Empire through Kinship: Rethinking Spanish-Apache Relations in Southwestern North America in the Late Eighteenth and Early Nineteenth Centuries

Recent scholarship on the North American West has suggested that kinship mattered more than race in social relations through at least the mid-nineteenth century, which illustrates the longevity of indigenous power in the region. In considering interactions between Chiricahua Apaches and Spaniards in the second half of the eighteenth century, this article demonstrates that kinship was indeed of central importance, but not always as a reflection of Native dominance or in lieu of the influence of other understandings of human difference such as race. Spaniards conflated nuanced knowledge of Apache political divisions and kinship relations with ideas about the innate and unchangeable character of all “barbarous” Indians to justify efforts to subjugate them through a war targeting Chiricahua and other Apache families. Spanish interest in exploiting Native war captives ultimately worked against any fixed racialization of Apache people, however, as the Spaniards argued that Spanish families could serve as key sites through which Natives might finally be Christianized and civilized through labor. For Chiricahua Apaches, meanwhile, flexible family strategies proved their principal means of persistence through the violence and forced migrations of this period as they incorporated refugees, recovered missing kin, and adopted outsiders into new family formations.