This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
In 1675 Spanish colonial authorities in New Mexico arrested forty seven Pueblo religious leaders on charges of sorcery and publicly whipped several of them, among them Po'pay of Ohkay Owingeh, part of a decades long Franciscan mission campaign that had banned traditional Pueblo ceremonies and destroyed kivas and sacred objects across the province. Po'pay went on to organize a coordinated uprising in secret from Taos Pueblo, reaching dozens of villages across northern New Mexico that spoke different languages, and on August 10, 1680, Pueblo forces attacked in coordinated waves across the province in a single, secretly planned action.
The uprising killed hundreds of Spanish colonists and missionaries within days and forced the entire surviving Spanish population, roughly two thousand people, to abandon New Mexico and retreat south to El Paso del Norte. The revolt is properly read as a rebellion against Spanish colonial rule in which resistance to forced Christianization and the defense of Pueblo religious practice were its central and organizing grievance, not as a war between two faiths each seeking to displace the other: the Pueblo peoples sought the restoration of their own ceremonial life under their own governance, not the conversion of the Spanish.