Arizona and Southwest Indian Tribes

This examination of the Spanish treatment of the Arizona and Southwest Indian tribes will first consider those peoples and their relationships with each other. By first looking at the possible origin of the Southwestern U.S. Indian tribes, one can see who the Spaniards encountered in the late 1700s and thus know what effect the Spaniards would have on them. Additionally, one might understand what those tribes are doing about that effect today.

Both Fr. Kino, the Catholic priest delegated by Spain to oversee the exploration of the Southwest, and Capt. Manje, the military officer overseeing the soldiers assigned to this operation, had their own reasons for writing the documents they left, so one can also see what they thought they were doing and compare that to what they actually did, see what legacy they thought they were leaving and compare it to the legacy they actually left.

Lucille Hooper, a 1918 University of California research fellow, related an intriguing story paralleled by a Quechan legend. Although her editor noted that the Cahuilla are more linguistically connected to the Shoshonean tribes to the west and concluded "with all their geographical proximity to the Yuma and Mohave, the Desert Cahuilla partake essentially of the native civilization of the Shoshonean coastal tribes of southern California," Hooper's story almost certainly is the same as that repeated by the Arizona Quechan, indicating a common origin. In the Cahuilla story of Mukat and Tamaioit that

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He had thus co-opted some of the tribes by using both their conversion to Catholicism and their continued enmity with other, enemy, tribes. Whereas the usual result of the introduction of Christianity into a hostile people is eventually to bring peace, sometimes even at the price of death, the political nature of Catholicism is evinced in having new converts continue their war, albeit now for Catholic purposes. This introduction of Spain's Roman Catholicism into the land it claims as its territories affects the history and development of that land and its people even today. Besides Arizona's late admission into the Union and its role in U.S. history as a refuge for outlaws, which, like the history of Florida, could be traced to it being under a different government, many of the people, and Indians, are still Catholic. Tom Kuhn described his accompanying a clan of Pima Indians as they celebrated La Posada, the peculiarly Spanish Christmas rite otherwise unknown in America. He concludes, "But I had not missed noticing that in nearly every house we visited, there were corn offerings to old spirits." Thus, one legacy of the Roman Catholic Church was spiritual confusion. Meanwhile, other Indians are nowadays making a conscious e

Category: History - A