Moquis and Kastiilam

In 1655 Padre Fray Salvador de Guerra, the Franciscan missionary stationed at the Third Mesa 1 pueblo of Orayvi, ordered the arrest of a Hopi man named Juan Cuna.According to three other Hopis from Orayvi, Guerra punched and kicked Cuna until he was "bathed in blood" and dragged him into the church, where he tied him to a ladder and whipped him "on the back, belly, and all of the other parts of his body."Then Guerra "scalded him from head to foot with a large lump of turpentine, and he burned him with it."Finally, the missionary dispatched Cuna and "other idolaters" to Awat'ovi."Unconscious and speechless," Cuna died before he reached Second Mesa. 2 Guerra's actions were so horri c that even his fellow Franciscans in Nuevo México were shocked.After the Hopi governor of Orayvi brought Guerra's abuses to the attention of Padre Fray Antonio de Ybargaray, the custodio, or head, of the missions, Ybargaray ordered an investigation into Guerra's conduct.The rst part was held in the Second Mesa village of Songòopavi, where the Franciscans heard from numerous Hopi witnesses as well as Guerra.The investigation then moved to mission headquarters in Santo Domingo, where Ybargaray and ve other Franciscans found Guerra guilty of killing Juan Cuna and in icting other abuses on the Hopis."Incorrigible, arrogant, and haughty," Guerra had disobeyed Ybargaray and violated other rules of the Franciscan order as well."As much for the peace and tranquility of this custodía and the reputation of our sacred religion that is so annihilated by the excesses and scandals said padre has committed in little more than two years since he came to this custodia, as for the consolation and relief of the natives whom he has so harassed in the administration he has had in his charge in this brief time," the investigators ordered Guerra to be secluded in the convento of Quarac until he could be sent back to Mexico City to be judged by his Franciscan superiors there. 3 don't know if Guerra ever traveled to Mexico City.Four years later, he was stationed at Taos.A decade later, he was serving as the right-hand man of Padre Fray Alonso de Posada, comisario of the Holy O ce of the Inquisition.If he was punished, his punishment was short-lived.The documentary records of the Guerra investigation give the who, where, and what about the case.They also provide the "why," but only for the Franciscans, not Juan Cuna or the other Hopis.All the documents say about him is that Guerra "caught him in a sinful act of idolatry." 4The "idolatry" is never speci ed.The investigation recorded the testimonies of numerous Hopis, but those testimonies only reveal the cruelties and other abuses Guerra in icted.As the great ethnohistorian Edward H. Spicer noted, we are always "looking through a glass darkly" when we read the Spanish colonial record.In Spicer's words:The expansion of Spain in the New World, like the expansion of other European nations in the Americas, Africa, and Asia, is a series of events the record of which will remain forever incomplete...It is not that there was any lack of European commentators-there were many.But the natives of the invaded regions were not literate people, and therefore what they thought and said about what was happening to them was never adequately recorded. 5tive Oral Traditions and the Story of Sitkoyma Moquis and Kastiilam: The Hopi History Project is an attempt to make that glass a little less dark.In our two published volumes, we not only translated and annotated Spanish documents about the "Moquis," as the Spaniards called the Hopis, but also elicited Hopi oral traditions about the "Kastiilam," or Castilians, their term for the Spaniards.Comparing and contrasting these two sources of information provide a much richerand darker-interpretation of their shared past than the Spanish documentary record alone.