Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands

Rating:
Summary: Informative and thought-provoking
Review: It would be foolish to give a book that won three prestigious professional awards (the Bancroft, Turner, and Parkman prizes) all in one year anything less than five stars, but the stars I have given this book can only hint at its remarkable contents. Captives and Cousins is based on prodigious research in original sources, and the research is wedded to a compelling and innovative analysis.
Brooks is not the first historian to show that the practice of taking captives and subjecting them to involuntary servitude was widespread in the American Southwest, but I don't think that anyone else has demonstrated so convincingly how deep and wide the cycle of capture and slavery was. Virtually all of the peoples who lived in and around New Mexico in the three centuries following the Spanish entrada (Native Americans and Europeans alike) took captives and engaged to one degree or another in the slave trade. Indians preyed on Spanish and Mexicans, and on themselves, and the Spanish and Mexicans returned the favor. To a degree, even Americans played a role in the trade after they became the controlling force in the region. They offered rewards for the return of captives and thus provided incentives for further captures. Brooks shows that the system of capture and slavery contributed in significant ways to the political, economic, and cultural development of the Southwest, providing a ready source of labor (and wives), knitting disparate peoples into webs of kinship (some biological, some adoptive, some deriving from Catholic godparenthood), helping to equalize wealth, and provoking endless cycles of revenge and retaliation. The system (a kind of "war of all against all") had its own logic, though the logic was crude and in many respects cruel.
Brooks does not saddle Europeans with all of the blame for the system. He makes it clear that capture and enslavement were practiced before the Spanish first arrived in the Southwest. But they participated in it and added refinements derived from their own Iberian traditions. In one sense, the book helps to challenge the myth of Indians as indigenous peoples "operating within subsistence-and-exchange economies that produced little intergroup conflict." Conflict there was, and in spades.
Brooks is an academic, and the book is addressed primarily to his fellow academics. General readers will find the text too dense for easy reading. I found some parts of the book slow going, but I persisted and, in the end, was glad I did. Captives and Cousins not only informed me; it made me think.