Yowe, The Priest Killer

This is an Ogre Kachina, a spirit in Hopi spirituality, sometimes a personification of things in the real world. This particular Kachina is known as Yowe, The Priest Killer to some non-Hopi people based on an account during the Pueblo Revolt in 1680, where a Franciscan priest was beheaded.
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Catholicism was a cancer forced upon indigenous people of the Southwest and all of U.S.. Missionaries burnt ceremonial pits (kivas), masks, and sacred objects. Indigenous people were tried in Spanish courts and received severe punishments, even death.

In 1675, Spanish governor at the time Juan Francisco Trevino learned of a meeting of medicine men and dispatched troops to arrest 47 of them and executing three, a handful were released as a warning to abandon their meetings and practices and one of those medicine men was Popay from San Juan Pueblo.

The Pueblo Revolt, or better known as Popay’s Rebellion in 1680 was an event in now Pueblo, New Mexico, of a successful uprising of Indigenous Pueblo people and retaliation against Spanish colonizers in an effort to reclaim their sacred practice, culture, and land.

Spanish losses were great, but to take away from this event was that this was a fight for basic human rights and freedom, the right to simply exist on their own land.