The Pueblo Indians of the Southwest - Essay Example

It can be assumed that this was the case for the Pueblo people of the southwestern United States. By the time the Spanish first encountered the Pueblo peoples in the 1500s, they were already living in settled villages and had established trade agreements with neighboring tribes. The purpose of this paper is to discover more about who these people are, their pre-history, history after encountering Europeans and their conditions into the present day. The Pueblo people can be generally divided into two major groups – the Western Pueblos who engaged mostly in dry-farming and the Eastern Pueblos who were irrigation farmers living near the rivers (Eggan, 1950).

In addition to their differences in form of subsistence, these peoples also differed in the languages they spoke. According to Eggan (1950), there were as many as seven individual languages spoken among these peoples, several of which were themselves complex blends of yet other languages. This illustrates the high diversity of the peoples generally grouped as Pueblo people as well as giving some sense of the age of the society at the time of first European contact as it takes a long time for languages to blend in this way.

Major subdivisions popularly recognized include the Hopi and the Anasazi. Nearly all surviving Pueblo peoples today live in New Mexico and Arizona, with a few living in far west Texas. When the Spaniards came in contact with the Pueblo people, they noticed many differences between their culture and that of the Indians. To begin with, the Indians had a greater respect and appreciation for their women and expected women to take an active role in the welfare of the camp. Even as late as the 1800s, when many tribes had already been forced onto reservations or into more stationary roles, women retained much of this respect.

Although speaking of Indians living nearer her own home, the same types of behavior