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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 Louisiana, 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 nations. 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 Spaniards 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 "perdition" by "such cruel captivity," grieved Santa María y Silva.1 |
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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 Increasing attention to the enslavement of Indians has pushed United States historians beyond identifications of North American slavery as primarily an African American experience 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 operated constrained the women's opportunities, an emphasis on women's agency has obscured 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 important 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 Canadian 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 Charbonneau's "wife" and a celebrated mediator of Indian-European diplomacy.4 |
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