Captives & Cousins

by Brooks, James

• ISBN13: 9780807827147
• ISBN10: 0807827142
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2002-05-01
• Publisher: Univ of North Carolina Pr

Summary

This sweeping, richly evocative study examines the origins and legacies of a flourishing captive exchange economy within and among native American and Euramerican communities throughout the Southwest Borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century. Indigenous and colonial traditions of capture, servitude, and kinship met and meshed in the borderlands, forming a "slave system" in which victims symbolized social wealth, performed services for their masters, and produced material goods under the threat of violence. Slave and livestock raiding and trading among Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, and Spaniards provided labor resources, redistributed wealth, and fostered kin connections that integrated disparate and antagonistic groups even as these practices renewed cycles of violence and warfare. Always attentive to the corrosive effects of the "slave trade" on Indian and colonial societies, the book also explores slavery's centrality in intercultural trade, alliances, and "communities of interest" among groups often antagonistic to Spanish, Mexican, and American modernizing strategies. The extension of the moral and military campaigns of the American Civil War to the Southwest in a regional "war against slavery" brought differing forms of social stability but cost local communities much of their economic vitality and cultural flexibility.

Author Biography

James F. Brooks is assistant professor of history at the University of California, Santa Barbara.

Table of Contents

List of Maps, Illustrations, and Tables
Violence, Exchange, and the Honor of Men	p. 1
Maps	p. 41
Los Llaneros: Creating a Plains Borderland	p. 45
Los Pastores: Creating a Pastoral Borderland	p. 80
Los Montaneses: Traversing Borderlands	p. 117
Elaborating the Plains Borderlands	p. 160
Commerce, Kinship, and Coercion	p. 208
Peaks and Valleys: The Borderlands Speak	p. 258
Closer and Closer Apart	p. 304
Epilogue: Refugio Gurriola Martinez	p. 361
Chronology	p. 369
Glossary of Spanish and Native American Terms	p. 373
Navajo Livestock and Captive Raids, 1780-1864	p. 377
New Mexican Livestock and Captive Raids, 1780-1864	p. 382
New Mexican Peonage and Slavery Hearings, 1868	p. 385
Acknowledgments	p. 405
Index	p. 409
Table of Contents provided by Blackwell. All Rights Reserved.