The Other Slavery (62 page)

27. My description is entirely based on the excellent biographical treatment of Bancroft by John Walton Caughey,
Hubert Howe Bancroft: Historian of the West
(Berkeley: University of California Press, 1946), passim.

28. Hubert Howe Bancroft,
History of Arizona and New Mexico, 1530–1888
(Albuquerque: Horn and Wallace, 1962), 174–175. To his credit, Bancroft acknowledged that there had been “elements of secular oppression,” as he called them, motivating the Pueblos. As David Weber has observed, other historians of that era, such as Ralph Emerson Twitchell, essentially repeated Bancroft’s interpretation. Weber,
What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680?,
17 n. 12.

29. Weber,
What Caused the Pueblo Revolt of 1680?,
10–11. Daniel T. Reff has argued that the Pueblo Revolt was a millenarian movement triggered by the devastating effects of Old World diseases. Reff,
Disease, Depopulation, and Culture Change in Northwestern New Spain, 1518–1764
(Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1991); Reff, “The ‘Predicament of Culture,’” 63–90. Andrew L. Knaut considers a number of factors in his fine book
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680.
In addition to the religious cleavage, he emphasizes Apache raiding, famine, and the disintegration of European authority in seventeenth-century New Mexico. Knaut,
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680,
especially 119–170. The quotes are from Gutiérrez,
When Jesus Came,
127.

30. Governor Mendizábal’s quotes are from his reply to accusations made against him, n.p., March 1664, in Hackett,
Historical Documents,
3:211–213. It is true that Mendizábal expressed these unflattering opinions out of spite as he tried to defend himself against his religious detractors. And indeed, no evidence has come to light linking New Mexico’s friars directly with the Indian slave trade. But there was a kernel of truth in Mendizábal’s assertions, as the friars’ ambitious building projects and livelihood depended on resources that could be mustered only by tapping deeply into the pool of Native labor. Scholars have long echoed the work of France V. Scholes to the effect that during the seventeenth century, New Mexico was in turmoil due to an ongoing dispute between church and state. There were many reasons for this clash, not the least of which was their competition over Indian labor. Scholes, “Church and State in New Mexico,” passim. For the Hopi oral traditions and their documentary support, see Wiget, “Truth and the Hopi,” 183–187.

31. Testimony of Juan Domínguez de Mendoza, Mexico City, June 20, 1663, in Hackett,
Historical Documents,
3:234. See also Wiget, “Truth and the Hopi,” 189; and Gutiérrez,
When Jesus Came,
131–132.

32. Howard Lamar wrote a pioneering and ambitious essay specifically interpreting the Pueblo Revolt as an insurrection against labor coercion. Lamar, “From Bondage to Contract: Ethnic Labor in the American West, 1600–1890,” in Steven Hahn and Jonathan Prude, eds.,
The Countryside in the Age of Capitalist Transformation
(Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 1985), 293–324. James Brooks’s book
Captives and Cousins
powerfully describes the captive exchange system involving various Indian groups in New Mexico. Chantal Cramaussel has underscored the rising tide of slaves from New Mexico flowing into the mines of Chihuahua in the waning decades of the seventeenth century. Rick Hendricks and Gerald Mandell have shed considerable light on the workings of the Apache slave trade. Most recently,
archaeologist Michael V. Wilcox has cast doubt on the pervasive historical narrative describing the demographic collapse of the Pueblo Indians as being induced by epidemic disease. Instead, he has emphasized both the high levels of violence that accompanied the European settlement of New Mexico and the creative responses of the Pueblo Indians, who resorted to complex strategies of abandonment and reoccupation of various sites and to strengthening their ties with the Athapaskan peoples surrounding them. See Brooks,
Captives and Cousins,
52; Cramaussel,
Poblar la frontera,
186–205; Hendricks and Mandell, “The Apache Slave Trade in Parral,” 59–81; and Wilcox,
The Pueblo Revolt
. Not all the work is so recent. In his pioneering
Apache, Navaho, and Spaniard
(1960), Jack Forbes presents the Pueblo Revolt of 1680 as a multiethnic movement responding to a long-term history of abuse and enslavement.

33. As the Spaniards and their dependents began their retreat to the south, they were able to capture forty-seven Pueblo Indians, who were interrogated more for tactical information than to learn the underlying causes of the uprising—at least the
auto
drawn up by Governor Otermín the day after the Indians were captured sheds no light on these causes. The opening question posed to the nine Pueblo Indians captured at the end of 1681 was as follows: “What was the cause and reasons that led all the Indians of this kingdom to rise up, reverting to their idolatrous ways, abandoning the law of God, withholding their obedience to His Majesty, burning images and temples, and committing all the other crimes?” This line of questioning implied an unmistakable condemnation of the movement couched in religious language. Interestingly, the shrewdest prisoners turned the religious tenor of the questions in their favor. For example, Alonzo Attuzayo, a widower from the pueblo of Alameda, admitted that he had done wrong in joining the rebels but went on to explain that “the devil had blinded his heart and tricked him and for this reason he had done those crazy things.” Testimony of Alonzo Attuzayo, December 27, 1681, in De Marco, “Voices from the Archives,” part 1, 436. Juan, a married Indian from Tesuque, remarked that Pop’ay “speaks with the devil and for this reason everyone was terrorized by him.” Testimony of Juan, Tewa from Tesuque, December 18, 1681, 392. There were nine prisoners but only eight testimonies because two brothers, Juan and Francisco Lorenzo, declared jointly. See also testimony of Pedro Naranjo, December 24, 1681, 418; and testimony of Joseph, December 19, 1681, 404.

34. On earlier rebellion attempts, see testimony of Pedro Naranjo, December 24, 1681, 417; testimony of the lieutenant general of cavalry, December 20, 1681, 2:266; and testimony of Sargento Mayor Luis de Quintana, December 22, 1681, 2:278. For concise considerations of famines and epidemics, see Knaut,
The Pueblo Revolt of 1680,
155–159; and John P. Wilson, “Before the Pueblo Revolt: Population Trends, Apache Relations and Pueblo Abandonments in Seventeenth Century New Mexico,” in Nancy Fox, ed.,
Prehistory and History in the Southwest
(Santa Fe: Ancient City Press, 1985), 118.

35. West makes clear that the Indian slaves of Parral came from New Mexico, Sonora, and the region of the eastern Tobosos. West,
The Mining Community in Northern New Spain,
50 (map), 51–56. Deeds reaches the same conclusion when she writes,
“Slaving expeditions . . . continued to commandeer Apaches and Navajos from New Mexico, Pimas from Sonora, and hunter-gatherers, especially Tobosos, from the east.” Deeds,
Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North,
71.

36. Revolts broke out among the Acaxees in 1601–1603; the Xiximes in 1610; the Tepehuanes in 1616–1620; the Tobosos, Conchos, Salineros, and others in 1644–1645; and the Tarahumaras in 1648–1652. Yet the Great Northern Rebellion of the 1680s and 1690s dwarfed all previous resistance movements and changed the balance of power in significant ways. In effect, these rebels forced the colonists to rely less on slave labor. The composition of the workforce in the mines offers the best evidence of this transformation. Whereas in a seventeenth-century mine such as Parral, ten percent or more of all indigenous workers were slaves, by the end of that century labor arrangements had evolved. In an eighteenth-century mine such as Santa Eulalia, in the vicinity of Chihuahua City (which in many ways succeeded Parral as a regional magnet), there were few Indian slaves and almost no encomienda Indians. Santa Eulalia’s workforce consisted primarily of salaried workers and repartimiento Indians coming from nearby missions to fulfill their labor obligations. To attract laborers, eighteenth-century miners were forced to rely on market incentives to a greater extent than their predecessors. See Roberto Baca, “La esclavitud y otras formas de servidumbre en Chihuahua: Una visión desde los archivos coloniales,” in Jesús Vargas Valdés, ed.,
Chihuahua: Horizontes de su historia y su cultura,
2 vols. (Chihuahua: Milenio, 2010), 1:118–145; Cramaussel, “Encomiendas, repartimientos y conquista en Nueva Vizcaya”; Cheryl Martin, “El trabajo minero en Chihuahua, siglo XVIII,” in
Actas del primero congreso de historia regional comparada 1989
(Ciudad Juárez: Universidad Autónoma de Ciudad Juárez, 1990), 185–196; Salvador Álvarez, “Agricultural Colonization and Mining Colonization: The Area of Chihuahua During the First Half of the Eighteenth Century,” in Alan K. Craig and Robert C. West, eds.,
In Quest of Mineral Wealth: Aboriginal and Colonial Mining and Metallurgy in Spanish America
(Baton Rouge: Geoscience Publications, 1994), 171–204; Deeds, “Rural Work in Nueva Vizcaya,” 425–449; Deeds,
Defiance and Deference in Mexico’s Colonial North,
chaps. 3, 4, and 5; Cheryl Martin,
Governance and Society in Colonial Mexico: Chihuahua in the Eighteenth Century
(Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1996), chap. 3; and Philip L. Hadley,
Minería y sociedad en el centro minero de Santa Eulalia, Chihuahua, 1709–1750
(Mexico City: Fondo de Cultural Económica, 1979), 190–201.

7. POWERFUL NOMADS

1. For a pioneering study of Indian slavery in colonial America, see Almon Wheeler Lauber,
Indian Slavery in Colonial Times Within the Present Limits of the United States
(New York: Columbia University, 1913). For a more recent survey, see Barbara J. Olexer,
The Enslavement of the American Indian in Colonial Times
(Columbia, MD: Joyous, 2005). For the Carolinas and Florida, see Gallay,
The Indian Slave Trade;
Snyder,
Slavery in Indian Country;
and Krauthamer,
Black Slaves, Indian Masters
. Robbie Ethridge draws on the ideas of Ferguson and Whitehead,
War in the Tribal Zone
. As she writes, “In coining the term
militaristic slaving society
I hope to emphasize that
an Indian group’s involvement in the commercial slave trade in eastern North America required that a society become militarized and that this militarization informed much about how a group acted and reacted to the events and opportunities that arose with the Indian slave trade.” Ethridge, “Creating the Shatter Zone,” 208. For the role of the Westo Indians, see Eric E. Bowne,
The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South
(Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2005). For French Canada, see Rushforth,
Bonds of Alliance
.

2. Cecilia Sheridan,
Anónimos y Desterrados: La contienda por el “sitio que llaman de Quauyla,” siglos XVI–XVIII
(Mexico City: CIESAS, 2000); Cecilia Sheridan, “Social Control and Native Territoriality in Northeastern New Spain,” in Jesús F. de la Teja and Ross Frank, eds.,
Choice, Persuasion, and Coercion: Social Control on Spain’s North American Frontiers
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 2005), 121–148. Sheridan elaborates on cases such as the Tobosos and Alazapas. Similarly, Carlos Manuel Valdés has written about the lives of two adolescents, Negrito and Miguelillo, who were caught stealing horses in 1666. Their trial reveals that they were part of a mixed Native community that operated in a gigantic quadrangle extending two hundred miles south from the Texas border and that they traded horses and captives with no less than twenty-five different Indian nations. Negrito was the son of an African slave who grew up around the mining towns of San Luis Potosí. He was later kidnapped by an Indian group known as the Momones and traded to another group called the Bobosirigames for a white horse. Miguelillo was an Indian from the Tusare nation who had been baptized in Parras but ultimately chose a roving existence. Valdés,
La gente del mezquite: Los nómadas del noreste de la Colonia
(Mexico City: CIESAS-INI, 1995), 199–201.

3. The quotes are from Diego de Vargas, letters of July 13 and October 4, 1692, in Forbes,
Apache, Navaho, and Spaniard,
237–241; his diary entry for November 22, 1692, in John L. Kessell and Rick Hendricks, eds.,
By Force of Arms: The Journals of Don Diego de Vargas, 1691–1693
(Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1992), 208; and J. Manuel Espinosa,
Crusaders of the Río Grande
(Salisbury, NC: Documentary Publications, 1977), 100. See also Charles L. Kenner,
The Comanchero Frontier: A History of New Mexican–Plains Indian Relations
(Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1994), 19, 26–27. Matthew Liebmann reminds us that these relationships were complex. For example, relations between Jemez and the Utes actually deteriorated during the interregnum of 1680–1692. Liebmann,
Revolt,
42, 97–98. On the instability and violence that characterized Pueblo-Ute relations more broadly, see Blackhawk,
Violence over the Land,
especially 32–33.

4. For the background of this trade, see Katherine A. Spielmann, “Late Prehistoric Exchange Between the Southwest and Southern Plains,”
Plains Anthropologist
28:101 (1983), 257–272; Katherine A. Spielmann, “Colonists, Hunters, and Farmers: Plains-Pueblo Interaction in the Seventeenth Century,” in D. H. Thomas, ed.,
Columbian Consequences,
vol. 1,
Archaeological and Historical Perspectives on the Spanish Borderlands West
(Washington, DC: Smithsonian Institution Press, 1989), 101–113; and Spielmann et al., “‘. . . Being Weary, They Had Rebelled,’” 101–125.

5. Francis Haines, “The Northward Spread of Horses Among the Plains Indians,”
American Anthropologist
40:3 (July–September 1938), 430–431; Pekka Hämäläinen, “The Rise and Fall of Plains Indian Horse Cultures,”
Journal of American History
90 (December 2003), 836–837.