Other Slavery, The MP3 CD – MP3 Audio, January 17, 2017

An interesting introduction to thinking about enslavement of American Indian people from the beginnings of colonization. Reséndez traces not only explicit enslavement, but also the ways in which enslavers (particularly Spanish enslavers) managed to keep systems of enslavement in place even when laws dictated they should fall apart. Through this analysis, Reséndez makes the systems of enslavement that still exist more legible as such.His analysis does fail entirely to go into the ways that sexual violence was a major part of this--he makes clear that women were more highly valued on slave markets, but just erases the reasons for that, which mirrors the continual erasure of the amount of sexual violence that Native women experience to this day. This massive gap in his analysis really needs to be addressed, and the fact that it is not in this book is really a problem.Nevertheless, undoubtedly this book will open doors for more historians to examine this phenomenon, and to begin to make connections intellectually between American Indian enslavement and African enslavement on the North American continent, making both avenues of thought more productive.

I reviewed this book in the journal New Oxford Review in June 2017 and give it a very high rating. Most of the book is about the enslavement of Native Americans in Latin and Central America and in the Indies, but there is a very important section about the enslavement of Native Americans in the United States in the 19th century especially in New Mexico, California, and Oregon. That is what my review is focused on. Here is a small section from my review: "James Calhoun, the Indian agent in New Mexico in 1849, found “a market for captives” and a “highly coercive” system of servitude, but did nothing to stop it. A “peon,” he wrote, “is but another name for slaves as that term is understood in our Southern States.” In 1850 a veteran of the U.S.-Mexico War joined some sheepherders going to California and saw them buy Indian children in New Mexico in exchange for horses and later sell them in California to acquire “large herds” of sheep. In 1850, a new California law allowed for any Indian deemed a “vagrant” to be leased out to the best bidder for four months and for captive Indian children to be indentured in homes or on farms. Moreover, the same law stated that a white man could not be convicted on the word of an Indian, and that an Indian could not appeal from the decision of a justice of the peace. From 1854 to 1857, slavers, “ revolvers in hand, regularly descended on small Indian bands, shot the men and sometimes the women, and caught the boys and girls between the ages of eight and fourteen.” In 1860, an amendment to the 1850 law allowed for any person in “charge” of an Indian minor to secure the “custody, control, and earnings” of that minor by going before a justice of the peace: “This resulted in more kidnapping parties roaming the Golden State to obtain suitable children and murder their parents, as well as the intensification of the Indian wars in the early 1860s.” There were nearly 6,000 Indian children serving as “apprentices” in settlers’ homes in 1864 and 1865. George Hanson, superintendent of Indian Affairs for northern California, deplored this “slavery” and tried to bring kidnappers and slavers to justice. In 1867 Senator Charles Sumner caused Congress to pass the Peonage Act, plainly prohibiting involuntary labor to pay off debts."

Slavery is an important postcarbon topic because given our past history, future wood-based civilizations after fossil fuel depletion will certainly return to slavery, that’s the kind of species we are. Even hunter-gatherers had slaves.The main reason we don’t have slavery today is that fossil fuels provide each American with about 500 “energy” slaves each as I write about here.It’s clear that slavery has existed since towns and cities began (Scott 2013 Against the Grain). If you read the Old Testament, it is full of slavery (Wikipedia 2020 The Bible & Slavery), as I discovered when I tried to read the Bible in High school. I can’t begin to express how sad and angry I was. Plus how awful women were treated. It’s one of many reasons I became an atheist.Some key points:Indian slavery never went away, but rather coexisted with African slavery from the 16th through late 19th century. Until quite recently, we did not have even a ballpark estimate of the number of Natives held in bondage. Since Indian slavery was largely illegal, its victims toiled, quite literally, in dark corners and behind locked doors, giving us the impression that they were fewer than they actually were. Because Indian slaves did not have to cross an ocean, no ship manifests or port records exist.Slavery had been practiced in Mexico since time immemorial. Pre-contact Indians had sold their children or even themselves into slavery because they had no food. Many Indians had been sold into slavery by other Indians as punishment for robbery, rape, or other crimes. Some war slaves were set aside for public sacrifices and ritual cannibalism. Some towns even had holding pens where men and women were fattened before the festivities. All of these pre-contact forms of bondage operated in specific cultural contexts.In pre-contact North America … Indian societies that adopted agriculture experienced a sudden population increase and acquired both the means and the motivation to raid other peoples. The Aztecs, Mayas, Zapotecs, Caribs, Iroquois, and many others possessed captives and slaves, as is clear in archaeological, linguistic, and historical records. Nomadic groups also had slaves. But it is possible to find some nomads who were reluctant to accept even individuals who willingly offered themselves as slaves to save themselves from starvation. For some of these groups, taking slaves was simply not economically viable.The end of native American slaveryThe impetus did not originate in abolitionist groups. Instead it came from that much-maligned institution, the United States Congress. Although the intended beneficiaries of the 13th amendment were African slaves, the term “involuntary servitude” opened the possibility of applying it to Indian captives, Mexican peons, Chinese coolies, or even whites caught in coercive labor arrangements.It is clear that the introduction of horses and firearms precipitated another cycle of enslavement in North America. Read all about it in “Thundersticks: Firearms and the Violent Transformation of Native America“ by David J. Silverman 2016.

Great Book