Empire of Sand: The Seri Indians and the Struggle for Spanish Sonora, 1645-1803 (review)

Empire of Sand: The Seri Indians and the Struggle for Spanish Sonora, 1645-1803. Compiled and edited by THOMAS E. SHERIDAN. Tucson: University of Arizona Press, 1999. Illustrations. Maps. Glossary. Bibliography. Index. 493 pp. Cloth. $65.00.

Twenty-five years after its inception at the Arizona State Museum of the University of Arizona, the Documentary Relations of the Southwest project continues to yield annotated volumes of documents on the history of northwestern New Spain. In the most recent addition, ethnohistorian Thomas Sheridan chronicles the attempts of the Seri Indians (or Comcáac as they call themselves) to resist first incorporation and then annihilation by Spaniards. Remarkably, this group of about 500 fishers and gatherers survives today along the northern coast of Sonora and on Isla Tiburón, as "resilient and opportunistic as ever," and they still "make their living from the desert and sea" (p. 462).

Many of the clues that explain Seri persistence in the colonial period despite the overwhelming odds against them are implied in the documents published in this volume in ably executed English translations and Spanish transcriptions. The translations are accompanied by extensive annotations in reference to persons, places, and cultural artifacts. In an introductory overview, Sheridan describes non-hierarchical patterns of Seri social organization and religion as well as their material culture. In the late seventeenth century, Spaniards estimated that there were about 3,000 Seris, subdivided into a number of bands. Before contact with Europeans, Seris traded salt, deerskins, and shells for agricultural products from more sedentary groups. They were highly adept at fishing, foraging, and taking advantage of the meager resources and water sources in their extremely arid environment; initially they may have viewed the arrival of the Spaniards as offering new potential, for example, in mission rations of corn or Spanish livestock.

But neither missions nor Spanish settlements appealed for long as places of permanent residence. The few Jesuit missions established in the late seventeenth century were never able to maintain sizeable core populations, and Seri relations with Spaniards declined as the latter slowly increased their numbers, either through pearl fishing in Seri lands, or ranching in river valleys to the east. Seri thefts of livestock provoked Spanish retaliation, but at mid-eighteenth century, Seris were still raiding, occasionally in concert with other groups. Between 1750 and 1770, abandoning attempts at peaceful suasion, Spanish officials waged genocidal campaigns against the Seris, first in massed battle and then through brutal guerrilla warfare. Neither these tactics nor subsequent deportations could completely dislodge the Comcáac from their places of refuge in the Cerro Prieto and Isla Tiburón. Cycles of violence continued into the nineteenth century when this volume ends.

The documents selected to portray these contentious relationships consist primarily of Jesuit accounts and military reports, organized in chronological subdivisions with headnotes. Despite their mostly critical appraisals of Seris, many of them contain valuable ethnohistorical information about the ways in which Spanish introductions altered the Seris' material culture and widened their ecological niche. Less often do they provide insight into indigenous worldviews, a drawback that especially afflicts Spanish reporting on nonsedentary groups (a priori ungovernable and sans culture). We do learn a good deal about Spanish goals and designs, and especially how the aims of colonial agents were often in conflict. In this respect, it would have been helpful for the editor to have provided more explicitly comparative context from the substantial literature on missions and northern Indian policies to explain how the Seris fit within the larger networks of civil authorities, settlers, missionaries, and other indigenous groups in the eighteenth century. A more nuanced understanding of the broader colonial context would also problematize Sheridan's notion of a dichotomous shift from missionization to militarization at mid-century. Despite these reservations, this volume is a fine resource for all ethnohistorians and historians who study colonial encounters and experiences...