Rebecca Solnit: Diary

Rebecca Solnit

The first thing you see at Virgil Ortiz’s exhibition Continuum: Blindfall, First Strike, at the Vladem Contemporary branch of the New Mexico Museum of Art in Santa Fe (until 18 October), is a monumental head on a pedestal. The head has a band of black across the eyes, a row of five topknots marching from forehead to nape, and a pattern of spikes on a looped line across the hairless skull. It’s glossy raku ceramic, white with blue glaze dripping like fine rain across the head and face, and represents a historic figure, Po’pay, the catalyst of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in which the Indigenous people of dozens of communities in northern New Mexico rose up against the Spanish invaders and drove them out. Or rather it represents a once and future Po’pay, whom Ortiz has conceived as part of a grand mythologising of the Indigenous revolt that preceded by almost a century the 1776 American Revolution and which, in his narrative, continues far into the future.

‘Po’pay 2180: Leader of the Pueblo Revolt’ (2026). Glazed raku ceramic, by Virgil Ortiz. © Virgil Ortiz.

Facing Po’pay is another monumental head, this one of a fictional figure, Tahu, leader of the Blind Archers, who recurs in Ortiz’s mythology, including in the wall-size video projection at the far end of the show. In the video, the blind archers transcend normal sight to strike by way of spiritual force. ‘When they blinded me, I stopped seeing the world they forced on us,’ the video text relays, as we watch a beautiful woman, her upper face masked in black. ‘The archers move by memory.’ The video shows the Spanish invading with armoured dogs of war (a black sculpture of one such dog, made by Ortiz’s collaborator Eric J. García, is to the side of the screen) and the Indigenous resistance, including strange, patterned creatures that seem an answer to the dogs of war. A clay version of one of these creatures is perched in front of the screen.

Ortiz was born in 1969 and saw Star Wars as a young boy; he says that he has loved science fiction ever since. The ceramic figures he makes have travelled a long way from the traditional art of his people, but they’re recognisable descendants. The title of his wider mythological project, Revolt 1680/2180, suggests that tradition and innovation, the past and the future, are not at odds with each other – a potent reversal for people who have been told for centuries that they must assimilate or be left behind. Ortiz has spent the last two decades building his mythic narrative of the once and future war as an answer to the question: what if the resistance never stopped? What if Po’pay’s warriors travelled forward, from 1680 all the way to 2180, protecting Pueblo sovereignty across centuries?

The Pueblo are agrarian dwellers in communities across what is now northern New Mexico, with each pueblo a distinct nation. (Early Spanish invaders called them Indios de los Pueblos, or Indians of the Towns, in contrast to the more nomadic tribes they called Indios Bárbaros, and the term Pueblo Indians, or Pueblo people, stuck. The Pueblo called the armoured Spanish ‘metal people’.) They are famous for their ceramics, and Ortiz is the son and grandson of ceramic artists from Cochiti Pueblo, about thirty miles south-west of Santa Fe. A piece from 1985 by Ortiz’s mother, Seferina Ortiz, a creamy figure of an owl clutching her young in both wings, is in a glass case near the entrance, alongside a piece from the 1950s by his grandmother, Laurencita Herrera: a wide vessel painted white with black patterns and lizards serving as handles. Beside them is a white vase made this year by Ortiz. It shows a figure in black – a woman archer again – but the aesthetic is closer to punk stencils than traditional Pueblo ceramics.

Ortiz began making ceramic sculptures when he was six or seven. He was a teenager when a collector noticed his work and invited the family to Albuquerque, where he showed them his traditional Cochiti Pueblo sculptures, which Ortiz’s work uncannily resembled. Ortiz himself has stated that his ‘mission in life’ is to ensure that the Cochiti clay tradition ‘doesn’t die out’. A glass case at the Wheelwright Museum of the American Indian, also in Santa Fe, displays two dozen of his early ceramic pieces, from a small mermaid made when he was a teenager in 1985 to a preening leatherman in a chest harness and chaps from 1989 to a figure from 2023, dressed for the deer dance still practised in some Pueblo societies. A case of ceramic figures by his grandmother, aunt, mother and siblings is displayed nearby.

Last year, the curator Antonio Chavarria, who is from Santa Clara Pueblo, took me round Santa Fe’s Museum of Indian Arts and Culture. In 1997, the museum revised its permanent exhibition: Here, Now and Always was a radical departure, showing Native Americans of the Southwest through their own eyes and as individual artists rather than generic representatives of cultures. Chavarria guided me to a small painting in a glass case. A white church took up most of the background. A Native figure could be seen taking down its white cross while several more appeared to be dismantling the beams of the roof. Another was walking out of the church carrying an icon. In the lower left appeared a hanged priest in a black cassock. Wood, presumably for a fire, was being piled beneath him by Native men. A woman was bringing more wood. Soft colours, clear outlines and an air of calm made the figures seem as if they were performing everyday activities rather than overthrowing spiritual tyranny. The artist, Fred Kabotie, was Hopi and it was painted in 1976, the year the US celebrated its 200th anniversary. Some pieces of smashed church bells lay beneath the painting in the glass case, along with a framed set of knotted strings, replicating the strings Po’pay gave to runners to take to all the pueblos with instructions to untie one knot every day and rise up to drive the Spanish out when the last knot was untied.

‘The 1680 Pueblo Revolt at Hopi’ (1976) by Fred Kabotie

The uprising on 10 August 1680 was one of the most successful acts of Indigenous resistance against colonialism and is sometimes called the first American revolution. More than forty pueblos acted together to drive out two thousand Spanish priests, soldiers and settlers. About four hundred of them were killed, including 21 priests. Although we usually say the Pueblo people were ‘forcibly converted’, it’s probably more accurate to say that the Spanish forced them to act as if they were Christian, and punished and attempted to suppress Pueblo spiritual traditions. In the 1660s, some practitioners were burned as sorcerers, and Pueblo religious objects were also torched. The Native people were subjugated, forced to hand over punishing amounts of each harvest, put to work as serfs and sometimes slaves. As Ortiz puts it in his statement for the Vladem exhibition, ‘for more than eighty years, Spanish colonisers occupied Pueblo lands – suppressing ceremony, destroying lifeways, threatening our people with erasure.’

Po’pay was one of 47 men arrested and imprisoned for sorcery; on his release, he went to the remote pueblo of Taos to orchestrate the revolt. His goal was not only political but spiritual: the restoration of his people’s religious practices. The Spanish governor fled Santa Fe following the revolt, and wrote afterward: ‘They were saying that now God and Santa Maria were dead, that they were the ones whom the Spanish had worshipped, and that their own God whom they obeyed had never died.’ Twelve years later, the Spanish returned, but now the Pueblo people were able to retain more rights and freedoms.

This history hasn’t stopped being contested. New Mexico has the third highest proportion of Native people of any US state, at 12.5 per cent, as well as many descendants of the Spanish settlers, who have their own folk traditions and history. In the 1990s, a big equestrian statue of Juan de Oñate was installed not far north of Po’pay’s pueblo (called for centuries San Juan Pueblo, it reclaimed its name of Ohkay Owingeh in 2005). The statue was part of an attempt to affirm ethnic pride in preparation for the 400th anniversary of Spanish settlement: Oñate, the son of a mining magnate in New Spain, was chosen by a viceroy of King Philip II to expand Spanish territory north into the Pueblo peoples’ region.

The Spanish invaders often demanded goods be handed over without compensation, and when Acoma Pueblo, far to the west of Santa Fe, refused, and some Spaniards were killed in the resulting conflict, Oñate ordered the pueblo destroyed. In 1599, several hundred Acoma people were butchered and the surviving adults sentenced to twenty years of forced labour; the children were sent to be raised by Christian religious orders. Oñate also ordered all the men from Acoma and the surrounding pueblos have their right foot cut off; 24 men are reported to have been mutilated. This is why, in 1997, unknown protesters with good metalworking skills cut the right foot off the bronze statue and sent a picture of it to the state’s main newspaper, the Albuquerque Journal. The accompanying note read:

We took the liberty of removing Oñate’s right foot on behalf of our brothers and sisters of Acoma Pueblo. This was done in commemoration of his 400th anniversary acknowledging his unasked-for exploration of our land. We will be melting his foot down and casting small medallions to be sold to those who are historically ignorant.

This wasn’t the first act of historical revisionism by means of well-deployed tools in northern New Mexico. In 1974, a trio dressed up as official workmen chiselled the word ‘savage’ off the base of the obelisk commemorating American soldiers, including those who fought ‘the savage Indians’, which stood in the central plaza in Santa Fe. The obelisk itself was toppled on Indigenous People’s Day 2020, after protests against the murder of George Floyd expanded to include slavers and invaders on both sides of the Atlantic. The same year, the Oñate statue was put into storage. In Albuquerque, New Mexico’s biggest city, people protesting at the site of another Oñate statue, including at least one person from Acoma Pueblo, were threatened by right-wing paramilitaries, one of whom fired several bullets.

But Hispanos, or Nuevomexicanos, as these descendants of the Spanish are sometimes called, are themselves an invaded people; in 1848, the US seized the northern half of Mexico, from California to New Mexico, and imposed American law and the English language – a reminder that most of what is now the United States of America was not part of it in 1776, and would not be for many decades. Michael L. Trujillo writes that ‘the significance of the Oñate icon for many Oñate supporters may be found in Nuevomexicanos’ own subjugation to the most powerful of the three major ethnic/racial groups in New Mexico: Anglos.’ Which is to say that the population of the state consists largely of three waves of people, the second invading and exploiting the first, the third doing the same to the first and second. This past cannot be reconciled, perhaps, but it can be reimagined.

Until the 1990s, most representations of Native Americans were by or managed by non-Native people, and the story they told was one of defeat, decline, disappearance. In the 19th century, this was portrayed as destiny; in the 20th century, it was portrayed as a fait accompli, even by those who saw themselves as sympathetic to the Native cause. In the white imagination, Native Americans existed in the past tense. What survived of their cultures was imagined as static and inflexible.

In the 1990s, I visited many smalltown museums that presented the same sequence: geology, biology, static Native culture and then history beginning with the arrival of the whites. In 1987, the performance artist James Luna, a member of the Luiseño tribe in Southern California, began exhibiting himself in museums in a glass vitrine. The performance, called The Artefact Piece, mocked and disrupted the treatment of Native Americans and their cultures as relics, objects, anachronisms. (I remember what an amusing reversal of the usual order it was to see Luna walking up to an earnest white man in the front row of the audience, as he was giving a talk, and declaring: ‘I love your people’s dances!’) His vitrine is now on display (sans performer) at Site Santa Fe, a contemporary art space just down the block from Vladem. A sign on it reads: ‘Object removed for potential repatriation.’

Savage Dreams: A Journey into the Hidden Wars of the American West (1994), my second book, was in part about the representational genocide in Yosemite Valley, home to the Southern Sierra Miwok people for about four thousand years. While I was writing it in the early 1990s, I heard a photographer who had been an assistant to the quintessential Yosemite photographer Ansel Adams say in a lecture: ‘After 1870, they didn’t make Indians in Yosemite anymore.’ I found a book from the 1920s about the last Ahwahnechee, as Yosemite Valley people were sometimes called, though on her deathbed the supposedly last Ahwahnechee was surrounded by her children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren.

Jay Johnson, who grew up in Yosemite Valley and worked as a park service employee there, told me about visiting an exhibition on Native Americans while in Washington DC trying to get federal recognition for his tribe (federal recognition conveys many benefits, and many of California’s tribes were denied it). He had seen a sign in the exhibition that read: ‘It’s very sad today. There are no more Yosemite Indians.’ Johnson went on: ‘I said, “Let’s go down, talk to the people at the desk about this statement.” So we went down there and this lady, she was at the desk, and I said, “Ma’am, about that diorama about Yosemite,” and she says, “Oh, isn’t that nice?” And I said, “It’s nice, but there’s an error in the statement,” and she says, “Oh no, there can’t be. Every little word goes through channels and committees and whatnot,” and I said, “But it tells me that there are no more Yosemite Indians today.” She says, “Well, that’s true. It’s very sad but whatever’s out there is true.” So I say, “Well, I hate to disturb you, but I’m a Yosemite Indian, and we’re here on business for our tribe.”’

Since then, Native Americans have reclaimed an enormous amount of power, culture (including language revivals), land, rights and recognition from non-Native people. The assumption that Native people are extinct or never existed in a given region has largely dispersed. I have the impression that the quincentenary of Christopher Columbus’s arrival in the hemisphere in 1992 was key; planned as a celebration of colonialism, the forces of anticolonialism seemed more effective at defining what that arrival meant. ‘Five hundred years of genocide’ and ‘We are still here’ were common declarations at the time.

The 1988 Indian Gaming Regulatory Act allowed federally recognised tribes, which are in many respects exempt from state laws, to open casinos, which in turn gave them the visibility and influence that comes with money. The 1990 Native American Graves Protection and Repatriation Act required museums and universities to return human remains and sacred objects to descendants and rightful owners. All these shifts mattered. I don’t know exactly how a non-Native population that had largely ignored and dismissed Native people became more aware and more respectful, how the way we tell the history of this hemisphere shifted or why Native voices began to be heard and heeded. I do know the situation is radically changed, which is not to say it’s now totally enlightened.

Once you acknowledge that most of the Americas were inhabited or occupied long before 1492, everything changes, starting with the idea that nature in its ideal state is what they used to call virgin wilderness, in which people don’t belong. The reminder that people lived here for many generations before strip-mining and clear-cutting and other destruction opens up new – or very old – ways of relating to nature. Indigenous leadership in the climate movement from Ecuador to British Columbia suggests the importance of this understanding in pursuing a viable future. Deb Haaland, a Laguna Pueblo member and former US secretary of the interior, seems likely to become the governor of New Mexico in November – and the first Native woman governor. Peggy Flanagan, the Minnesota lieutenant governor, may become the first Native woman in the US Senate later this year (or one of the first, if the Alaskan congresswoman Mary Peltola wins a trickier race).

In 2003, the Anishinaabe scholar Grace Dillon coined the term ‘Indigenous futurism’ to describe ‘discovering how personally one is affected by colonisation, discarding the emotional and psychological baggage carried from its impact, and recovering ancestral traditions in order to adapt in our post-Native Apocalypse world’. Ortiz isn’t the only Pueblo artist whose work combines tradition and innovation. For the past year, the de Young Museum in San Francisco has displayed two customised cars by Rose B. Simpson. Both are decorated in the style of Pueblo pottery; one of them, Maria, pays tribute to Maria Montoya, from San Ildefonso Pueblo, who was renowned for black-on-black ceramic vessels. Simpson’s own mother is a ceramic artist and sculptor, as was her grandmother; all three come from Santa Clara Pueblo.

‘What if that resistance never stopped?’ Ortiz proposes. This raises the question of what constitutes resistance. In Ortiz’s work, resistance is martial, military, a war in 1680 that continues in 2180. But Po’pay and the Pueblo people were fighting for cultural survival, and the twelve-year hiatus from Spanish domination spurred a revival that continues to this day. Ortiz’s work suggests that cultural survival is or could be achieved through warfare, when in fact it seems to have been achieved by the steady practice of that culture, generation after generation, backed up by political activism on behalf of the rights of individual pueblos and Native Americans in general. But then his depiction of the once and future war is itself cultural practice. Central to Ortiz’s work is its ability to claim a future without letting go of the past, to express an individual vision while acknowledging the family and community from which it arose, just as, in its material audacity, his work insists that clay and video can coexist. In that sense, Ortiz is the answer to his own question, part of the revolution that never ended.

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