Kristopher McVeigh
Professor Roberts
9 November 2017
Native American Cultures Thought Paper
This weeks readings discussed heavily the Native People of the SouthWestern
region of North America. Among these the groups are often split into what are called
Pueblo and non-pueblo groups who settled in these regions. This region was prone to
contact with European colonists mostly from the southern Mexico region as well as from
the coastal California missions and expansion from there. This being said, the primary
influence would then be from the Spanish Colonists and religious leaders and some
from the United States, but the majority of early contact came with Spaniards.
An interesting trademark of these early Pueblo Native AMericans is that they
were most often part of sedentary towns that farmed and had sometimes existed where
they stood for hundreds of years. This is quite different from a large majority of the
groups of Natives we often study which often are more nomadic or have seasonal living
arrangements. Even once you use the classification of Pueblo vs non-pueblo natives
there are key differences in further subcategories. For example, according to Westerns
Pueblo social traditions, land and inheritance lines were controlled by women which
gave them of course great power, as opposed to in the Eastern Pueblo region where
inheritance and ways of measuring inheritance were considered bilateral.
One of the very interesting concepts to me was supernatural being the Pueblo
people believed in and “dressed up” (I use this loosely due to their belief that these were
people that were a true manifestation of an early ancestor or messenger) as. While they
had many important religious significance they also performed social functions that