Land, culture, and sovereignty in the Pueblo Dance Controversy.

In November 1922, the Council of All the New Mexico Pueblos issued "An Appeal to the People of the United States" in protest against the Bursum Bill, then under debate in Congress. The Bursum Bill was intended to settle longstanding title disputes over ancestral Pueblo lands, but its opponents claimed it would strip the Indians of approximately sixty thousand acres. The council, which included delegates from all nineteen of New Mexico's pueblos, protested not only against this threatened loss of land, but also against the bill's potential to disrupt every aspect of tribal life. They wrote, "This bill will destroy our common life and will rob us of everything which we hold dear--our lands, our customs, our traditions." (1) This Pueblo statement linked the preservation of land and of culture, and over the next several years the Pueblos were forced to defend both.

In the midst of bitter public debates over the disputed Pueblo lands, the Bureau of Indian Affairs (BIA) issued new policies aimed at severely restricting traditional Native American dancing. Although these policies applied to all Indians, the ensuing controversy focused largely on the Pueblos because so much public attention was already focused on them. Many of the people involved in both the Pueblo land and dance controversies, including the Pueblo Indians themselves, saw connections between the two disputes. But despite their observations, historians have not yet explored the extent or significance of these connections. (2) This essay does so, arguing that the early-twentieth-century pressures on Pueblo landholdings were among the reasons for the attempts to repress Pueblo culture and sovereignty in the period. More specifically, those who wished to reduce Pueblo landholdings both contributed to and benefited from the attacks on Pueblo tribal governments and ceremonies. Of course, this dynamic is not unique to the Pueblo experience. The history of federal Indian policy is one of attacks on both Indian land and Indian culture, and these attacks have often been intertwined in complex ways. Thus, the controversies over Pueblo land and Pueblo religion illustrate some of the interrelationships among land, culture, and sovereignty in American Indian history.

By 1920, the longstanding controversy over Pueblo lands had reached crisis proportions. The 1848 Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo stipulated that the United States would recognize the Pueblo Indians' ownership of the land grants given them by the Spanish crown, as Mexico had done. But rival claimants also held grants from the Spanish and Mexican governments to some of the same lands, resulting in ongoing legal confusion. Furthermore, most New Mexicans assumed that the Pueblos had the right to sell their land, and in some cases Pueblo individuals did so, generally without tribal approval. The 1876 U.S. Supreme Court Joseph decision affirmed this right when it defined the Pueblos as "civilized Indians" and therefore not wards of the federal government. By the early twentieth century, large numbers of Hispano and Anglo settlers had claimed portions of the historic Pueblo land grants, some through purchase from legitimate titleholders, either Hispanos or Indians, and others by illegally settling on the land. San Ildefonso Pueblo reported in 1922 that of the 12,000 acres in its original land grant, only 1,250 acres were irrigable, and they retained possession of only 248 acres of that irrigable land. (3) Despite numerous Pueblo complaints, the federal government had given these "civilized Indians" virtually no assistance in combating this loss of land. But to the dismay of most non-Indians in New Mexico, the 1913 U.S. Supreme Court Sandoval decision reversed Joseph, ruling that the Pueblo Indians were entitled to the same federal protections granted other Indians--including protections against their land being sold to or settled by non-Indians. Over the course of the next ten years, government attorneys filed a series of suits on behalf of the Pueblos, including a suit for San Ildefonso, intended to evict settlers who did not have legitimate title, but these progressed very slowly. The situation grew increasingly tense and even violent as some settlers fenced in their claims, and the Indians tore down the fences. (4)

The 1922 Bursum Bill was an attempt to resolve these land disputes. Most observers believed that many of the non-Indian claims merited consideration, particularly where there was evidence of good-faith purchase prior to the Sandoval decision. But at the insistence of New Mexico politicians, who were notoriously unsympathetic to the non-voting Indians, the bill would have awarded nearly all disputed land and water rights to the non-Indian claimants, even where they had no evidence of good-faith purchase. (5)

When the All-Pueblo Council protested that this bill would have destroyed Pueblo ways of life, they did not simply mean that the loss of land would threaten their cultural survival. The Bursum Bill also aimed to regulate Pueblo culture and sovereignty. It would have assigned jurisdiction over the "internal affairs and government" of the Pueblos and "all crimes and offenses" committed on Pueblo lands to the state courts, which were notoriously unfriendly to Pueblo interests. (6) These sections of the bill, intended to reduce both tribal and federal authority in favor of the state, reflected another longstanding dispute regarding jurisdiction over civil and criminal complaints in the pueblos. For many years, frustrated by the interference of BIA agents and state courts in their internal affairs, Pueblo leaders had asked that the Interior Department formally acknowledge their right to govern themselves and to impose discipline within their own communities. (7) However, many BIA agents wanted to limit the power of the Pueblo governors and to impose federal control, both as part of the BIA's civilizing mission and to defend the Pueblos from hostile state authorities. Meanwhile, non-Indian land claimants, wanting to weaken the position of both BIA agents and Indians, advocated for state jurisdiction over Indian affairs. (8) Many of these claimants were poor Hispano or Anglo settlers, but others were wealthy land investors (including the Denver & Rio Grande Railroad Corporation), and it was the latter's aims that the Bursum Bill would have codified. (9) In an apparent political deal with New Mexico's congressmen, the Interior Department supported this bill even though its own agents in New Mexico opposed the bill's provisions for both land and governance. (10)