Volume LX, Number 2

William and Mary Quarterly

Reviews of Books

Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. By James F. Brooks. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, published for the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture, 2002. Pp. xii, 419. $55.00 cloth, $22.50 paper.) Reviewed by Claudio Saunt, University of Georgia In Captives and Cousins, James F. Brooks paints a rich and detailed portrait of the "intercultural exchange network" (p. 363) that characterized the American Southwest in the seventeenth, eighteenth, and nineteenth centuries. The network tied together Navajos, Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, Utes, Pueblos, and New Mexico colonists in a regional economy based on trade, theft, kinship, and slavery. The economy resists simple description and defies familiar categories of analysis, yet Brooks skillfully elucidates its complexities to recover the history of this enormous region of early America. Brooks traces the origins of this social network system to Iberian and Native American traditions of violence, exchange, honor, and shame. In several fundamental ways, he suggests, Iberian and Southwestern societies echoed each other: the reputations of both Spanish and native men rested on their ability to protect and control their families, and success depended on social interactions with other groups; conventions of honor and shame in both Spain and the Southwest dictated the tenor of relations between groups; and social interactions with outsiders created interdependency and produced unresolved tensions in the maintenance of stable cultural identities. The cross-cultural resonance described by Brooks, however, is tenuous; it is difficult to speculate about the existence in the precontact Southwest of culturally constructed categories such as honor and shame, let alone to determine if they functioned in the same way as they did in early modern Spain. Nevertheless, Brooks asserts that the parallels between indigenous and Iberian traditions meant that men from both sides of the Atlantic "negotiated interdependency and maintained honor by acknowledging the exchangeability of their women and children" (p. 40). Even if Brooks does not sufficiently substantiate that honor and shame shaped the actions of Spanish and native men in the colonial Southwest, it is clear that the political economy he describes drew on both Iberian and indigenous traditions of kinship slavery. Brooks's description of this borderlands economy is nuanced and sophisticated. It begins with an important insight: although anthropologists have long believed that war and gift exchange are opposite and mutually exclusive actions, slave-raiding and trade were both part of a larger system of exchange relations in the Southwest. "The capture of 'enemy' women and children," he writes, was "one extreme expression along a continuum of exchange" (p. 17). Slavery and slave-raiding were central to the political economy of the borderlands. Slaves contributed not solely the surplus labor needed to tend livestock, but also reproductive labor, a scarce resource in many small native and New Mexican settlements. Proscriptions against endogamy forced men to look beyond their communities, leading to "mutualistic or competitive patriarchal exchanges of women" (p. 365). When men married their female slaves, the line between slavery and kinship, captives and cousins, dissolved. Brooks recognizes that kinship slavery involved its own form of exploitation and coercion. Nevertheless, even if they were still in subordinate positions, when slaves became kin, they contributed to the growth of families and communities. Slavery also helped build regional trading networks. Slave raids and counter-raids encouraged the development of an active regional market, where slaves could be ransomed from their captors. Moreover, New Mexico and native captives could be found in nearly every community in the Southwest, and through adoption or marriage, they established kinship ties between their captors and their natal communities. Several captives themselves became important go-betweens, brokering relations between their new and old communities. This was a system built on paradox. Ties between 2003, by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Volume LX, Number 2

William and Mary Quarterly

Reviews of Books

communities were sustained through slave-raiding, creating a larger regional economy, yet slaveraiding encouraged communities to retain their distinct identities. The numbers of slaves were small, especially compared to the Southeast. Among the Navajos, for example, the enslaved population numbered between 300 and 500 in the midnineteenth century, or at most 5 percent of the total population of 10,000. In wealthy communities, the proportion of slaves may have risen to as much as 38 percent of the residents. By contrast, it is estimated that between 1700 and 1880, roughly 5,000 native peoples entered New Mexican society as slaves. Despite these small numbers, Brooks writes, "the slave system of the Southwest Borderlands provided the ideological and cultural fuel that fed the larger economy" (p. 363). Brooks is unusually attentive to stratification both in New Mexico and native communities, and he notes that the theft of livestock (most often sheep and horses) and the abduction of people provided a means for disadvantaged communities, native and New Mexican, to increase their wealth. Although frequently opposed by wealthy New Mexicans and Indians, the poor established "communities of interest" (p. 164) dedicated to creating a political economy of the borderlands. Genzaros (detribalized Indians living in colonial settlements) and poor New Mexicans, for example, migrated onto the Plains in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, where they established hybrid communities that were neither fully colonial nor fully indigenous. They lived in farming settlements, like other colonists, but traveled seasonally to hunt buffalo or trade with Indians. Although these kinds of communities differed in their particular subsistence practices and settlement patterns, they all shared the custom of assimilating outsiders through adoption. After the United States invasion in 1846, the incorporation of the region into larger capitalist markets brought a gradual end to the Southwestern exchange network of captives and cousins. Particularly during the Civil War, the United States government made a concerted effort to sponsor capitalist development, in Brooks's words, "replacing kin-based subjectivity with state-sponsored individual autonomy" (p. 331). Navajos became not captors and captives but dependents of the United States, a transformation that culminated in the imprisonment of 9,000 Navajos at Bosque Redondo in 1864. As late as 1909, one Navajo headman still held thirty-two Ute slaves, but market forces had for the most part eroded traditions of slavery and kinship. Brooks's bold interpretation can be compared fruitfully to Alan Gallay's recent publication on slavery in the Southeast.1 The contrasts between bondage in the Southwest and Southeast are striking. In the American slave colonies, slavery was solely a form of labor exploitation. In New Mexico and surrounding native communities, by contrast, it was primarily a form of communitybuilding. As a consequence, slavery in the Southeast was premised on race in order to exploit the subject population more efficiently. In the Southwest, although slavery exacerbated gender and class inequalities, it never assumed the racial patterns of its Southeastern counterpart. For native peoples, these differences had tremendous consequences. Southeastern slavery may have temporarily enriched some Indian communities, but as the demand for captives rose, it destabilized the entire region. The dehumanization of non-Europeans ultimately allowed white colonists to justify the killing of Southeastern Indians and the appropriation of their lands. In the Southwest, the relative tolerance of intermarriage lasted well into the nineteenth century, although it was slowly undermined after white Americans seized the region and brought with them their obsessive fear of race-mixing. James Brooks's broad and ambitious interpretation of the Southwest is carefully argued in its details and is based on exhaustive research in Spanish-language archives. It is further bolstered by an impressive use of anthropology, especially the well-developed literature on African kinship slavery.
1

Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 16701717 (New Haven, 2002). 2003, by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture

Volume LX, Number 2

William and Mary Quarterly

Reviews of Books

Because Brooks refuses to simplify the complex political economy of the Southwest, his book makes for demanding and at times difficult reading, but his insights and overall argument make Captives and Cousins an innovative and truly important work. It will inform scholarship on early America and on borderlands regions for many years to come.

2003, by the Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture