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

During some three centuries of colonization in the New World, the Spanish encountered and had to relate to a large variety of native peoples, from sedentary agriculturalists living under hierarchical state systems to nomadic hunters and gatherers in small bands. The Spanish erected a complex colonial system to replace the hierarchical indigenous state systems such as the Mexica-Aztec of central Mexico and Tawantinsuyu in the Andean region. However, conquest and colonization were difficult on the fringes. The primary institution that evolved along the fringes was the mission/reduction, designed to transform the native peoples along the lines envisioned by the Spanish. The natives were to be converted to Catholicism, the official religion of empire, and changed into sedentary agriculturalists.

In recent years a number of scholars have turned to examine missions/reductions in different parts of Spanish America, and among different native groups. The two books reviewed here examine Spanish-native interactions and efforts to establish missions among groups of largely nomadic hunter-gatherers. In the first book James Saeger studies the Guaycuruan, different groups that inhabited the Chaco region now divided among Paraguay, Argentina, and Bolivia. The different Guaycuruan groups were nomadic hunter-gatherers when the Spanish arrived in the region in the mid-sixteenth century, and modified their lifestyle, economy, and way of waging war by adopting Spanish livestock, particularly the horse, and the use of iron for tools and weapons. The Guaycuruan, who were militaristic at first contact, developed an uneasy relationship with the Spanish based primarily on trading and the raiding of Spanish settlements. Guaycuruan bands even rustled livestock from one Spanish community to trade to another, brand and all.

The pattern of trade and raiding persisted for two centuries, and during that period the Spanish made efforts to establish missions that largely failed. However, beginning in the 1740s and 1750s many Guaycuruan bands asked Spanish officials to establish missions for them. Saeger argues that drastic ecological changes, such as depletion of traditional sources of plant foods such as palms, left the natives few options. However, in the missions the Guaycuruans did not immediately change their culture or adopt Christianity. There were even instances of Guaycuruans from different missions raiding each other or even Spanish settlements. The missions survived until independence in the region after 1810.

Saeger outlines different aspects of Guayuruan life both outside and in the missions. The strength of the book is the ethnohistorical synthesis based on the pioneering works of scholars such as Furlong, Metreaux, and Susnk, as well as several detailed first hand accounts of the Guaycuruans written by missionaries in the eighteenth-century. Given the paucity of data, Saeger’s coverage of the missions is not as detailed as is the ethnohistorical sections of the book. Saeger uses an article written by David Sweet as the baseline against which to construct his analysis of the Guaycuruan missions, and not surprisingly Saeger concludes that not all aspects of Sweet’s generalizations on native experiences in frontier missions apply to the case he studies.

Saeger has written a solid and competent book that benefits from extensive previous ethnohistoric scholarship, and contributes to the growing literature on frontier missions. Having said that, I found a number of problems with the book. Saeger draws comparisons between the culture and historical experiences of the Guaycuruans and other native groups in the Americas, but the comparisons chosen are not always the best. Moreover, Saeger demonstrates a limited knowledge of the literature on missions in different parts of the Americas. I raise this point primarily because Saeger could have drawn more useful comparisons for the case study he examines. For example, the story of the missions the...