Resistance through secrecy and integration: Pueblo Indians, Catholicism, and the subversion of colonial authority

While the most well know example of indigenous resistance to colonialism in North America is the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, this overt form of resistance is one event in a longer history of Pueblo people’s struggles to maintain their religious traditions in the face of colonialism. More consistently has been the use of covert tactics of secrecy and the strategic integration of Catholicism in ways that subtly subverted colonial hegemony. This article begins with a discussion of a framework for understanding Pueblo ‘religion,’ then examines the Pueblo Indian Patron Saint Feast Days as expressions of religious agency through their intentional incorporation of Catholicism on the Pueblos’ own terms. It then explores how this came to be through an examination of Spanish colonial and missionary ideologies and practices that influenced the development of secrecy and religious adaptation as successful subtle forms of subversion that later became articulated within the Feast Days.