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  • Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands ed. by Bonnie Martin, James F. Brooks
  • Michelle LeMaster
Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands
Bonnie Martin and James F. Brooks, eds.
Santa Fe: School for Advanced Research Press, 2015.
xxxiv + 382 pp., $39.95 (paper)

The goal of Linking the Histories of Slavery is to connect Native American slavery with other forms of American slavery, including African American slavery and modern human trafficking, spanning the period from the precontact era to the present. The essays in this anthology stem from two workshops and a symposium sponsored by the School for Advanced Research and the William P. Clements Center for Southwest Studies at Southern Methodist University. The editors ably pull together what otherwise might be an eclectic collection of essays through an insightful introduction, as well as introductions to each part of the book. They view slavery as a global phenomenon and define it as “a coerced state of living, a limitation on basic human choices . . . enforced by the threat of violence” (xxii). Slavery is both an economic and a social institution, involving forced labor to produce economic wealth and social status. It is also highly gendered. Although most Americans are familiar with the Atlantic slave trade in which African men were generally the most desired laborers, the majority of slaves historically have been women and children. This generalization holds true for Native American slavery and also for modern human trafficking. Native American slavery shares with African slavery, though, the commonality of migration, as both enslaving and enslaved peoples moved, at times over great distances, via complex networks of commerce. Slave societies then faced the challenge of both controlling and absorbing captives.

Part one of the collection provides background for those not familiar with Native American slavery in North America. Catherine M. Cameron and Eric E. Bowne provide useful syntheses of scholarship relating to precontact and early contact slaveries across the continent. Both provide powerful reminders that Native people engaged in captive taking as well as slavery before the arrival of Europeans and that many became enmeshed in a system of commercial slave trading with Europeans.

Part two makes up the true core of the book. Comprised of six essays that focus primarily on the Southwest and adjacent regions in the nineteenth century, this section includes original and well-researched work on Native slaveries and their intersections with European systems of unfreedom, including African American chattel slavery and Native servitude of various forms in supposedly “free” territories and states. Migration and relocation together make up a unifying theme. Each essay “adds to the map of expanding, intersecting, cross-cultural slave trade networks” and demonstrates the “fearful continental reach of North American slavery” (65). Boyd Cothran and Natale Zappia investigate the expansion of Native slave raiding as a result of European migration into the far west. The introduction of Euro-American trade goods, especially horses and firearms, expanded existing trading networks and produced markets for Native slaves in both the Columbia River and California regions. Cothran investigates the expansion [End Page 108] of Klamath trade and slaving, demonstrating that the Klamath transformed an existing tradition of captive taking, which had previously allowed adoption or liberation, into a form of commercial slave trading. The Klamath expanded their slave raiding to acquire captives who were sold to tribes in the Northwest, who in turn relied on captives’ labor to produce goods for trade. Zappia demonstrates that the expansion of settlement in California in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth century allowed Native groups to raid settlements for both horses and captives, while also providing a market for captives. The work of both scholars overlaps in interesting ways with that of Ned Black-hawk on the Great Basin (Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West [Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006]). All three demonstrate the expansion of slave raiding by Native peoples in contact with first the Spanish and later Anglo-Americans in the intermountain and far-west region. Settlement produced both opportunities for raiding and for trading humans as commodities. Native people controlled this trade, not Euro-Americans, and the trade required...

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