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From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands

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From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands Juliana Barr On July 21, 1774, fray Miguel Santa María y Silva, the leading Franciscan missionary stationed in the mission district of Los Adaes on the border between Texas and Loui- siana, reported to the Spanish viceroy in Mexico City on his trip through that region as part of a delegation seeking renewed peace with powerful Wichita and Caddo na- tions. In 1769, in the aftermath of the Seven Years’ War, Spain had officially established administrative control of the former French province of Louisiana, and the mission to reconfirm Wichita and Caddo alliances sought to represent the new unity of Span- iards and Frenchmen in Louisiana and Texas. Many, however, could not put aside past rivalries so easily, and Santa María y Silva was no exception. Rather than detail this first peace council sought by the Spanish government with leading Indian nations, the Franciscan spent page after page lamenting an “infamous traffic of the flesh” he had witnessed being carried on by Frenchmen living in and among Caddoan Indian villages along the Red River. To discredit Frenchmen, Santa María y Silva could have deplored the skyrocketing numbers of enslaved Africans and African Americans in Louisiana by the 1770s. Or, given the hostile relations between the Spanish government and many independent and powerful Indian nations in the lower Plains, the missionary could have bemoaned the fate of Spanish women and children from New Mexico who had been taken captive by Indians armed with guns obtained from French traders. Yet, strikingly, the traffic in humans on which Santa María y Silva chose to focus was one in Indian women and their children, captured by Indian warriors in the southern Plains and Texas and traded east as slaves to French buyers in Louisiana—women thus consigned to “per- dition” by “such cruel captivity,” grieved Santa María y Silva.1 Given the growing proliferation of studies of Indian slavery, notably the works of James F. Brooks and Alan Gallay, the Franciscan’s lament seems not at all surprising.2 In- Juliana Barr is an assistant professor at the University of Florida. She wishes to thank Sean P. Adams, Jeanne Boydston, James F. Brooks, Indrani Chatterjee, Laura F. Edwards, Alan Gallay, Ramón A. Gutiérrez, Nancy A. Hewitt, Joseph C. Miller, Jennifer M. Spear, David J. Weber, the participants in the 2002 Avignon Conference on Forced Labour and Slavery, and the anonymous readers for the Journal of American History for their valuable com- ments on earlier drafts of the essay. Readers may contact Barr at <[email protected]>. 1 Fray Miguel Santa María y Silva to Viceroy Antonio Bucareli y Ursúa, July 21, 1774, in Athanase de Mézières and the Louisiana-Texas Frontier, 1768–1780, trans. and ed. Herbert Eugene Bolton (2 vols., Cleveland, 1914), II, 74–75. 2 James F. Brooks, Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (Chapel Hill, 2002); Alan Gallay, The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717 (New Haven, 2002); Russell M. Magnaghi, Indian Slavery, Labor, Evangelization, and Captivity in the Americas: An Annotated Bibliography (Lanham, 1998). Recent conference programs of historical organizations (notably the June 2005 The Journal of American History 19 20 The Journal of American History June 2005 creasing attention to the enslavement of Indians has pushed United States historians be- yond identifications of North American slavery as primarily an African American experi- ence and of North American captivity as primarily a white experience. As Brooks’s study of New Mexico demonstrates, scholars also are beginning to focus attention on women as the victims of that slave trade. Their scholarship is deepening understandings of the roles of Indian women in their peoples’ interactions with Europeans. Women often stood in unique positions to learn languages, to act as translators and emissaries in cross-cultural communications, and to create ties between cultures.3 Though scholars have recognized that the conflicting European and native systems of power in which native women op- erated constrained the women’s opportunities, an emphasis on women’s agency has ob- scured the more coercive traffics in women that were equally central to Indian-European relations. In seeking to redeem the humanity of such women and to recognize their im- portant roles in trade and diplomacy, scholars have often equated agency with choice, independent will, or resistance and de-emphasized the powerlessness, objectification, and suffering that defined the lives of many. Perhaps the best-known example of this trend in American history and popular culture is Sacagawea, whose capture at the hands of raiding Hidatsas turned into enslavement when she was purchased by the French Cana- dian trader Toussaint Charbonneau—bondage that continued through her time with the Lewis and Clark expedition. The violence and coercion that reduced her to the status of a slave among Euro-Americans has been lost as popular preference casts her as Charbon- neau’s “wife” and a celebrated mediator of Indian-European diplomacy.4 The scholarly focus on mediation and accommodation as women’s characteristic activ- ity in Indian-European relations often leads us to overlook the importance of women in political economies of war and imperial rivalry. Multiple coercive traffics in women be- came essential to European-Indian interaction long before Sacagawea fell into the hands of her captors. Recognition of the diversity of trafficking not only enriches our under- standing of the gender dynamics of European-Indian diplomacy and conflict but also enables us to move beyond the homogeneous conception of slavery suggested by using only African American enslavement, specifically, racial chattel slavery (defined here as a form of property and system of compulsory labor entailing permanent and hereditary Omohundro Institute of Early American History and Culture) indicate that numerous studies of Indian slavery across colonial North America are in the works, particularly dissertations. For a recently completed example, see Brett H. Rushforth, “Savage Bonds: Indian Slavery and Alliance in New France” (Ph.D. diss., University of Cali- fornia, Davis, 2003). 3 Susan Sleeper-Smith, Indian Women and French Men: Rethinking Cultural Encounter in the Western Great Lakes (Amherst, 2001); Jennifer S. H. Brown, Strangers in Blood: Fur Trade Company Families in Indian Country (Van- couver, 1980); Jacqueline Peterson, “The People In Between: Indian-White Marriage and the Genesis of a Métis Society and Culture in the Great Lakes Region, 1680–1830” (Ph.D. diss., University of Illinois, Chicago, 1981); Sylvia Van Kirk, Many Tender Ties: Women in Fur Trade Society, 1670–1870 (Norman, 1980); Nancy Shoemaker, ed., Negotiators of Change: Historical Perspectives on Native American Women (New York, 1995); Tanis C. Thorne, The Many Hands of My Relations: French and Indians on the Lower Missouri (Columbia, Mo., 1996); Greg O’Brien, Choctaws in a Revolutionary Age, 1750–1830 (Lincoln, 2002); Theda Perdue,Cherokee Women: Gender and Culture Change, 1700–1835 (Lincoln, 1998). 4 On historians’ definitions and uses of agency, particularly in relationship to slavery, see Walter Johnson, “On Agency,” Journal of Social History, 37 (Fall 2003), 113–24. On the limits of agency for women caught in the ex- changes of men, see Brooks, Captives and Cousins; and Albert L. Hurtado, Intimate Frontiers: Sex, Gender, and Culture in Old California (Albuquerque, 1999). On Sacagawea’s experience with the Lewis and Clark expedition as well as her escape from slavery and her life afterward—lost to history by past tendencies to cast her as a tragic heroine who died young—see Thomas P. Slaughter, Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness (New York, 2003), 86–113. On the mythologizing of Sacagawea, see Donna Barbie, “Sacajawea: The Making of a Myth,” in Sifters: Native American Women’s Lives, ed. Theda Perdue (New York, 2001), 60–76. Commodifying Indian Women in the Borderlands 21 S t . Santa Fe Cim . F . arron R OSA GES r n R a nadia n a W South C c i N s ort an h h C adia n R A i R . rk t W e A an . s a R as s R. h . Í it OKLAHOMA a R R . chARKANSAS M Oua ita i R s E . s i NEW MEXICO s Arkansas s i H Post p p i C WICHITAS ARKANSAS R R . N TAOVAYAS ed A S R. NASONIS M A Nassonite KADOHADACHOS O Post C T S a I l i n H e CADDOS C R AP AC H ERÍA W I . TAWAKONIS El Paso HASINAIS Natchitoches P Los Adaes ecos R TAWAKONIS Nacogdoches . S TONKAWAS ISCANIS LOUISIANA Natchez AN Rapides C B a LIP S T l a a r N c y TEXAS a B i b o n s r e i u i MESCALEROS a i n t c e z h y u o e R e s R R R . s Opelousas . R Co G l . T uad or ec alup ad h NUEVA e R. o R Atakapas e San Antonio . S VIZCAYA de Béxar an An ton io R. N u Chihuahua ec es R. La Bahía COAHUILA S N A U N E G u l f o f M e x i c o MEXICO T V Monclova A O N D Ri E o G R Indian settlement ra 0 100 NUEVO nde French or Spanish settlement miles LEÓN Major Indian, Spanish, and French settlements in Spanish Texas, French Louisiana, Apachería, Comanchería, and the territories of Caddo and Witchita peoples in the mid- eighteenth century. status) to explore bondage and unfreedom in America. In fact, the very heterogeneity of Indian bondage suggests comparisons with the range of slave practices in Africa, Asia, the Mediterranean, and other parts of the world where at different times and places persons, primarily women, were held and used as not only economic but also social and politi- cal capital—comparisons that resonate with growing scholarly discussions of slavery in a global perspective.5 The confluence of Spanish, French, and Indian peoples in the areas later known as Co- manchería, Apachería, Spanish Texas, and French Louisiana makes them an ideal venue for exploring the forms that traffic in women might take and the kinds of currency that women might represent to Indian and European men who exchanged them.
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