12 of 12 people found the following review helpful:
5.0 out of 5 stars
Conflict, Cultural Change, and Slavery in New Mexico, November 2, 2008
This review is from: Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Paperback)
Author James Brooks has turned out a fascinating book about slavery among American Indians and the Spanish colonists of New Mexico. We see through his eyes the cultural synthesis in New Mexico that took place over a period of three centuries among Indian tribes and Spanish colonists.
Slavery worked in many ways in the borderlands. The Indians vied among themselves for captives that could be traded among themselves, put to work, or adopted into the tribe. Spanish captured Indians and made of them family members, slaves, or soldiers. Indians captured Spaniards with the same aim. The result was an ethnic stew.
What makes this book much better than the average scholarly endeavor is Brook's use of primary sources to come up with precise information and fascinating stories of individuals impacted by slavery. For example, we often hear authors talk in generalities about the Comanches as a warlike, raiding nation. Brooks quantifies their impact. He tells us that from 1771 to 1776 that Indians, mainly Apache and Comanches, killed 1,674 people in Mexico and stole 68,256 head of livestock. That gives us a vivid picture of the scope and scale of Indians and a reason to believe that the terror they inspired was not exaggerated. (He also includes extensive footnotes so one could can the sources of his information.)
Moreover, Brooks tells us about the fate of individuals swept up in Indian raids. One Mexican boy, for example, was captured by the Comanches when he was eight, enslaved, and then sold to the Wichita when he was twenty. He then became an employee of the Spanish to deal with Indians on their borders and when last seen by history had amicably rejoined his Comanche enslavers and was enroute to New Mexico to visit his parents from whom he had been stolen twenty years before. Another woman abducted by Comanches in New Mexico ended up as a French matron in St. Louis. The ethnic stew boils and bubbles.
Brooks also looks at the internal New Mexican society and the relations among its social classes, including slaves, descendants of slaves, Christianized Indians, mestizos, and Spanish grandees. He examines slavery among the Navajo and describes their pastoral economy, as well as that developed by the New Mexicans. Along the way he looks into tidbits of Pawnee religious ceremonies, Kiowa society, the Ute and Apache, and the epidemics of European diseases that brought the high-flying Comanches down to earth.
Brooks concludes his book with a look at the coming of the Americans to New Mexico in the nineteenth century, the society they found, and their impact. He tells briefly a story about an American woman who, in 1909, learned that she had inherited 32 Ute slaves -- perhaps the last slaves in the United States.
Smallchief
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3 of 3 people found the following review helpful:
4.0 out of 5 stars
Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, February 9, 2011
This review is from: Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Paperback)
In Captives and Cousins, Brooks provided me with a dioramic view of lifestyles and conditions of my genízaro ancestors. Church records that were previously found described my Navajo GG Grandfather as adopted, "hijo natural adoptivo", while an 1865 Indian Agency report numbered him with the "Indian Captives acquired by purchase and now in the service of the citizens of Conejos County". I found that Captives and Cousins put many of the family stories that I've heard into prospective that I would not have previously understood.
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