The colonial history of the American southwest is vastly different from that of the east coast regarding the interactions between Indigenous persons and European powers. Indigenous nations fought against European control throughout what is now the United States, but the 1680 Pueblo Revolt in New Spain was the most successful Indigenous stance against colonial rule in the Americas. In August of 1680, a diverse Pueblo population led by a religious figure named Po'Pay organized to drive the Spanish from New Mexico. An era referred to as the “freedom period” followed, characterized by Pueblo communities' self-rule until 1696, when the Spanish defeated the final Pueblo resistance. The history of the 1680 Revolt and freedom period highlights the deep cultural and spiritual ties upon which the Pueblo communities depended amidst Spanish colonialism in the seventeenth century. After the successful expulsion of Spanish forces from the Rio Grande region, there was an era of revitalization that drew on Pueblo traditions while also establishing a cultural age that differed from the precolonial period. This interdisciplinary research draws from the social psychological concept of social identity theory, which links self-worth to communal identification, to examine the cultural history of two periods, the pre-1680 Spanish colonial period and the freedom period, as well as their effects on the twenty-first century. While the documentary primary sources from the first two periods are filtered primarily through Spanish perspectives, those are supplemented in this research with archaeological artifacts uncovered by archaeologists and anthropologists and later preserved by modern Pueblo societies along with transcribed oral histories. This cultural history reveals evolving notions of social identity that, in turn, influenced other historical events. The themes crafted from the cultural battles and revitalization of previous centuries are vibrantly apparent in modern, twenty-first-century cultural practices.