The traditional image of slavery in the United States is one of Africans taken from their homeland in packed, disease-ridden ships across the Middle Passage of the Atlantic Ocean to plantations of the American South. Although this statement is historically accurate, there is another side of slavery in the Americas that many of us do not know. In a pathbreaking book, historian Andrés Reséndez (Changing National Identities at the Frontier: Texas and New Mexico, 1800-1850) examines the "other slavery"- Native American slavery- from the time of Christopher Columbus' "discovery" of the "New World" to the early twentieth century after the American Civil War, when African Americans and Indians were supposedly emancipated but other forms of slavery existed. One theme that emerges from this book is that even though legal and legislative prohibitions against Indian slavery existed on paper, slavery continued. In 1542, in response to reformers like the Dominican friar and first appointed "Protector of the Indians" Bartolomé de las Casas (1484-1566), the Spanish monarchy issued the New Laws, seeking to prevent the exploration of Indian peoples by the encomenderos, or large landowners. However, Spanish administrators in the Americas did not feel compelled to implement these orders, as many officials benefited from indigenous slavery. In 1674, responding to new reforms proposed by the crown against slavery, Governor Juan Enriquez of Chile wrote defiantly in a letter to the king in the tone of the dictum "Obedezco pero no cumplo"(I obey but not comply). And in the United States, Congress enacted the Thirteenth Amendment to the U.S. Constitution in 1865 prohibiting enslavement of African Americans, but failed to eradicate Native American slavery in the West and Southwest (only with the passage of the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924 did Congress offer federal citizenship to all Indians living in the United States). True, many Native Americans participated in the slave trade from the beginning of European colonization, especially the Comanches of the American Southwest, as Reséndez points out. Among the Indian nations in the American South prior to removal in the 1830s, the Cherokees owned the largest number of African slaves. Tribes like the Iroquois adopted captives to replace warriors slain in battle. By the late seventeenth century Indians in the Southwest had acquired European weapons and horses and were able to become more adept at taking slaves. It can be argued that Europeans transformed the power of the Indians' slaving as peoples like the Comanches had more mobility in taking captives with horses. Like Reséndez's previous book Changing National Identities at the Frontier (2004), The Other Slavery is an excellent example of the new, transnational history unrestricted to the boundaries of any one country. He starts with the Caribbean and moves on through Central America and Mexico and into North America, particularly the Southwest under Spanish, Mexican, and Anglo American rule. His book builds on other scholarship on Indian slavery, including Alan Gallay's The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670-1717 (2002) and Brent Rushford's Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France (2014). Reséndez's work also shows that there were slaveries, not one singular slavery, in American history. Reséndez, Andrés, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Boston: Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.
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CategoriesAuthorTom Schmidt lives in Prescott Valley, AZ. Archives
October 2018
CategoriesArchives
October 2018
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