Indian Captivity in Spanish America
Indian Captivity in Spanish America

Author: Fernando Operé

Publisher: University of Virginia Press

Published: 2008

Total Pages: 332

ISBN-13: 9780813925875

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Even before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, the practice of taking captives was widespread among Native Americans. Indians took captives for many reasons: to replace--by adoption--tribal members who had been lost in battle, to use as barter for needed material goods, to use as slaves, or to use for reproductive purposes. From the legendary story of John Smith's captivity in the Virginia Colony to the wildly successful narratives of New England colonists taken captive by local Indians, the genre of the captivity narrative is well known among historians and students of early American literature. Not so for Hispanic America. Fernando Operé redresses this oversight, offering the first comprehensive historical and literary account of Indian captivity in Spanish-controlled territory from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Originally published in Spanish in 2001 as Historias de la frontera: El cautiverio en la América hispánica, this newly translated work reveals key insights into Native American culture in the New World's most remote regions. From the "happy captivity" of the Spanish military captain Francisco Nuñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, who in 1628 spent six congenial months with the Araucanian Indians on the Chilean frontier, to the harrowing nineteenth-century adventures of foreigners taken captive in the Argentine Pampas and Patagonia; from the declaraciones of the many captives rescued in the Rio de la Plata region of Argentina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the riveting story of Helena Valero, who spent twenty-four years among the Yanomamö in Venezuela during the mid-twentieth century, Operé's vibrant history spans the entire gamut of Spain's far-flung frontiers. Eventually focusing on the role of captivity in Latin American literature, Operé convincingly shows how the captivity genre evolved over time, first to promote territorial expansion and deny intercultural connections during the colonial era, and later to romanticize the frontier in the service of nationalism after independence. This important book is thus multidisciplinary in its concept, providing ethnographic, historical, and literary insights into the lives and customs of Native Americans and their captives in the New World.

Indians, Merchants, and Markets
Indians, Merchants, and Markets

Author: Jeremy Baskes

Publisher: Stanford University Press

Published: 2000

Total Pages: 322

ISBN-13: 0804735123

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Challenging the conventional portrayal of Indian-Spanish economic relations in Mexico, this book argues that Indian market behavior was economically rational and voluntary. It further argues that the repartimiento de mercancías, usually described as a system of forced labor and consumption, was designed to overcome imperfections in Mexico's colonial economy and to facilitate the extension of credit.

Race, Caste, and Status
Race, Caste, and Status

Author: Robert Howard Jackson

Publisher:

Published: 1999

Total Pages: 0

ISBN-13: 9780826318947

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How and with what effect were notions of race and status applied to indigenous peoples in colonial Spanish America? To answer that question, Jackson compares the legal and social distinctions created by Spanish officials to separate the colonisers from the colonised in north-western Mexico, an area on the periphery of Spain's empire, and in Bolivia, a so-called core region with a large sedentary native population. In both regions Spanish elites imposed on native peoples a hierarchical social order based on skin colour, language, dress, residence, and access to land. As fixed as these definitions may have seemed in parish registers, censuses, and tribute records, the actual circumstances of people's lives, whether Indian or mestizo, show that racial classifications were imprecise and subjective. While identity categories had definite importance, particularly for defining who made tribute payments, they were also mutable. Jackson shows that indigenous peoples routinely moved upward to take advantage of opportunities to improve their lives. This book offers students the first new synthesis in over thirty years of what race meant in colonial Spanish America, and it raises important issues.

A History of the Indians of the United States
A History of the Indians of the United States

Author: Angie Debo

Publisher: University of Oklahoma Press

Published: 2013-04-17

Total Pages: 477

ISBN-13: 0806179554

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In 1906 when the Creek Indian Chitto Harjo was protesting the United States government's liquidation of his tribe's lands, he began his argument with an account of Indian history from the time of Columbus, "for, of course, a thing has to have a root before it can grow." Yet even today most intelligent non-Indian Americans have little knowledge of Indian history and affairs those lessons have not taken root. This book is an in-depth historical survey of the Indians of the United States, including the Eskimos and Aleuts of Alaska, which isolates and analyzes the problems which have beset these people since their first contacts with Europeans. Only in the light of this knowledge, the author points out, can an intelligent Indian policy be formulated. In the book are described the first meetings of Indians with explorers, the dispossession of the Indians by colonial expansion, their involvement in imperial rivalries, their beginning relations with the new American republic, and the ensuing century of war and encroachment. The most recent aspects of government Indian policy are also detailed the good and bad administrative practices and measures to which the Indians have been subjected and their present situation. Miss Debo's style is objective, and throughout the book the distinct social environment of the Indians is emphasized—an environment that is foreign to the experience of most white men. Through ignorance of that culture and life style the results of non-Indian policy toward Indians have been centuries of blundering and tragedy. In response to Indian history, an enlightened policy must be formulated: protection of Indian land, vocational and educational training, voluntary relocation, encouragement of tribal organization, recognition of Indians' social groupings, and reliance on Indians' abilities to direct their own lives. The result of this new policy would be a chance for Indians to live now, whether on their own land or as adjusted members of white society. Indian history is usually highly specialized and is never recorded in books of general history. This book unifies the many specialized volumes which have been written about their history and culture. It has been written not only for persons who work with Indians or for students of Indian culture, but for all Americans of good will.

To be Indio in Colonial Spanish America
To be Indio in Colonial Spanish America

Author: Mónica Díaz

Publisher: University of New Mexico Press

Published: 2017

Total Pages: 296

ISBN-13: 0826357733

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Focusing on central Mexico and the Andes (colonial New Spain and Peru), the contributors deepen scholarly knowledge of colonial history and literature, emphasizing the different ways people became and lived their lives as "indios" in this new study.