonies nevertheless rebelled: Florida’s Guales in 1577 and 1597, Apalachees in 1647, and Timucuas in 1656, and New Mexico’s Pueblos in 1680 and 1696. Contrasting these uprisings, Galgano points out basic differences in native polities and motives. The allied villages of Florida, with their respective councils and elders, proved difficult for any paramount leader to marshal and sustain. In contrast, New Mexico’s autonomous Pueblo communities, especially those farthest from Santa Fe, more often resorted to quick unilateral violence. The Timucuas rose in 1656 in a calculated but vain attempt to force more-favorable relations with the colonial regime, while the Pueblos in 1680, finally united by unprecedented environmental crises, aimed at nothing short of annihilating the Spaniards and reclaiming their homeland.In New Mexico, geographical isolation had given rise to an oppressive spiritual monopoly by Franciscans, the colony’s only Roman Catholic clergy. While bishops sailed easily from Cuba to Florida, keeping the friars there in check, no bishop visited seventeenth-century New Mexico. Galgano mentions the New Mexican missionaries’ use and abuse of the authority of the Inquisition in their struggles with perceived enemies of their regime. Was the Inquisition a factor in seventeenth-century Florida? Were there civilian protectores de indios in Florida as there were in New Mexico?Galgano views late-seventeenth-century instability in the missions of both colonies as largely “self-inflicted” (p. 90), as civil and ecclesiastical masters bore down on shrinking Indian populations. “The essence of Spanish relations with Indians — when and for whom natives worked, where the profits went, who had the Indians’ interests at heart, and what traditional practices were sacrilegious — was at stake” (p. 90). Yet the results differed. “If Florida was bombarded by pressures from outside the region, New Mexico imploded from internal strife” (p. 155).In sum, Feast of Souls has reinforced my belief that seventeenth-century New Mex-ico was indeed like no other place.