Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863 - W. Dirk Raat - Страница 17

Contrary to popular belief, American Indians were enslaved by each other and their European conquerors. In other words, the history of slavery in the United States includes slavery by Native Americans as well as slavery of Native Americans. The slavery practiced by indigenous groups prior to the European introduction of African slaves was a limited type of slavery that held people in servitude to work off a debt or serve a penal sentence. It is often called “de facto” slavery or “peonage.” Sometimes, as in the case of the Aztecs, slaves were used for ritual sacrifices. Slavery was often the result of “blood” revenge practices between extended families, clans, and tribes, and most of these slaves were war captives. Kinship and community overlapped with slavery, with captives (Indian and non-Indian) often being slowly integrated into the tribe. Unlike the chattel slavery of the Europeans and Americans, slaves were not simply property (commodities, credit, or assets to secure loans, capital, and investments), and slavery usually was not accompanied by sexism (although women and children were most often the victims) and racism.

In North America, several tribes held captives as hostages for payment (pawnage) or imposed slavery on tribal members who committed crimes. The Creeks of Georgia and the Comanches of Texas were notorious “slavers” and slave traders, the Comanches often trading Sioux, Navajo, and Apache women and children to Mexicans as slave laborers and domestic servants. Fishing villages like the Yurok of northern California were acknowledged slaveholders. The Haida and Tlingit were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave traders, and in the Pacific Northwest as many as one-fourth of the indigenous populations were slaves.⁶ By the early nineteenth century Indian slavery and the slave trade extended from the Great Lakes and Canada through the Greater Southwest, including southern California.

By the beginning of the nineteenth century one of the more established slave trade routes ran from the Los Angeles area in southern California, through the Mojave district on the Colorado River, on to Zuni or Durango, to the Spanish community of Santa Fé. This had been an Indian trading trail in the pre-Spanish Southwest. At the end of the Spanish colonial era it involved Ute Indians capturing Paiutes or purchasing Paiute children from their parents, and trading them to the Mojaves for horses from California and Sonora. The Mojaves would exchange their captives at markets in northern Mexico and Alta California. Some of the horses and Paiute slaves would also be exchanged for Navajo blankets, ceramics, and buffalo skins from Santa Fé. Horses that sold for $10 each in California might fetch as much as $500 in Missouri, while young female Paiutes could bring as much as $250 in the Santa Fé market. The Utes practically depopulated Nevada and Utah of their Paiute population, with any remaining Paiutes, or “Diggers” as the locals called them, enslaved by first the Mountain Men and trappers, and later Mormon settlers. All had access to the slave trade along the Old Spanish Trail.⁷

Indian and African slavery was always a tool of European expansion. To depopulate the Carolinas and Florida of their original inhabitants in order to introduce plantation agriculture (along with the international market for commodities and labor), English and American settlers and their Indian allies captured hundreds of Indians and forced their removal from their native lands. This was accompanied by violence, rape, and warfare. From 1670 to 1720 more Indians were exported out of Charleston, South Carolina, than Africans were imported as slaves—even though Charleston was a major port city for African slaves. The Choctaws and their neighbors in the Lower Mississippi Valley, battered by raiders spent most of their lives working on plantations in the West Indies.⁸

One peculiarity of American history was the possession of African slaves by Native Americans. From the early times of colonial America Indian slaves, African slaves, and European indentured servants all lived and worked together. Over time many of the Native Americans became partially assimilated and absorbed many aspects of white European–American culture, including the “peculiar institution” of African chattel slavery.

While the practice was limited in the American Southwest,⁹ the Indians of “cotton culture” country held the most enslaved blacks. This was especially true for the so-called “Five Civilized Tribes” of the Southeast, especially the Cherokees who by 1809 held 600 enslaved blacks, a number that grew to 21,000 in 1860. The Cherokee constitution, written by the Indians themselves, prohibited slaves and their descendants (including mixed-races) from owning property. When the Indian Removal Act was enforced during the 1830s, the Cherokees, Choctaws, Chickasaws, Creeks, and Seminoles took their slaves (6% of the aggregate population, or 5,000 black slaves) with them to Indian Territory (today’s Oklahoma), and later supported the Confederate cause during the Civil War.¹⁰

By the middle of the nineteenth century Indian slavery in the Southwest was a mix of three distinct traditions. The first, of course, was the kin-ordered system of the Native Americans themselves. The second was an amalgam of Indian and Spanish practices, and was not unlike the kin-based slave societies of Africa. This borderland “slave system” paralleled the African situation in several ways, including war captives, the dominance of women and children as slaves, the absence of plantations, the practice of pawnage, the role of kinship and related customs (including, for the Spanish, compadrazgo sanctified by the Church, and other kinds of social interchange that extended family relations such as intermarriage, concubinage, and miscegenation), and the agency of a “conquest” state that curtailed or promoted slavery.¹¹

Finally, of course, the chattel slavery that was introduced to America by Europeans and promoted in the Southwest by Anglo-Americans. Chattel slaves, unlike land or buildings, were simply movable pieces of property. This third system, while part of an international economy that did not always penetrate the borderlands, did share with the Spanish tradition the custom of discrimination (most Indians, especially the “wild” ones, were savages) and a belief in the slaveholder group of cultural and religious superiority. Racism, especially dark skin color denoting racial inferiority, and sexism were more prevalent among white Americans than Spaniards and Mexicans.

The European trade in Indian slaves was initiated by Columbus in 1493. Following the Italian mercantile tradition of the trading company (compañía), a small group of passive, wealthy individuals would invest in a venture in which the active partners would be shareholders. The gold seekers and/or slave traders would receive a share in the gold and/or slaves that were found or captured. Needing funds to support his New World adventures, Columbus shipped Indians to Spain where there existed a slave market that sold Africans and Muslims. The entrada or entry by slave raiders into the Caribbean followed this basic form. When the original inhabitants of the West Indies died out due to disease, warfare, and slavery, this mercantile tradition was carried to the Indian communities of Central America (about 650,000 Indians in coastal Central America were enslaved in the sixteenth century) and fringe regions south and north of central Mexico.¹²

As these expeditions moved from coast to mainland, the activity of slave hunting was transformed from the Italian compañía to the Iberian reconquest tradition of compaña or band of men (sometimes called “soldiers”).¹³ The leader(s) and ordinary men would finance the entire expedition and be whole or partial shareholders, with each man receiving a share of the booty (slaves, gold, encomiendas, etc.) based on the size of their share and their importance for the mission. For example, a powerful leader might receive several shares, while a horseman would only get one share and a foot soldier a half share. Many of these conquerors had personal servants, often Indians, whose skills, including slave hunting, were in high demand. These auxiliaries were known as naborías and were also a prelude to the history of slavery and the slave trade in Sonora and New Mexico.¹⁴ It was a blending of these Italian and Spanish heritages that was used to conquer the Greater American Southwest.

The most common arrangement between conquered and conquerors in the sixteenth century was known as the encomienda. The first conquerors who received a royal grant of encomienda to the labor and tribute of the conquered Indians were known as encomenderos. Encomienda Indians were not technically slaves since they lived in their own villages or sedentary communities. They could not be sold as individuals or separated from their own ethnic group to live under direct European influence. Yet, in the early sixteenth century, as a group they owed the encomendero both personal service and tribute. The encomienda also furnished Spanish men with Indian concubines. Although the New Laws of 1542 tried to limit the encomienda to tribute only, outlawed Indian slavery, and guaranteed the ecomienda’s existence for the life of its present holder and one successor, the encomienda (usually as a subterfuge for slavery) continued to exist well into the eighteenth century in the frontier areas of Venezuela, Chile, Paraguay, the Mexican Yucatan, and the Spanish borderlands of the Greater American Southwest. And even though the Spanish state had a stake in curtailing the owning of slaves by colonists, cannibals (such as the Caribs of the West Indies) or rebellious Indians (e.g., the Chichimeca [Apaches] of northern Mexico) could be enslaved, the latter by military personnel in the presidios.¹⁵ The institution of the encomienda was one of the major grievances that led the Indians to rebel in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 in New Mexico and Arizona.¹⁶

As the Indian population declined and the price of labor increased, the state moved to reduce the number of encomenderos and colonists who had access to Indian labor and preserve ever scarce Indian labor for state and public projects. The name for this institution was taken from the earlier period when a share was an allocation or repartimiento. The repartimiento was in full force in central Mexico from about 1560 to 1620, while it continued to exist in Peru (known there as the mita) until the end of the colonial period. Under the repartimiento Indian laborers worked in the silver mines, built forts, roads, and buildings for the army and government, and did agricultural work and construction for the Church. Again, like the encomienda, repartimiento continued to exist in frontier areas of Mexico, especially around missions and presidios in northern Mexico and the borderlands, including Florida. Although repartimiento laborers were supposed to be paid a minimal wage, and their working hours were limited, institutional means of enforcement were weak and temporary workers were often unsatisfactory laborers. Thus the colonists tended to replace them with contract workers or personal servants and/or slaves.¹⁷

Because the institution of Indian slavery on the frontier continued in one form or another after the New Laws of 1542, the government made a continued effort to outlaw the enslavement of Indians. This was partly simply a struggle between the royal bureaucracy and the colonists over control of Indian labor, but it was also the position of the Church based on Christian principles. In spite of a history of legislation opposing slavery, the institution persisted in the frontier zone beyond 1800 and the colonial era.

In 1769 an emancipation proclamation was issued by the Spanish Governor of Louisiana, Alejandro “Bloody” O’Reilly, stating that all Indian slaves were to be freed upon the death of their masters, and babies of slaves were to be free at birth. That next year Spanish St. Louis, according to census data, reported that 66 Indian slaves were being held in that city, mostly women and children. Obviously, the King’s law stopped at the gates of the city, with all the area claimed by Spain from the Mississippi to the Rocky Mountains being untouched by the Spanish edict.¹⁸

On September 15, 1829, President Vicente Guerrero emancipated all slaves in Mexico. A law in April 1830, prohibited the introduction of slaves into Spanish Texas. Needless to say, Mexican frontiersmen in Coahuila, and Tejanos (Mexicans in Texas) and Anglo-Americans in Texas protested these laws and did their best to evade the law’s intentions.¹⁹ The law was not enforced in Texas. As mentioned before (see endnote 9), 25% of the population of Texas prior to 1836 consisted of African slaves.

Although slavery had been legally abolished in New Mexico while a province of Mexico, in actuality, slavery still persisted after 1850 when New Mexico acquired US territorial status. In 1858, a proslavery faction of the territory passed a slave code known as the Otero Slave Code (named for Miguel Antonio Otero, a delegate in Congress from New Mexico), and approved by Governor Abraham Rencher on February 3, 1859. This slave code was similar to those of the southern confederate states, including provisions requiring runaway servants to be arrested, fines and punishments for slaves violating curfews, and imprisonment for any person found guilty of giving a slave a sword or any firearm. This slave code specifically affirmed “that it in no way applied to peonage and that the word ‘slave’ designated only a member of the African race.”²⁰

When, in 1860, the New Mexico legislature attempted to extend the Otero Code to male and female Indians, the governor vetoed the bill. The governor explained his action by saying: “The act apparently is founded on the supposition that the Indians acquired from the savage tribes were slaves; which is not the case; neither is it in the power of the legislature to make them such … . The normal or native condition of our Indian tribes is that of freedom and by our laws they cannot be made slaves either by conquest or purchase. We may hold them as captives or peons but not as slaves.”²¹ The governor, like most New Mexican citizens who held peons and captives, was in denial that their form of peonage or “enforced servitude of savages” was not a form of slavery. Only African slavery deserved that epitaph.

Indian slavery in New Mexico, intertwined as it was with peonage and kinship, took several decades to die. One example of this would be the ineffectiveness of President Andrew Johnson’s directive of June 1865 declaring that slavery in the territory of New Mexico was in violation of “the rights of Indians” and instructing his subordinates to participate in “an effective suppression of the practice.”²² The president’s letter elicited a response from Felipe Delgado, New Mexico’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs. To Commissioner of Indian Affairs, William Dole, he argued that:

It is true that there are among the citizens of this country a large number of Indian captives … but the object in purchasing them has not been to reduce them to slavery, but rather from a Christian piety on the part of the whites to obtain them in order to instruct and educate them in Civilization. … This has been the practice in this country for the last century and a half and the result arising from it has been to the captives, favorable, humane, and satisfactory.²³

Like an earlier generation of New Mexicans, the post-Civil War cohort denied that their form of servitude was slavery. It was simply a historical and customary way of extending Spain’s original civilizing mission. This was the dominant “local” view until the early 1880s, and Indian slavery lasted in New Mexico well into the twentieth century.²⁴

About two months after Johnson’s declaration a Hopi woman staggered into Fort Wingate. She said that she and her daughter had been attacked on the road from Cubero to Fort Wingate, and that she had been beaten and battered and her daughter kidnapped. She knew that some men in Cubero held her daughter, and she requested aid from the US military in retrieving her child. The military caught up with the man who had taken her daughter, but he protested that “he had assumed a debt which the woman contracted” and had initially taken both the woman and child as security or collateral against the debt. The matter was dropped. The merger of peonage and slavery was the way the Hopi woman and child had become servile workers in the home of the man from Cubero. Involuntary servitude was the norm and American reformers could not eliminate debt bondage, let alone slavery.²⁵

In the first half of the nineteenth century, from California, through New Mexico, to Texas, gente de razón (literally “people of reason”), that is, people of any race whose way of life was Hispanic and not Indian, maintained the Spanish practice of taking, purchasing, and ransoming Indian captives. These captives, so-called gente sin razón (“people without reason”), became involuntary members of Mexican households. Rarely called esclavos or slaves because they were legally and theoretically free, the bondage was always justified on the grounds that these pagans were baptized and received the blessings of Christianity.²⁶

In 1927, Amado Chaves recalled the traditions of his family of frontiersmen by saying that:

To get Indian girls to work for you all you had to do was organize a campaign against the Navajoes or Utes or Apaches and kill all the men you could and bring captive the children. They were yours … . Many of the rich people who did not have the nerve to go into campaigns would buy Indian girls.²⁷

If the Indian servants were fortunate enough to work off their ransom or become acculturated adults, they might be released from their masters and mistresses. But as “detribalized” peoples they found themselves in between Indian and non-Indian societies, and on the bottom perch.

Obviously, many of the gente sin razón did not view peonage and the kidnapping of their children as a blessing of civilization. In 1852, Armijo, a Navajo headman from Chuska, voiced to the regional Indian agent the feelings of the Diné: “My people are all crying in the same way. Three of our chiefs now sitting before you mourn for their children, who have been taken from their homes by the Mexicans. More than 200 of our children have been carried off; and we know not where they are … . My people are yet crying for the children they have lost. Is it American justice that we must give up everything and receive nothing?”²⁸

Historian L. R. Bailey has coined a term for this process of assimilating alien individuals. He uses the rather formidable word transculturalization to describe “the process whereby individuals under a variety of circumstances are temporarily or permanently detached from one group, enter the web of social relations that constitute another society, and come under the influence of its customs, ideas, and values to a greater or lesser degree.”²⁹ This process is a universal one, and applies equally to the white captives that become “Indianized,” such as the Oatman sisters under the Mojave (see Chapter 6), non-Athapascans (white or Indian) who became members of Navajo or Apache “alien clans,” or Native Americans who became acculturated peons of their Spanish and Mexican masters. It is in this context that Indian slavery, involuntary servitude, and the slave trade in the American Southwest must be understood.

The foundation for Indian slavery in the borderlands was obviously a rigorous slave trade that continued throughout the Spanish colonial era and into the nineteenth century. In the 1620s and 1630s New Mexicans looked eastward and traded iron knives, cattle, and sheep for plains products, including bison hides, robes, and Apache slaves. Backed up by a provincial government that claimed the Apaches were a menace, by the 1640s most Spanish households in New Mexico possessed Quiviran, Ute, or Apache slaves. In the early 1660s 40 colonists and 800 Pueblo Indians under the direction of the Governor of New Mexico brought over 70 captives to Santa Fé. Those who were not sold locally were sent to work the silver mines of Nueva Vizcaya (today’s Chihuahua and Durango in northern Mexico).³⁰

When the Plains Apache raids declined in the eighteenth century, the Comanche attacks increased. By 1750 the mounted Comanches were the most formidable military force on the southern plains, driving the Jicarilla Apaches westward to the protection of the Rocky Mountains and subduing Lipan Apaches, Mescalero Apaches, and Navajos. Chiricahuas were pushed west and south, where they roamed Arizona and New Mexico and raided the ranches of Sonora and Nueva Vizcaya. With Comanches joining up with the Utes to conduct raids, the Navajos and Paiutes almost feared their Indian brothers more than their Mexican and white neighbors.³¹ These were the conditions that continued through the Mexican era and into the modern American period of Southwest history. Expanding trade meant a dynamic Indian slave trade, and this meant additional peons and slaves and involuntary laborers for the economic and social projects of the Southwest.

Before leaving the topic of Indian slavery, mention should be made of the correlations between slavery and sexism and racism. It could be argued that the southwestern traditions of involuntary servitude were accompanied by patriarchy and gender oppression. Certainly Spanish overlords, the gente de razón of Mexican times, and American military elites considered the non-sedentary and semi-sedentary inhabitants of the Southwest (that is, the “wild Indians”) to be racially and culturally inferior to themselves. At the end of the nineteenth century most Americans considered the Indians to be “a vanishing race,” and therefore the conquest of their lands was justified. As an “absent” people their Native bodies were polluted, or as white Californians described them in the 1860s, Native Americans “were the dirtiest lot of human beings on earth … . [they wear] filthy rags, with their persons unwashed, hair uncombed and swarming with vermin.”³²

Or as a Proctor & Gamble ad for Ivory Soap

that appeared in 1885 illustrated:

We were once factious, fierce and wild,

In peaceful arts unreconciled

Our blankets smeared with grease and stains

From buffalo meat and settlers veins.

Through summer’s dust and heat content

From moon to moon unwashed we went,

But IVORY SOAP came like a ray

Of light across our darkened way …

And now I take, where’er we go

This cake of IVORY SOAP to show

What civilized my squaw and me

And made us clean and fair to see.³³

Because Indian bodies are dirty and impure, they are considered “rapable,” since the rape of polluted bodies does not count. Or, as scholar Andrea Smith goes further to note, “For instance, prostitutes are almost never believed when they say that they have been raped because the dominant society considers the bodies of sex workers undeserving of integrity and violable at all time. Similarly, the history of mutilation of Indian bodies, both living and dead, makes it clear that Indian people are not entitled to bodily integrity.”³⁴

One example can be used to illustrate the aforesaid. During the second quarter of the nineteenth century a small number of trappers known as the La Bonté group were hunting and trapping southwest on the outskirts of the Great Salt Lake. The expedition of five men led by a Colorado trapper named Rube Herring soon left the safety of the lake and headed across the desert. Although Rube supposedly knew the country and was an experienced guide, his ignorance was soon apparent as the group lost their way across the waterless desert of the Great Basin desert. Late one evening several Paiutes crawled into their camp and stole two of their horses. The next day La Bonté and his men followed their tracks to the Indian village. The following morning the trappers, discharging their rifles at close quarters, killed nine Indians and captured three young girls. They also retrieved their stolen horses and acquired two more. After proceeding to scalp the dead bodies, the trappers moved on with their young “squaws” in hand. But they were still lost, and food and water was in short demand.³⁵

Eventually, they were so driven to the point of hunger that one of them suggested that the alternative to starving to death would be to sacrifice one of their party so as to save the lives of the others. The idea was voted down, and La Bonté and the others, who had noticed some deer-tracks, decided to hunt for wild game. At sunset when La Bonté returned to camp he saw one of his companions named Forey broiling some meat on the embers. The young girls were gone, perhaps having escaped. In the distance he saw what he thought was the carcass of a deer. Forey shouted, “there’s the meat, hos—help yourself.” La Bonté drew his knife and approached the carcass, but, as his narrator George Frederick Ruxton notes, to his horror he saw “the yet quivering body of one of the Indian squaws, with a large portion of the flesh butchered from it, and part of which Forey was already greedily devouring.”³⁶

The La Bonté experience is an extreme example and may be a composite of fiction and reality, but it does illustrate the ideas of cannibalism and mutilation of Indian bodies. As for the eating of human flesh, even the great pathfinder and anti-slavery crusader John C. Frémont experienced cannibalism during his attempt to cross the San Juan Mountains in the winter of 1848–1849.³⁷