Prologue Introduction Chapter 1. Debating Southwestern Slavery in the Halls of Congress Chapter 2. Indian Slavery Meets American Sovereignty Chapter 3. The Peculiar Institution of Debt Peonage Chapter 4. Slave Codes and Sectional Favor Chapter 5. Reconstruction and the Unraveling of Alternative Slaveries Conclusion Notes Bibliography Index Acknowledgments * * * * * Prologue In a January 1864 communication with Indian Commissioner William P. Dole, New Mexico Superintendent of Indian Affairs Michael Steck provided a concise description of Indian slavery that alluded to every fundamental aspect of the practice as it existed in the Southwest. Upon being taken into captivity, he explained, indigenous slaves "are usually adopted into the family, baptized, and brought up in the Catholic faith, and given the name of the owner''s family, generally become faithful and trustworthy servants, and sometimes are married to the native New Mexicans.
" In a single breath the superintendent summarized--albeit somewhat superficially--Indian slavery as it existed not only in American times but in earlier Spanish and Mexican periods as well. Steck''s previous decade of experience with New Mexico Indian affairs rendered him eminently qualified to comment upon the nature of captivity. His letter to Dole asserted the widespread cultural hybridity and concomitant transformation of human identity that emanated from captivity and dependency, practices that predated Steck''s arrival in New Mexico by three centuries. Human captivity was a critical component of indigenous warfare, labor, and social interaction in the Southwest long before the influx of European explorers and colonists that began in the sixteenth century. Complex trade networks linked nomadic people of the Plains with sedentary Puebloan inhabitants of the upper Rio Grande region through intricate commercial mechanisms, primarily involving commodities obtained through hunting, gathering, and cultivation. The exchange of human subjects, however, also formed an element of this culturally entrenched kin-based system, with adoption, dependency, and assimilation being important components. Intertribal warfare in the Southwest perpetuated a continuing captive trade, one based more on honor, community, gender roles, and kinship demands rather than on economic necessity. When Francisco Vasquez de Coronado reached northern New Mexico in 1540-41, he found a thoroughly enmeshed system of slavery emanating from warfare and raiding between sedentary Puebloan peoples and nomadic tribes occupying neighboring regions.
Coronado himself enlisted a former Indian slave--a Pawnee held in servitude at the Tiguex Pueblo--as a guide for his expedition from the upper Rio Grande Valley to the South Plains. With the arrival of the first Spanish imperialists--many of whom subverted Native inhabitants to servitude using the encomienda and repartimiento systems--multiethnic slavery institutions took on new importance in the Southwest and quickly burgeoned into a permanent fixture of community interaction. Political, military, and ecclesiastical support buttressed Euro-American influence over Indians in the Rio Grande Valley of north-central New Mexico during the early decades of colonization. Although European systems of coerced labor proliferated to a larger degree in Spain''s South American and Central American outposts, where labor-intensive sugar plantations and silver mines required large numbers of workers, colonists representing the cross and crown carried the impetus for involuntary servitude into the more northerly provinces as well. When Spaniards colonized New Mexico, they established a predominantly agricultural and pastoral economy, one that required a liberal supply of manual labor to ensure optimum production. With demand for labor exceeding the number of available working-age men and women, colonists began forcing Indians into servitude, a phenomenon first manifested in the encomienda and later in captive enslavement. Whatever their sobriquets, such systems introduced a more profit-centered form of slavery into the Southwest. The practice of forcibly removing indigenous women and children (who collectively were some two-thirds of all captives) from their tribes and subverting them to servitude entailed a widespread assimilation of Indians into Spanish culture--and vice versa--and often resulted in a transformation of identity on the part of the victim.
In New Mexico, the encomienda system, which the Spanish crown formally inaugurated in 1503, legitimized the subjugation of Pueblo Indians. Through this legal apparatus, Spaniards manipulated power relations and allowed for Indians to be claimed by settlers and soldiers who, as masters, exposed them to Christianity and protected them from enemies. In return, indigenous subjects performed menial chores and acted as either domestic servants or shepherds in the field, depending on age and gender; they also paid tributary taxes in the form of corn and other foodstuffs that they cultivated throughout the year. Perceiving this to be a noble undertaking, colonists taught Puebloan subjects to speak the Castilian language while ecclesiastics forcefully instructed them in the tenets of Catholicism, believing that this so-called salvation warranted servitude as a means of remuneration. Spanish officials not only condoned but even encouraged miscegenation between Indians and New World colonists, recognizing the social and religious benefits entailed in demographic incorporation and believing that the absorption of Native blood into Catholic lineages through the ideology of limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) would more readily foment spiritual conversion and civility. Although it continued to sanction the encomienda and remained supportive of settlers who held others in bondage, the crown insisted that such a system not be identified as "slavery" and banned settlers from holding Indians in that capacity. In 1542, the Spanish monarchy outlawed Indian slavery in the so-called New Laws, and leaders reiterated that decree in the 1681 Recopilación de Leyes (a nine-volume set of laws governing all aspects of colonial affairs), which prohibited the ransoming of captives but simultaneously and incongruously encouraged that noncompliant Indians be attacked and subverted. Even so, the redemption and exchange of captives occurred frequently throughout Spain''s colonies and effectively counteracted any prohibitory edicts issued from across the Atlantic.
Like English colonists in seventeenth-century Virginia, whose statutes-at-large mandated that "all Indians taken in warr [ sic ] be held and accounted slaves," New Mexicans easily circumvented antislavery royal cedulas by invoking the "just-war doctrine," enabling them to take captives during hostile encounters without fear of being reprimanded. In 1638, Fray Juan de Prada criticized the encomienda as a system of persecution and ominously predicted that Indians, "oppressed with new impositions and annoyances," would lash back at the ecclesiastics who collected their tribute. Time would ultimately prove him correct. At the onset of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt, an estimated one-half of the approximately two hundred Spanish households in New Mexico held Indians in varying forms of servility. The rebellion occurred because of not only cultural tensions between Natives and newcomers, but also the widespread use of Puebloan peoples as unwilling and uncompensated laborers. The successful Native insurgence ousted colonists from New Mexico for more than a decade and invoked a profound sense of fear among Euro-Americans, with the ripple effect being felt as far away as Seville. Following Don Diego de Vargas''s 1692 reconquista and subsequent reestablishment of Spanish rule in New Mexico, settlers came to better appreciate the limits to which the Pueblos could be subverted. Like the 1676 Bacon''s Rebellion in colonial Virginia--which prompted a tactical shift in coerced labor from the predominantly white method of indentured servitude to a race-based chattel system of African slavery--the Pueblo Revolt altered slaving practices in the Southwest.
By the early 1700s, enslavement of indigenous peoples began to shift toward nomadic and seminomadic Apaches, Comanches, Navajos, and Utes. Catholic missionaries actively contested the enslavement of Pueblo Indians, hoping instead to convert them to Christianity through conciliatory strategies. Long-standing rivalries between secular and clerical elements stemming from the Inquisition fanned the flames on these already firmly established hegemonic quarrels. Ecclesiastics emerged largely successful in their protestations, although Spanish captive raiding and violence toward slaves perpetuated a process of hostile reciprocation that did not dissipate until the mid-nineteenth century. Predicated upon imperial interlopers exerting symbolic psychological power and physical control over Native peoples and the spaces they inhabited, the proliferation of Indian slavery in the Southwest during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries coincided with the development of similar slave systems in the eastern part of the continent. On North America''s Atlantic and Gulf coasts, and throughout its hinterlands, English and French settlers also subjected Indians to comparable forms of denigrating and exploitative bondage. Spaniards acted unintentionally in concert with rival European imperialists in promulgating new systems of involuntary servitude across much of the continent, and in so doing all three of those foreign nations influenced the indigenous forms of labor and exchange that Indian tribes practiced. Indigenous captivity continued unhindered in part because of the material and symbolic wealth.