2017 Pauley Lecture

Department of History Author

11/05/2018 Added

3 Plays

Description

The Department of History's 2017 Pauley Lecture, featuring Dr. Andrés Reséndez

Searchable Transcript

Search:

[00:00:13.100]It's a huge honor to have a very distinguished speaker
[00:00:16.930]this evening speaking at our signature bid
[00:00:19.770]for the Department of History of Pauley Lecture
[00:00:22.230]and symposium that we have every year
[00:00:24.540]is one of the crown jewels of our department.
[00:00:27.710]And it makes us very proud.
[00:00:29.680]It allows us to do certain kinds of things
[00:00:31.560]like inviting very distinguished speakers.
[00:00:34.350]It's a very important part of what we do
[00:00:36.718]and this evening we have the pleasure
[00:00:39.450]of kind of setting up the, handing off really the microphone
[00:00:44.440]to more suitable introducers.
[00:00:48.000]But I do have the pleasure to say
[00:00:49.880]I just bought my copy and I had the first signature
[00:00:54.110]that I captured on campus today.
[00:00:57.200]This is probably worth gold whether it was worth half.
[00:01:00.766](laughs)
[00:01:03.800]I also have the pleasure of introducing a fellow classmate.
[00:01:07.710]We were at the University of Chicago together.
[00:01:10.010]We spent maybe a half a decade in combined misery.
[00:01:15.250]We lived through the experience and we came out alive
[00:01:19.900]and we weren't--
[00:01:22.590]We're still functional human beings.
[00:01:24.250]Yeah, we scarred of the words I'm done.
[00:01:27.570]And as you can see,
[00:01:28.430]it's produced a groundbreaking scholarship
[00:01:32.410]and it's a great honor to have someone I know from Chicago
[00:01:36.210]speaking at this event an event that I hold
[00:01:39.180]and cherish very much.
[00:01:41.390]The Pauley symposium is important to me as a scholar
[00:01:45.120]because when I came to the University of Nebraska,
[00:01:47.430]the very first year I was here,
[00:01:49.920]I was invited to pick out the next year's speaker
[00:01:53.320]and it happened to be at the time Bill Cohen
[00:01:57.250]who came in 2002 and then died two weeks
[00:02:01.270]after the speech here and it was the last big topic
[00:02:06.530]he gave in his life
[00:02:07.950]which we don't want any kind of replicating.
[00:02:11.627](laughs)
[00:02:15.700]But that experience did teach me one thing.
[00:02:18.100]We need to film these talks.
[00:02:21.120]So tonight we're going to try something new.
[00:02:22.970]We're going to film this and then put it on our website.
[00:02:25.390]Katrina Jagolinski had the opportunity
[00:02:27.900]to interview a professor Resendez today
[00:02:31.480]and we also put that on our website as well.
[00:02:34.000]So there'll be two elements of this
[00:02:35.420]that you'll be able to see
[00:02:36.389]and if you weren't able to come to talk tonight,
[00:02:39.510]you will be able to see it later
[00:02:41.070]and this is something that department's going to do
[00:02:43.140]routinely now.
[00:02:44.120]So without further ado, I'd like to introduce Bruce Pauley.
[00:02:47.670]He's going to say a few words about his father
[00:02:49.980]and the origins of this speaker series
[00:02:52.670]and I'll hand it off to Bruce and then I'll come back
[00:02:54.677]and introduce Katrina.
[00:02:57.344](applause)
[00:03:03.019]Thank you.
[00:03:03.947]I want to tell you just a little bit
[00:03:05.480]of why I gave a donation to the history department
[00:03:11.840]for the purpose of this lecture series.
[00:03:15.270]My father was born in Nebraska in 1908
[00:03:21.410]and moved to Lincoln with his parents at 1915.
[00:03:25.220]He graduated from Lincoln High School in 1926
[00:03:28.360]and from the University of Nebraska in 1930
[00:03:31.850]and he was president of his senior class in 1930
[00:03:36.840]as well as a president of his fraternity
[00:03:42.940]His fondness activity who was being the drum major
[00:03:49.239]for the marching band.
[00:03:51.340]He just really loved that.
[00:03:54.750]He admitted that he actually majored in activities
[00:03:58.610]more than anything else while he was here,
[00:04:01.350]even though technically he was a business major.
[00:04:05.480]Then went on to join his father at Pauley Lumber Company,
[00:04:10.382]at 27th and Eighth Street,
[00:04:12.310]which a few of you older folks may remember.
[00:04:15.810]It went out of business at the end of 1999.
[00:04:20.160]Anyway, although he was a businessman,
[00:04:23.770]his real passion was history.
[00:04:28.240]Whenever we went on a trip, which was pretty often,
[00:04:33.890]he wanted to visit every historical place
[00:04:38.640]he possibly could along the way.
[00:04:41.590]And he was basically the reason
[00:04:44.680]why I became a history major
[00:04:47.170]and went on to become a history professor.
[00:04:53.190]Without that inspiration I might have gone
[00:04:56.960]into some other field.
[00:04:58.400]Normally of course I would have followed in his footsteps
[00:05:01.920]and have joined him at the Pauley Lumber Company.
[00:05:05.820]History was my passion and I'm everlastingly grateful to him
[00:05:11.160]that he never insisted that I enter in the lumber business
[00:05:15.700]because I would have been frankly bored to tears if I had.
[00:05:21.180]When I was married to my wife Miranda,
[00:05:23.740]who was over here in 1963,
[00:05:26.680]my Mentor said you will live a very interesting life
[00:05:32.290]and it has been.
[00:05:36.300]So I'm grateful to my father for his inspiration
[00:05:40.980]and I felt it important to a return something to the people
[00:05:49.090]that he loved in Nebraska
[00:05:52.650]from what he had earned while working
[00:05:54.600]at the Pauley Lumber company.
[00:05:56.890]So I thought it appropriate
[00:05:59.840]that I made this donation to the history department
[00:06:04.270]and in a way we were in total agreement.
[00:06:08.760]Ambrosia and I who was chair of the department
[00:06:11.510]sitting on the second row.
[00:06:13.230]That having a lecture series in honor of my father
[00:06:17.110]would be a wonderful way to honor my father.
[00:06:20.770]And it's been I think 20 years now, or close to 20 years
[00:06:25.730]since I made that donation.
[00:06:28.100]And it was the best investment that I've ever ade.
[00:06:31.490]I've thoroughly enjoyed it all these years
[00:06:35.990]and I think this is probably the best audience
[00:06:38.670]that we've ever had for this event.
[00:06:42.400]So maybe that shows that it's kind of building up
[00:06:45.996]it's outreach.
[00:06:48.040]Anyway, I am so grateful that you are here
[00:06:52.330]and so grateful to my father that because of him,
[00:06:56.930]I would have the resources to make this donation.
[00:06:59.960]So thank you very much for coming.
[00:07:02.464](applause)
[00:07:10.889]Thank you Bruce.
[00:07:12.960]Katrina Jagadinski is an associate professor of history.
[00:07:15.860]She's going to introduce our speaker,
[00:07:18.360]so I'm going to hand the floor to Katrina.
[00:07:27.260]Thank you James and thank you Bruce
[00:07:30.570]and thank you to our speaker, Dr. Resendez.
[00:07:34.130]Andres Resendez grew up in Mexico City
[00:07:37.040]where he received his BA in international politics,
[00:07:40.960]international relations and briefly went into politics.
[00:07:44.260]He served as a consultant for historical soap operas
[00:07:48.270]or a Tele novellas.
[00:07:49.866]he got his pHD in history at the University of Chicago.
[00:07:54.220]He has taught at Yale, the University of Helsinki
[00:07:58.200]and at the University of California Davis,
[00:08:00.550]where he is currently history professor
[00:08:02.680]and departmental vice chair.
[00:08:05.270]He is the author and the reason he is here tonight
[00:08:08.150]is because of his book, The Other Slavery,
[00:08:10.740]the uncovered story of Indian enslavement in America,
[00:08:14.910]finalists for the 2016 National Book Award
[00:08:18.360]and winner of the 2017 Bancroft prize.
[00:08:21.900]His other books include A Land So Strange,
[00:08:24.860]The Epic Journey of Cabeza de Vaca
[00:08:27.681]and Changing National Identities at the Frontier,
[00:08:31.450]Texas and New Mexico 1800 to 1850,
[00:08:35.580]a book I read a bit more than a decade ago
[00:08:38.300]while a graduate student and it has been a treat
[00:08:41.100]to follow his career since then.
[00:08:43.760]I should note that all of those books
[00:08:45.650]are available outside and I hope you'll take a look at them
[00:08:49.330]on your way out.
[00:08:51.520]The Other Slavery is an eyeopening and gut wrenching history
[00:08:55.440]spanning four centuries that clarifies
[00:08:58.320]the centrality of Indian enslavement
[00:09:00.367]and the Spanish Mexican and American efforts
[00:09:03.244]to colonize Latin and North America.
[00:09:06.640]For those of us are already familiar
[00:09:08.560]with those overlapping histories,
[00:09:10.600]Resendez' work synthesizes the traces of slavery
[00:09:14.430]we might have noticed in our research,
[00:09:16.570]but did not fully understand
[00:09:18.260]in terms of scope and significance.
[00:09:20.760]For Historians of African American slavery,
[00:09:23.510]Resendez offers a parallel narrative
[00:09:25.740]of the creative and cruel strategies enslavers used
[00:09:29.600]to justify their mastery and subjugation.
[00:09:32.870]For readers committed to expanding their knowledge
[00:09:35.580]of indigenous history, the book demonstrates
[00:09:38.194]familiar narratives about population decline
[00:09:41.500]in the face of epidemic disease and overt dispossession
[00:09:46.070]where strategies used to compliment Spanish,
[00:09:48.830]Mexican and American enslavement of Indians,
[00:09:51.630]a practice that indigenous groups also tried to leverage
[00:09:54.810]to their own advantage when they could.
[00:09:57.420]Explaining key events and borderlands history
[00:09:59.870]through the lens of the other slavery
[00:10:02.120]with such clarity that readers might wonder
[00:10:04.730]what took us so long to see it.
[00:10:07.340]Resendez is a scholar shaping the field
[00:10:09.860]and we are very pleased to host him
[00:10:12.140]as part of the Pauley Lecture series.
[00:10:14.710]We look forward to a tremendous presentation
[00:10:17.360]and a discussion afterward.
[00:10:19.690]Please feel free I have to say to tweet your feedback
[00:10:23.120]to @unlhistory and follow our feed
[00:10:26.150]for other upcoming events on campus.
[00:10:28.740]Thank you for coming and thank you for presenting.
[00:10:32.130]Thank you.
[00:10:33.453]Thank you so much.
[00:10:35.241](applause)
[00:10:40.040]Thank you so much.
[00:10:40.880]It is a true honor to be here in Lincoln.
[00:10:44.941]I really want to thank James and Katrina and Bruce.
[00:10:50.850]Everyone who made possible, my presence here
[00:10:54.350]and share what I have been learning in the past
[00:10:57.138]seven or eight years of really intense work.
[00:11:01.937]And I also want to thank you all for carving out some time
[00:11:05.560]and defying the elements in this day to be here.
[00:11:09.925]When I entered this room, I think you've got to be kidding
[00:11:14.260]that this is going to hold these audience
[00:11:16.130]but I am blown away that you all were able to come here.
[00:11:20.210]So the topic today is slavery
[00:11:24.030]and it is a topic that brings to mind
[00:11:27.420]bodies of Africans stuffed in the hold of a ship
[00:11:31.900]or white apron made bustling in an antebellum home.
[00:11:36.080]History books and movies like the ones I'm showing you here
[00:11:40.200]continuously reinforced the notion that slaves
[00:11:44.070]were black Africans imported into the new world.
[00:11:47.610]Now we may be aware that in the long sweep of history,
[00:11:50.600]people other than Africans been held in bondage
[00:11:54.313]but we seem to be unable to escape our historical myopia.
[00:12:00.000]So indeed, my recent book, The Other Slavery
[00:12:02.780]tells about the system of bondage
[00:12:04.890]that targeted native Americans,
[00:12:07.510]a system there was every bit as terrible,
[00:12:10.310]degrading and vast as African slavery.
[00:12:14.100]And yet most Americans are only dimly aware of it
[00:12:18.450]or none at all.
[00:12:20.160]According to my estimates, anywhere between 2.5
[00:12:23.960]and five million native Americans were enslaved
[00:12:27.010]throughout the hemispheres in the centuries
[00:12:29.470]between Columbus and 1900.
[00:12:33.040]And interestingly in contrast to African slavery,
[00:12:35.640]which targeted, mostly adult males,
[00:12:40.610]the majority of these native slaves
[00:12:43.150]were actually women and children.
[00:12:44.890]So the two slaveries are interesting
[00:12:47.340]in that they are like mirror opposites of each other.
[00:12:50.230]It was a very big deal but somehow,
[00:12:53.010]we have chosen to forget all about this
[00:12:55.295]and to get a sense of just how neglected a topic this is,
[00:12:59.369]try this get into Amazon and type in African slavery
[00:13:04.110]and you will turn up more than 16,000 books
[00:13:07.520]devoted to African slavery.
[00:13:09.630]However, if you type in Indian slavery,
[00:13:11.920]you will find instead, some works about the Indian Ocean
[00:13:16.480]and Southeast Asia and just a couple of dozen
[00:13:20.470]specialized monographs devoted
[00:13:22.910]to native Americans held in bondage.
[00:13:25.940]The consequences are plain to see.
[00:13:30.880]Whenever the conversation turns to slavery,
[00:13:33.170]people typically think of black slaves.
[00:13:36.160]Virtually no one ever thinks about native Americans.
[00:13:40.440]It is as if each group could fit into a neat historical box.
[00:13:44.510]Africans were the ones enslaved
[00:13:46.328]while Indians either died off or were dispossessed
[00:13:49.860]and confined to reservations.
[00:13:52.708]Now I have to start out by emphasizing
[00:13:56.060]that Indian slavery was not a European invention.
[00:14:00.600]Maya's an Astex took captives to use a sacrificial victims,
[00:14:06.020]Iroquois people wage campaigns in a neighboring groups
[00:14:10.280]called "mourning wars to avenge and replace their dead,"
[00:14:15.390]in the Pacific northwest male Indians
[00:14:17.890]offered slaves as dowries to finalize elite marriages.
[00:14:21.910]So along with the rest of the world,
[00:14:24.185]the rest of the planet,
[00:14:25.620]native Americans enslaved one another for millennia.
[00:14:28.890]So the image that I'm showing you here on the top image,
[00:14:33.910]you can see the beautiful Fresco Bonampak
[00:14:37.442]at Maya site where you can see some Maya Lords
[00:14:40.970]clearly standing, towering over
[00:14:43.420]what are quite evident captives
[00:14:46.930]and below what I'm showing you here
[00:14:48.920]is a folio of the Codex Mendoza.
[00:14:54.050]Admittedly the Codex Mendoza
[00:14:55.560]is from the middle of the 16th century.
[00:14:57.380]So it's opposed contact document.
[00:15:00.178]What you have is two warriors
[00:15:03.190]holding to individuals by the hair.
[00:15:05.720]And if you look at the Spanish clause there,
[00:15:07.650]you will see that it says captivo, captive very clearly.
[00:15:11.210]And that was so common that it was a pictorial convention
[00:15:16.680]to depict a captive by somebody being held by the hair.
[00:15:20.450]And so that goes back to precontact era.
[00:15:24.120]So it, it was something that occurred
[00:15:27.018]in our hemisphere before contact.
[00:15:30.520]But with the arrival of Europeans,
[00:15:33.330]these preexisting practices of bondage
[00:15:36.320]originally embedded in very specific cultural contexts
[00:15:40.290]like the ones I just mentioned a minute ago.
[00:15:43.430]Became commercialized, expanded in unexpected ways
[00:15:47.760]and came to resemble the kinds of human trafficking
[00:15:50.640]that are recognizable to us today.
[00:15:54.770]This transformation began
[00:15:57.590]with the earliest European explorers
[00:16:00.690]During his second voyage to America in 1493,
[00:16:04.880]Columbus sent dozens of Indians from the Caribbean
[00:16:08.590]and accompanying them was a candid letter
[00:16:11.540]addressed to the Spanish monarchs, and I quote him
[00:16:14.040]just a line so get you a taste of this.
[00:16:16.797]"May Your highnesses judge, whether these Indians
[00:16:20.167]"ought to be captured for I believe
[00:16:22.557]"we could take many of the males every year
[00:16:25.467]"and an infinite number of women
[00:16:27.817]"and may you also believe that one of them
[00:16:30.367]"would be worth more than three black slaves from Guinea
[00:16:33.647]"in strength and ingenuity, as you will gather
[00:16:36.477]"from those I am shipping out now."
[00:16:40.020]Those Columbus inaugurated the middle passage
[00:16:43.130]complete with the overcrowding and high mortality rates
[00:16:47.030]that we commonly associate with African slavery
[00:16:50.090]but which in fact can be traced back a few years earlier.
[00:16:55.584]Now, eventually all European powers
[00:16:58.600]became important participants in the Indian slave trade.
[00:17:01.560]The English, the French, the Dutch, the Portuguese,
[00:17:07.257]but Spain by virtue of the enormous
[00:17:09.220]and densely populated colonies that it ruled,
[00:17:13.110]became the dominant slaving power.
[00:17:15.290]Spain was to Indian slavery, what Portugal and later England
[00:17:19.370]were two African slavery.
[00:17:21.690]Ironically, Spain began by forbidding
[00:17:25.650]the enslavement of Indians, yet this categorical prohibition
[00:17:30.150]did not stop generations of determined conquistadores
[00:17:33.370]and colonists from taking natives truly on a planetary scale
[00:17:38.710]from the Canary Islands to the Philippines
[00:17:41.770]and from the tip of South America all the way to Canada.
[00:17:46.800]To what is now Canada and the fact that these other slavery
[00:17:50.360]had to be carried out clandestinely,
[00:17:53.000]made it even more insidious.
[00:17:55.170]This is a tale of good intentions gone badly astray.
[00:18:01.060]Now, the Caribbean was the laboratory of conquest
[00:18:03.740]and it was also the first and quite likely the worst
[00:18:07.155]native slaving ground in the world.
[00:18:10.490]At contact the Caribbean sustained
[00:18:13.280]a large indigenous population.
[00:18:16.000]Get from this high point,
[00:18:17.886]a tragic demographic collapse followed.
[00:18:21.290]By the 1550s, merely two generations
[00:18:24.610]after the arrival of Columbus,
[00:18:27.010]the natives so memorably described
[00:18:29.620]by the admiral of the ocean, CS,
[00:18:32.151]"affectionate and without malice"
[00:18:35.040]and having very straight legs and no bellies
[00:18:38.200]had ceased to exist as a people.
[00:18:42.042]As any school child knows, smallpox was a major reason
[00:18:45.790]for these devastation, but blaming everything
[00:18:48.840]on unintended biological consequences is just too easy
[00:18:52.880]and not borne out by the sources.
[00:18:54.744]Take for instance, Hispaniola the island now shared by Haiti
[00:18:59.300]and the Dominican Republic,
[00:19:01.054]which you can see right in the middle of the screen
[00:19:05.140]and I can get you a larger image right here.
[00:19:11.090]Italian demographer, Masimo Liberace a few years ago
[00:19:14.880]made the crucial point that the first certain documentation
[00:19:18.930]of smallpox in Hispaniola appears only in 1518.
[00:19:24.620]1518 and yet even though 26 years passed before
[00:19:30.880]the first documented cases of smallpox began to appear,
[00:19:34.630]the native population on this island
[00:19:36.820]found itself on a clear path towards extinction.
[00:19:41.250]At contact, Hispaniola may have had a population
[00:19:44.580]that we can reasonably estimate at around
[00:19:46.600]two or 300,000 inhabitants
[00:19:49.890]spread out in some 500 communities.
[00:19:52.480]So extreme dispersion, which again, makes unlikely
[00:19:56.930]the easy explanations of epidemics gone wild.
[00:20:02.180]By 1508, that figure had fallen into 60,000.
[00:20:07.510]By 1514, it stood at nearly 26,000
[00:20:11.430]according to a fairly comprehensive census
[00:20:14.130]and no longer guesswork.
[00:20:16.080]So these Indians were actually parceled out
[00:20:19.270]between different Spanish colonies.
[00:20:20.830]So they had a pretty good sense about how many they were,
[00:20:23.360]where they were, etc.
[00:20:25.350]And by 1517, that number had plunged
[00:20:28.370]to just 11,000 Native Americans.
[00:20:31.990]So in other words, one year before Europeans
[00:20:36.080]began reporting smallpox, Hispaniola's Indian population
[00:20:40.280]had dwindled to perhaps five percent or less
[00:20:44.170]of what it had been in 1492.
[00:20:50.410]While it is impossible to rule out completely
[00:20:53.150]the possibility of unreported epidemics
[00:20:55.920]it is obvious that other factors were at work
[00:20:59.370]in the early years and as it turns out,
[00:21:02.080]Europeans found the largest deposits of gold on Hispaniola
[00:21:06.230]and they quickly put the local residents to work.
[00:21:10.220]So if you look at that map, if you see that road
[00:21:13.790]between the top of Hispaniola and down
[00:21:15.870]into the bow valley of Sibow,
[00:21:18.160]that's where the gold fields were founded.
[00:21:24.080]The image that I'm showing you here,
[00:21:26.750]it's maybe familiar to some of you.
[00:21:28.760]It's a beautiful image by Oviedo, one of the chroniclers
[00:21:32.080]who also happened to be one of the miners,
[00:21:36.390]early miners in the Caribbean.
[00:21:37.750]So he really knew what he was talking about.
[00:21:39.646]And so what that represents is the way
[00:21:42.460]in which gold was extracted.
[00:21:44.740]Basically groups of Indians, small groups of Indians
[00:21:47.333]were divided into three different quadrillas
[00:21:50.930]as they were called.
[00:21:51.763]So three different groups.
[00:21:53.340]One group did some superficial digging
[00:21:56.370]of which you can see at the right.
[00:21:58.590]Another group carried that sand
[00:22:03.630]to a nearby stream or river and a third group, usually women
[00:22:08.356]had these large pans called barteas at the time
[00:22:14.610]and they wash away the dirt that was at the top
[00:22:17.850]to leave the smallest specks of gold at the bottom.
[00:22:22.423]So this is the way a gold was mined in Hispaniola.
[00:22:29.760]This is a process that went on ceaselessly
[00:22:32.820]for 15, 17, 20 hours a day.
[00:22:36.290]The number of Indians involved at any one time
[00:22:39.610]in these gold fields was not to graded with 10,000
[00:22:43.100]but it was enough to really rapidly consume
[00:22:47.420]a lot of the Indian population in the island.
[00:22:51.230]By the 1500s, I mean 15 teens,
[00:22:56.410]the number of Indians of Hispaniola
[00:22:58.010]had plunged so drastically that the remaining population
[00:23:01.630]was no longer able to provide enough labor
[00:23:03.710]for the goldmines, let alone for all the other stuff
[00:23:07.000]that they needed to do like plant food
[00:23:09.562]and build houses, etc.
[00:23:12.490]And so to replenish the dwindling workforce,
[00:23:15.440]European slavers fanned out to neighboring islands.
[00:23:18.930]And does the demographic cataclysm spread out
[00:23:22.270]from Hispaniola to the neighboring islands
[00:23:24.840]as you can see here.
[00:23:25.673]So this map I constructed on the basis of contracts
[00:23:31.160]awarded by the Spanish authorities to individuals
[00:23:34.410]who undertook to go bring Indians
[00:23:36.676]from especially useless islands, like The Bahamas
[00:23:40.070]were known as the useless islands
[00:23:41.510]because there was nothing of value according to the Spanish
[00:23:43.990]only people to bring the people
[00:23:46.160]from the places where they were useless
[00:23:48.460]to another place where they could be of use.
[00:23:52.910]And so you can get a very good sense of how Hispaniola,
[00:23:56.400]Jamaica, Puerto Rico, where the centers,
[00:24:00.450]the recipients of these initial wave of enslavement.
[00:24:06.800]Now, when we think of these rushes based on precious metals,
[00:24:17.174]we may think of gold and certainly in the United States,
[00:24:21.030]we think of course, of the California gold rush.
[00:24:26.250]Altogether, California and let me just say,
[00:24:29.940]altogether, California produce
[00:24:31.340]some 3.7 million kilograms of gold
[00:24:34.970]and in the process attracted about 300,000 people
[00:24:38.360]from the rest of the world.
[00:24:40.180]So it was clearly a major phenomenon,
[00:24:42.780]yet the exploitation of silver rather than gold
[00:24:46.190]was the preeminent Indian slavery activity
[00:24:48.650]of the colonial world.
[00:24:52.150]In order to wrap our mindS around
[00:24:54.570]what these meant in comparative terms,
[00:24:56.760]I came up with this graph.
[00:24:58.210]So on the left hand side, or on the right hand side,
[00:25:02.096]these little bars that I left unlabeled,
[00:25:06.290]represent the California gold rush.
[00:25:09.770]The amount of gold in kilograms produced.
[00:25:14.550]And on the left hand side you have the amount of silver
[00:25:18.130]in kilograms as well a extracted during this time.
[00:25:24.740]So, what we can say first of all,
[00:25:26.750]that in terms of duration, the California gold rush
[00:25:29.430]was like a hurricane.
[00:25:30.460]So gold production skyrocketed in 1849,
[00:25:34.480]but peaked only four years later.
[00:25:38.670]For all practical purposes, the California gold rush,
[00:25:41.150]was over in 20 years.
[00:25:42.507]These earlier silver rush that I'm talking about
[00:25:46.192]actually started in the 1520s,
[00:25:49.046]it rose to the 16th century,
[00:25:51.690]plateaued in the course of the 17th century
[00:25:54.600]and gained a second wind in the 18th century
[00:25:59.020]to the point where during the second half
[00:26:00.990]of the 18th century, northern Mexico,
[00:26:03.620]the silver mines of northern Mexico,
[00:26:05.140]there was never a single gigantic mine
[00:26:07.560]in the same way that there was put the sea in south America.
[00:26:09.777]But it was a set of different mines,
[00:26:12.210]In many years, they were producing over half
[00:26:14.450]of the entire silver production of the world.
[00:26:17.360]It was produced in these one region
[00:26:19.820]just to give you a sense.
[00:26:21.900]So in other words, what you need to imagine
[00:26:25.240]is about 13 California gold rushes strung together
[00:26:31.090]in the course of the 16, 17 and 18th centuries
[00:26:34.140]to get a sense of the scope of what I'm talking about.
[00:26:38.250]And in terms of geographic scope,
[00:26:41.790]again, people sometimes talk about the silver mines
[00:26:44.200]of northern Mexico but in fact,
[00:26:46.320]these phenomenon started in central and southern Mexico.
[00:26:50.800]If you go from Mexico city to Acapulco today,
[00:26:53.350]you will run into Tesco and some otHer sites
[00:26:57.300]which were the minds originally developed
[00:26:59.760]by a man called Tesco himself.
[00:27:02.470]And that eventually moved to the western slopes
[00:27:06.890]to the pacific coast, then prospectors on miners
[00:27:11.550]moving into the high plateaus in central Mexico.
[00:27:14.670]And this map shows you just the,
[00:27:17.380]it's based on the most comprehensive senses of minds
[00:27:21.210]of the 16th, 17th and 18th century that I could find.
[00:27:24.310]And it gives you a sense
[00:27:25.300]of just the sheer geographic scope of this phenomenon.
[00:27:31.600]If this fantastic silver boom
[00:27:34.160]had occurred in the 19th century,
[00:27:36.360]Mexico would have become a worldwide magnet like California.
[00:27:41.120]In an era of newspapers,
[00:27:42.800]steamboats and widespread transoceanic travel,
[00:27:46.150]there is little doubt that the great Mexican silver mines
[00:27:50.030]would have lured immigrants from all quarters of the world.
[00:27:53.780]But because this boom predated all of these communications
[00:27:57.190]and transportation conveniences
[00:27:59.228]and unfolded at a time when the Spanish monarchy
[00:28:02.113]prohibited all foreigners from going
[00:28:04.620]to the silver districts, Mexico had to do
[00:28:07.939]with its own human resources, especially native Americans.
[00:28:12.890]So California attracted some 300,000 people
[00:28:15.660]from the outside, yet colonial Mexico
[00:28:18.330]had to satisfy a hugely greater demand for labor
[00:28:22.500]with no access to volunteers from the rest of the world.
[00:28:26.620]So the Indians who lived around the mines
[00:28:29.505]were the first we pulled into the system
[00:28:32.810]and eventually Indians from farther away
[00:28:35.548]had to be brought in.
[00:28:37.380]So what I'm showing you here is actually a picture
[00:28:40.826]taken by an American miner during the Porterian era
[00:28:46.400]in 1905 who went to Bueno Quatro
[00:28:48.950]and it shows the working conditions
[00:28:53.200]which would not have been radically different
[00:28:56.130]from what they would have experienced
[00:28:58.070]in the 16th or 17th century.
[00:28:59.920]That is silver mines were different from goldmines
[00:29:03.880]in that that required following the silver veins
[00:29:06.930]usually down.
[00:29:07.763]So this was not just superficial digging as gold.
[00:29:10.090]It required following the vein.
[00:29:13.530]It required then bringing that ore up to the surface.
[00:29:17.190]And this was done on the back of workers like this
[00:29:21.420]because they used chicken ladder, so to speak.
[00:29:24.180]They needed to have their hands free.
[00:29:26.070]So they basically dangled the ore on fiber bags
[00:29:31.410]that were propped up against their foreheads
[00:29:33.530]as you can see here, so that they can use their hands
[00:29:36.426]as they climbed up.
[00:29:38.050]And then that ore had to be crushed to a very fine powder
[00:29:42.860]mixed with some toxic reagents, especially mercury
[00:29:47.318]in order that the mercury with amalgamate with the silver
[00:29:50.860]sitting down to the bottom and produce the silver.
[00:29:54.789]Again, that process is very simple enough,
[00:29:57.590]but it was a major, a major, a major, a major labor sink.
[00:30:02.700]If you can imagine that, especially in the 16th,
[00:30:04.310]17th century, there were no explosives available.
[00:30:07.980]So just the whole hole had to be done by hand
[00:30:13.120]without explosives or anything like that.
[00:30:15.130]And these included, I mean, some of these mines
[00:30:17.300]in one Buena Quatro, when they were finished
[00:30:19.860]in the 16th century, were reputed to be the deepest
[00:30:23.400]manmade shafts in the world.
[00:30:26.640]So that you can get a sense of the scale of this.
[00:30:30.220]Now, that story illustrates very well
[00:30:33.493]what went on in northern Mexico, but these connections
[00:30:36.540]also explained a great deal of the historical experience
[00:30:39.954]of the American south west.
[00:30:42.740]For instance, in the summer of 1680,
[00:30:47.900]the pueblo Indians of New Mexico rose up
[00:30:51.750]and launched the most massive rebellion
[00:30:54.150]Spaniards had ever experienced in north America
[00:30:56.700]since the early days of conquest.
[00:31:00.079]The nervous center of these movement
[00:31:02.920]was the pueblo of cows in northern New Mexico.
[00:31:06.200]So there it is, New Mexico, Arizona,
[00:31:09.170]which will be very dear to my friend, Bill Beesley here.
[00:31:12.770]A talus is way at the top there.
[00:31:15.700]So that was the center of these movement.
[00:31:18.650]And from inside akiba, or underground chamber
[00:31:23.100]used for ceremonial occasions in Taues,
[00:31:26.290]a local shaman named Papei dispatched runners
[00:31:29.380]to more than 70 Indian communities.
[00:31:32.510]Some of them as far as the present day
[00:31:34.450]Hoppy Reservation in Arizona, some 300 miles away.
[00:31:39.510]And mind you, they didn't have horses.
[00:31:41.270]They had to go on foot.
[00:31:42.670]They basically were long distance runners.
[00:31:45.470]But based plan was to get
[00:31:47.310]all of these indigenous communities
[00:31:49.090]to rise up on the same day
[00:31:51.240]to overwhelm the much smaller Spanish population
[00:31:54.380]living in this region.
[00:31:55.690]And to this end, the runners carried an extraordinary device
[00:32:00.370]a chord of yoka fiber containing as many knots
[00:32:03.570]as there were days before the insurrection.
[00:32:06.720]By untying one knot everyday,
[00:32:08.610]each community would know when to strike.
[00:32:11.730]There revolve swept through New Mexico on August 11 and 10.
[00:32:16.467]I'm sorry, 10 and 11 of 1680,
[00:32:19.920]destroying houses, ranches and churches
[00:32:23.220]and succeeding mightily.
[00:32:24.760]Within two months, all Spanish living in New Mexico
[00:32:28.540]were either dead or had been driven out of the country.
[00:32:32.260]Writers have emphasized the religious aspects
[00:32:35.580]of the pueblo revolt of 1680.
[00:32:37.950]They have focused on the charismatic Popeii
[00:32:40.380]and he's ability to coordinate so many pueblos.
[00:32:43.103]These authors have also been rightly impressed
[00:32:46.270]by the burning and the facing of churches
[00:32:48.816]and the torturing and killing a friar's during the uprising.
[00:32:53.660]So again, explaining the motifs of people in remote times
[00:32:56.810]from around, is a very difficult enterprise.
[00:33:00.380]And of course, rebellions are seldom triggered
[00:33:02.640]by a single cause.
[00:33:04.320]However, in my book, I tried to make the case
[00:33:07.380]that while religion was certainly a very important factor,
[00:33:10.710]the Spanish enslavement of new Mexicans Indians
[00:33:13.567]played a major role in triggering these massive rebellion.
[00:33:19.730]For one thing, rebellious leaders talked about it.
[00:33:24.510]One of the demands of the rebels was, and I quote them,
[00:33:28.160]so this is one of the very few clear statements
[00:33:31.030]that we have about what this movement was all about.
[00:33:33.260]It was that all classes of Indians
[00:33:35.123]forcibly held by Spaniards be given back to the rebels.
[00:33:41.290]If you look at the new Mexican society, at that time
[00:33:45.246]in the late 17th century, they had servants,
[00:33:47.632]virtually all the households in New Mexico had servants
[00:33:50.830]and many of them were actually Indian servants.
[00:33:53.710]One of the rebellion leaders also asked that,
[00:33:56.507]"His wife and children be given up to him."
[00:34:00.120]And the same thing Apache's participated in this movement
[00:34:04.780]and they also claimed some of their own to be given back.
[00:34:09.414]So, by the statements of their own rebels,
[00:34:13.220]we know that slavery was part of the equation at least
[00:34:18.140]and furthermore, the geography of these uprising
[00:34:21.750]is just a suggestion about the importance
[00:34:24.450]of the Indian slave trade.
[00:34:26.450]Although the uprising is popularly known
[00:34:28.780]as the pueblo revolt of 1680,
[00:34:31.050]the movement that actually encompassed
[00:34:33.260]a large swath of territory along slaving corridor
[00:34:37.130]leading south from New Mexico
[00:34:39.480]to the mining region of Chihuahua
[00:34:42.000]and also west to Sonora.
[00:34:43.950]So in particular, these large mine in Paral
[00:34:47.250]was the destination of many of the goods
[00:34:49.750]at many of the people's coming out of New Mexico.
[00:34:56.030]The insurrection involved not only pueblo Indians,
[00:34:58.320]but also Apache's, Conchus, Humanos, Salineros
[00:35:01.620]and many other groups.
[00:35:03.430]And so what I have done in this map that you are seeing,
[00:35:06.170]is to overlay what I call the corridors,
[00:35:09.119]the flow of slaves shown by those arrows
[00:35:13.180]along with the areas of rebellion during the 1680s
[00:35:16.310]and you can see that the match is pretty good.
[00:35:19.470]So again, another little bit of evidence
[00:35:21.990]that supports the idea that labor coercion
[00:35:25.400]was an important part of this insurrection.
[00:35:32.320]One of the most fascinating aspects
[00:35:34.299]of the phenomenon of Indian slavery
[00:35:36.700]is the involvement of the Indians themselves.
[00:35:40.540]Native Americans participated in this slaving enterprises
[00:35:44.270]since the very beginning of European colonization
[00:35:47.440]and before, as we started to talk.
[00:35:50.190]However, at first they played a secondary role
[00:35:54.260]to the Europeans who after all,
[00:35:55.830]possess the most developed a warfare technologies,
[00:35:59.040]especially horses and firearms.
[00:36:02.190]Indigenous peoples became local suppliers at first,
[00:36:06.240]junior partners, guides, guardsman intermediaries
[00:36:10.663]but with the passage of time, Native Americans
[00:36:13.560]came to acquire courses and weapons of their own.
[00:36:17.071]And as they increase their power,
[00:36:19.650]they came to control
[00:36:20.870]a larger share of the traffic in natives.
[00:36:24.370]By the 18th and 19th centuries, they had taken control
[00:36:28.640]of much of the business.
[00:36:30.930]No other Indian nation attain the spectacular success
[00:36:35.270]of the Comanches, which became the preeminent supplier
[00:36:39.460]of indigenous slaves both to other natives
[00:36:42.620]as well as to European colonist.
[00:36:44.570]And that is not only the Spanish, but the French
[00:36:47.280]and the English who were around that enormous area
[00:36:51.044]wedged between Texas and New Mexico, known as Comancheria,
[00:36:55.210]which I'm showing you here.
[00:36:59.871]Their expansive territory became a major trading center
[00:37:05.610]as recent works by historians, one of your own
[00:37:09.370]Becca Jamalain and Brian Delay, Hakeem Martinez
[00:37:13.107]and others have made very clear.
[00:37:16.852]So, according to one witness in 1744,
[00:37:21.220]Comanche trading parties traveled, and I quote
[00:37:23.647]"More than a thousand leagues from New Mexico
[00:37:27.627]"in the course of a year acquiring captives
[00:37:30.387]"and returning to offer their loot
[00:37:32.267]"in the trading fairs in New Mexico."
[00:37:35.230]When missionary recorded the enthusiasm
[00:37:37.970]caused by the arrival of one of such trading embassies.
[00:37:41.155]So here's just one line to give you a flavor of this.
[00:37:45.730]Here the governor and his lieutenants
[00:37:48.100]gathered together as many horses,
[00:37:50.480]metal tools and everything possible
[00:37:53.130]as they can for trade and border with these barbarians
[00:37:56.500]in exchange for deer and buffalo hides
[00:37:59.400]and what is sad is in exchange for Indian slaves,
[00:38:02.710]men and women, small and large,
[00:38:05.570]a great multitude of people.
[00:38:09.640]For Comanches themselves, the Indian slave trade
[00:38:13.380]was not just a business where I went, but a way of life.
[00:38:16.580]Comanche sold some of their slaves,
[00:38:19.020]but they retained a large portion of their captives.
[00:38:22.440]One witness notice that, "Nearly every family among
[00:38:26.727]"the Comanches had one or two captives."
[00:38:29.620]Many of the captains were women
[00:38:31.640]who were actually incorporated into Comanche society
[00:38:34.970]as secondary wives.
[00:38:36.580]That is, they were sort of the wives of the wives
[00:38:40.690]if these makes some sense.
[00:38:43.660]Comanche men hunted bison,
[00:38:45.800]but women were the ones who processed the dead carcasses,
[00:38:49.214]preparing the meat and curing the hides
[00:38:52.210]an extraordinarily labor intensive activity
[00:38:55.490]and successful Comanche men could have five,
[00:38:57.710]10 or more wives.
[00:39:00.240]In addition to women, boys were the other significant
[00:39:03.430]contingent of slaves in the Comancheria.
[00:39:06.570]Their main occupation was tending the animals.
[00:39:09.830]As Comanches grew stronger,
[00:39:12.250]they accumulated horses and mules
[00:39:15.170]and managing all of these herds
[00:39:17.010]required prodigious amounts of labor
[00:39:19.840]that neither the worriers nor the women
[00:39:21.982]were able or willing to give.
[00:39:24.940]And so it was not uncommon for such boy slaves
[00:39:28.251]to manage herds of 30, 50, 70 horses.
[00:39:32.623]A a very grueling activity,
[00:39:34.070]especially if you think about it in the winter.
[00:39:37.110]So for Comanche's and other groups like Comanches,
[00:39:40.020]slaves constituted a very versatile commodity
[00:39:43.190]that could be used as an exploited underclass,
[00:39:46.710]as pawns that could be exchanged for kin members
[00:39:49.760]captured by other groups or simply
[00:39:51.960]as the most ubiquitous form of currency in the region.
[00:39:57.664]Now, what about Americans?
[00:40:01.230]So we're getting to that.
[00:40:03.270]Indian slavery engulf the entire continent.
[00:40:07.640]But the timing vary depending on the region.
[00:40:11.820]By the 19th century, Indian slavery had nearly disappeared
[00:40:15.820]in the eastern seaboard.
[00:40:18.070]In colonial times, the Carolinas had been a major
[00:40:21.700]in the enslaving ground as several works
[00:40:24.210]have made very clear.
[00:40:25.170]I'm thinking, eSpecially with Allan Galle, for example.
[00:40:28.330]New Englanders had impressed rebellious Indians
[00:40:30.610]and shipped them to the Caribbean.
[00:40:32.200]Again, plenty of scholarship on that.
[00:40:35.590]French colonists in eastern Canada
[00:40:37.850]had procured thousands of natives
[00:40:40.000]from the Great Lakes region, from the interior.
[00:40:42.610]Again, very well documented.
[00:40:44.810]However, during the 18th and especially
[00:40:48.140]in the early 19th century,
[00:40:50.020]the traffic of natives with largely replaced
[00:40:54.189]and overshadowed by African slavery in this whole region.
[00:40:58.410]Yet in the end, slavery continued to thrive in the west.
[00:41:02.160]The best evidence comes from letters
[00:41:04.890]and diaries of westbound Americans.
[00:41:08.620]In New Mexico, for example, James S. Calhoun,
[00:41:12.820]the first Indian agent of the territory
[00:41:15.420]could not hide his amazement
[00:41:17.730]of the sophistication of the Indian slave market,
[00:41:20.660]and I quote one line,
[00:41:22.447]"The value of the captives depends upon age,
[00:41:25.717]"sex, beauty, and usefulness."
[00:41:29.240]Good looking females, not having passes,
[00:41:31.620]sear and yellow leaf,
[00:41:33.600]that is a shakespearean reference by the way.
[00:41:35.990]So we had a very literate in Indian agent.
[00:41:39.120]So not having passes sear and yellow leaf
[00:41:42.870]are valued from 50 pestles to 150 pestles each.
[00:41:47.500]Males as they may be useful, one half less, never more.
[00:41:53.360]Similarly, California may have entered the union
[00:41:56.130]as a free soil state, "Free soil estate,"
[00:42:00.340]but American settlers soon discovered
[00:42:03.510]that the buying and selling of Indians
[00:42:05.710]was a common practice.
[00:42:07.680]As early as 1846, the first American commander
[00:42:11.210]of San Francisco acknowledged that,
[00:42:14.395]"Certain persons have been and still are imprisoning
[00:42:18.217]"and holding to service Indians against their will
[00:42:21.837]"and warn the general public that the Indian population
[00:42:24.413]"must not be regarded in the light of slaves."
[00:42:30.510]He's pleas went unheeded.
[00:42:32.030]The first California legislature
[00:42:33.949]passed the so called Indian Act of 1850,
[00:42:37.940]which authorized the arrest of "vagrant natives"
[00:42:42.120]who could then be "hired out to the highest bidders."
[00:42:47.030]This act also enabled White persons
[00:42:49.330]to go before a Justice of the Peace
[00:42:52.727]to obtain Indian children for "indenture."
[00:42:56.090]According to one scholarly estimate,
[00:42:58.030]the Indian Act of 1850 may have affected
[00:43:01.430]as many as 20,000 California Indians,
[00:43:04.690]including some 4,000 children, kidnapped from their parents
[00:43:08.470]and used primarily as domestic servants and farm laborers.
[00:43:14.250]Mormon settlers and that is finally the map
[00:43:16.490]that I'm showing you here arrived in Utah in the 1840s
[00:43:19.990]from upstate New York, as shown there
[00:43:22.680]looking for a promise land only to discover
[00:43:25.002]that in that region, Indians and Mexicans
[00:43:29.150]had already turned the great basin
[00:43:31.974]into a big slaving ground.
[00:43:33.415]The area was an is like a gigantic moonscape
[00:43:38.510]of bleach sands, salt flats and mountain ranges
[00:43:43.020]inhabited by small bands, no larger than extended families.
[00:43:47.820]Early travelers did not hide their contempt
[00:43:51.600]for these "digger Indians" lacking horses on weapons.
[00:43:55.470]These vulnerable paiutes had become easy prey
[00:43:58.400]for mounted Indians.
[00:44:00.320]And so Brigham Young and his followers
[00:44:02.620]by establishing themselves in the area
[00:44:05.570]became the most obvious outlet for such captives.
[00:44:09.770]Hesitant at first, Mormons required some encouragement.
[00:44:14.090]Slavers tortured children with knives and hot irons
[00:44:17.560]to call attention to their trade
[00:44:19.960]or threatened to kill any child that went unpurchased.
[00:44:24.360]Brigham young, son in law Charles Decker
[00:44:28.610]witnessed the execution of an Indian girl
[00:44:31.440]before he acceded to exchange his gun for the other captive.
[00:44:36.610]In the end, Mormons became buyers
[00:44:38.820]and even found a way to rationalize their participation
[00:44:41.900]in these human market.
[00:44:43.430]Buy up the Lamanites children, Brigham Young
[00:44:46.210]counsel his brethren, and educate them
[00:44:48.358]and teach them the gospel so that many generations
[00:44:51.238]would not pass before they should become a white
[00:44:54.780]and the light some people.
[00:44:56.422]It was the very same logic that Spanish conquistadores
[00:44:59.670]had used in the since the 16th century
[00:45:01.990]to justify the acquisition of Indians.
[00:45:06.932]So persistent on widespread was Indian slavery
[00:45:12.230]that ending it proved nearly impossible.
[00:45:16.460]The Spanish crown had prohibited native bondage
[00:45:19.480]under all circumstances, as early as 1542
[00:45:23.710]in the so called new loss, really new compact
[00:45:26.270]between the metropolis on the new world.
[00:45:28.380]Yet the traffic continued.
[00:45:29.741]To retain mastery over the natives,
[00:45:33.170]European owners resorted to a variety of euphemisms
[00:45:37.360]and subterfuges that amounted to slavery in all but name.
[00:45:42.220]Another attempt at abolition occurred
[00:45:44.210]in the early 19th century, in Mexico
[00:45:47.869]but, when Mexico actually prescribed
[00:45:52.090]all forms of native bondage and extended citizenship rights
[00:45:56.700]to all Indians who had been born in Mexico
[00:46:00.370]who were in Mexico, yet Indian slavery
[00:46:02.310]persisted in Mexico as well.
[00:46:04.950]One more opportunity arose immediately after the civil war.
[00:46:09.920]The United States congress passed the 13th Amendment
[00:46:13.740]which prohibited both slavery and involuntary servitude
[00:46:17.250]as you can read there in the whole article
[00:46:23.187]and these formulation opened the possibility of liberation
[00:46:26.220]of all native Americans held in bondage in the west.
[00:46:30.400]However, in various rulings in the 1870s and 1880s,
[00:46:35.710]the supreme court opted for a narrow interpretation
[00:46:38.690]of the 13th Amendment that applied primarily
[00:46:41.590]to African-Americans and generally
[00:46:43.840]excluded native Americans.
[00:46:45.460]So as you know, native Americans
[00:46:47.130]were not granted full citizenship rights until the 1920s.
[00:46:53.560]Congress also passed an act abolishing the system
[00:46:57.390]known as peonage defined as the voluntary
[00:47:01.820]or involuntary service or labor of any person as peons
[00:47:05.850]in liquidation of a debt or obligation
[00:47:08.830]that exists in various western states.
[00:47:12.030]So that was the main form that these other slavery
[00:47:15.180]had taken in the west.
[00:47:17.092]You could not leave the place of work if you owed a debt.
[00:47:21.060]And in many of these cases,
[00:47:22.440]this is throughout northern Mexico
[00:47:24.090]and the American southwest.
[00:47:26.090]In some cases a dads would pass on from parents to children.
[00:47:31.540]So it worked in fairly parallel ways to African slavery.
[00:47:36.290]Well, congress pass these Peoange Act of 1867
[00:47:40.900]to combat this form of trafficking that existed,
[00:47:46.638]but the written word alone was not enough
[00:47:49.550]to eliminate these practices.
[00:47:52.020]So forms of native bondage continued
[00:47:54.930]through the end of the 19th century
[00:47:56.900]and in some remote regions, well into the 20th century.
[00:48:02.690]So just to finish.
[00:48:05.030]Today, 45.8 million people in 167 countries
[00:48:10.550]live in some form of modern day form of enslavement
[00:48:14.360]according to the latest estimate
[00:48:15.890]of the Walk Free Foundation.
[00:48:18.470]Slavery is forbidden all over the world,
[00:48:21.230]yet not a single region of our globe
[00:48:24.270]has been spared from these scourge.
[00:48:27.640]Slavery continues to thrive because its beneficiaries
[00:48:30.810]resort to debts or prison sentences or some other subterfuge
[00:48:35.100]to compel people to work under the threat of violence
[00:48:38.910]and offering absurdly low or no compensation.
[00:48:42.002]With this growing awareness about the present day slavery,
[00:48:47.120]what lessons can we derive
[00:48:49.300]from these 400 year story of experience of native Americans
[00:48:54.420]with these others slavery?
[00:48:56.540]It seems to me that the emphasis on the newness
[00:48:59.679]of these slavery is somewhat myopic and misguided.
[00:49:06.766]Just by contemplating these 400 year experience,
[00:49:12.480]we can begin to understand just the staying power
[00:49:15.740]of the mutability and the staying power
[00:49:19.250]of these forms of enslavement, their breathtaking dynamism
[00:49:24.528]and the tremendous difficulties involved in ending it
[00:49:29.030]that we have experienced until today.
[00:49:31.020]Thank you very much.
[00:49:32.366](applause)
[00:49:41.210]So if you have any comments or questions,
[00:49:44.720]I'd be happy to do what I can.
[00:49:50.320]Yes.
[00:49:51.443](mumbles)
[00:49:58.270]There are, yeah.
[00:49:59.430]There is a great variation in all of this.
[00:50:02.440]So maybe I should take a step back and say that
[00:50:06.401]one of the things that I do in this book
[00:50:11.040]is to try to provide a sense of the overall structure.
[00:50:16.928]And so by that I lump together different practices
[00:50:20.687]that in my view, and I provide some definition
[00:50:22.360]amounts to slavery in all but name.
[00:50:25.830]And so the treatment varies widely.
[00:50:29.040]So for example, I look at nomadic groups in northern Mexico
[00:50:33.390]who were hunted down at planting time
[00:50:38.590]or harvest time were forcibly brought into state
[00:50:44.080]where they were forced to work and then they were released.
[00:50:47.530]So this is a very Unique form of cyclical enslavement,
[00:50:52.920]if you want to talk about that.
[00:50:54.740]So that was one variation, for example.
[00:50:58.075]Another one would be these peonage arrangements
[00:51:03.180]in which people were prohibited from going out of the work
[00:51:06.610]until they paid their debt because they needed to eat
[00:51:11.820]and be clothed, they never or seldom
[00:51:15.030]were able to get out of debt.
[00:51:16.500]And as I said, in some cases the debts
[00:51:19.010]were passed on.
[00:51:20.130]So that was another form.
[00:51:21.905]So I mean, I could go on and on and talk about...
[00:51:25.745]Maybe interestingly enough, thousands of Indians
[00:51:31.720]were shipped to Spain and that is where I found the best,
[00:51:35.117]the most detailed evidence as to their daily lives
[00:51:40.230]in houses because eventually, these Indians in Spain
[00:51:47.130]actually availed themselves over the legal system
[00:51:49.800]to sue their master's for their freedom.
[00:51:51.700]And so we have these incredible court cases
[00:51:55.060]running for hundreds of pages where we know all the deed.
[00:52:00.881]They come forth and they provided the position
[00:52:02.710]and they bring witnesses, oftentimes other slaves
[00:52:05.750]and so we get a good sense of their situation.
[00:52:10.080]So, as I said, in many cases, these are women and children.
[00:52:13.216]They lived in domestic houses.
[00:52:16.160]Their life was almost claustrophobic.
[00:52:19.090]So they were confined to the house.
[00:52:20.786]I mean, I'm talking about Spain and in this particular case
[00:52:24.870]and they often were trained into gainful occupation.
[00:52:33.030]So some of the cases that I saw, for example, were weavers.
[00:52:36.090]They were skilled weavers.
[00:52:37.650]And so these slaves, for example, where sometimes
[00:52:39.824]passed onto other families, were leased
[00:52:43.088]as a valuable piece of machinery to other families.
[00:52:46.844]They had some privileges because they were so valuable.
[00:52:50.640]so they were allowed to marry whomever they wanted
[00:52:53.540]and they made accommodations to live within,
[00:52:56.910]to make family life within the household where they worked.
[00:53:00.960]So again, the record is full of surprises
[00:53:06.110]as to what you will find in terms of the actual
[00:53:09.300]day to day experience of these Indian slaves.
[00:53:14.100]Can you say whether there was much brutality?
[00:53:18.840]Again, the record shows the whole gamut
[00:53:23.250]from extremely cruel extremely,
[00:53:26.910]I mean, terrible.
[00:53:28.140]I mean, I have anyways, I won't go.
[00:53:29.810]I'm a squeamish guy so I won't go into the worst
[00:53:32.560]but I have found really terrible
[00:53:34.810]all the way to fairly reasonable treatment of these.
[00:53:40.577]Yes.
[00:53:44.960]The information that you're providing
[00:53:47.585]has been known for 500 years in various ways.
[00:53:51.702]What was the trigger that made you take a look at this
[00:53:57.370]and provide what you've just done for all of us today
[00:54:01.890]that other people ignore or didn't see?
[00:54:06.040]Well, I think to me, the catalyst for the book
[00:54:12.020]was the growing...
[00:54:14.725]I mean it started simply as I want to count them.
[00:54:18.470]I want to know because numbers have such a power on us.
[00:54:21.580]Right?
[00:54:22.413]And so when we talk about African slavery,
[00:54:25.570]immediately you know that we're talking about
[00:54:27.330]12.5 million human beings and so whether we're talking about
[00:54:32.440]Brazil or Cuba or the American south, whatever,
[00:54:37.206]we're talking about a combined history with such power
[00:54:41.130]and when I started the project,
[00:54:44.250]there was not a single estimate for native American
[00:54:48.212]number of slaves.
[00:54:49.820]So the project started with,
[00:54:52.420]I want to know what's the number
[00:54:54.400]and when you get into the number,
[00:54:55.760]then very quickly you run into,
[00:54:57.210]so who should be counted as slaves?
[00:54:59.690]Because as you know, during the first 50 years,
[00:55:03.416]it was possible to make slavery legal,
[00:55:06.120]Indian slaves legally but eventually,
[00:55:08.410]the Spanish ground clamp down on that.
[00:55:11.340]And so I looked at that process very closely
[00:55:14.160]and I realized that well, by then
[00:55:17.048]those owners were totally dependent on Indian slave labor
[00:55:22.750]and so they found ways to get around the law.
[00:55:25.410]So I became persuaded that I could then say,
[00:55:27.860]okay, so it stops here, but that would be
[00:55:30.330]a very incomplete accounting of that number.
[00:55:33.410]So in order to really come to a better estimate,
[00:55:36.520]I needed to then start exploring these mutations
[00:55:40.750]so to speak, that became so resilient through the centuries.
[00:55:44.390]And so I made a catalog of the different forms
[00:55:48.118]that these took.
[00:55:49.829]And so I think the catalyst was this growing realization
[00:55:54.290]that for a long time we have a take
[00:55:57.960]the colonial terminology at face value, right?
[00:56:01.190]So when the Spanish grounds as well, but you know,
[00:56:03.280]the comendros were not slavers,
[00:56:05.800]clopatemento was not slaver or you know,
[00:56:08.050]that peonage was not slavery.
[00:56:10.440]And I started saying, well, no.
[00:56:12.212]I mean if we look at the cases on the ground,
[00:56:15.830]then you come to a different conclusion.
[00:56:18.080]And so I think that is the reason why you are right,
[00:56:20.950]the information is there, it is very scattered,
[00:56:25.240]it's very difficult to understand the whole scope.
[00:56:27.970]So that's what I eventually came to realize
[00:56:30.920]that what I needed to do.
[00:56:33.180]So is that your approach
[00:56:34.773]with your graduate students?
[00:56:37.660]Look at this information, think about it and ask questions.
[00:56:43.120]Yeah, totally.
[00:56:44.805](laughs)
[00:56:45.650]Totally.
[00:56:46.918]That has worked time and again.
[00:56:49.223](laughs)
[00:56:53.340]Yes.
[00:56:54.794](mumbles)
[00:56:58.430]I have a question about kind of status
[00:57:01.440]and thinking about African enslavement of Africans
[00:57:04.190]and African Americans and particularly
[00:57:06.090]what we teach it talking about the fact
[00:57:09.300]that it's inheritable and that
[00:57:11.351](mumbles)
[00:57:15.878]I'm just wondering why during that brief time
[00:57:18.130]when it was legal in the Spanish territory,
[00:57:21.700]what was the law?
[00:57:23.760]And then also after that, were there cases
[00:57:26.670]where we see generational slavery or inheritable slavery,
[00:57:31.130]or lifetime slavery.
[00:57:32.941](mumbles)
[00:57:37.960]Right.
[00:57:39.192]Well, that's an excellent question.
[00:57:40.780]So, I said that the first 50 years slavery was legal,
[00:57:46.490]but I kind of, which is true,
[00:57:50.210]but it is a little more complicated than that.
[00:57:53.272]It was frowned upon.
[00:57:57.600]It had been frowned upon even anyways,
[00:58:00.370]we won't go into the medieval history,
[00:58:02.350]but it was frowned upon since almost the beginning.
[00:58:06.570]Since 1500, for example.
[00:58:08.380]We find 1500s, 80 years after Columbus.
[00:58:12.650]Some unions are being shipped back to the new world
[00:58:14.890]because they should not have been made as slaves.
[00:58:18.710]The crowd eventually, however realized
[00:58:20.950]that it needed a Indian slave labor
[00:58:23.430]in order to attract colonies to the new world.
[00:58:25.600]And so the solution was to make Indian slavery illegal
[00:58:30.410]except in a couple of cases.
[00:58:33.600]So if the Indians were cannibalistic,
[00:58:36.540]that being a really terrible thing,
[00:58:38.570]then it was legal to hold those Indians in bondage.
[00:58:43.020]If those Indians had already been made as slaves
[00:58:46.880]by other Indians, it was okay for you to go
[00:58:49.810]and purchase them and keep them as your slaves.
[00:58:52.960]The thinking there was that
[00:58:54.190]it was much better for these slaves
[00:58:55.730]to be under a christian overlord
[00:58:57.770]than under a pagan overlord.
[00:59:01.794]And finally, Indians who were taken in just wars
[00:59:05.770]could be legally.
[00:59:06.710]And so when I say it was allowed,
[00:59:11.100]it was really not allowed.
[00:59:12.560]These loopholes were big enough
[00:59:14.830]so that it led to the decimation of the Caribbean,
[00:59:17.490]as I said.
[00:59:18.360]So this is the period of the decimation of the Caribbean.
[00:59:22.586]So really the point that I'm trying
[00:59:26.400]with this convoluted story is that
[00:59:28.800]Indian slavery was very different from African slavery
[00:59:31.851]in that it was very dependent on case by case.
[00:59:38.770]It was generally, even in the course,
[00:59:43.230]the span of a lifetime, you could change or condition
[00:59:46.630]from a slave to become a fairly...
[00:59:50.218]To find a survival condition that was better than a slave
[00:59:55.200]and we don't know.
[00:59:58.440]I mean, I have found, as I said,
[00:59:59.840]cases in which the children also became enslaved
[01:00:02.900]and as I said, debts were passed down
[01:00:04.598]but generally, we have very little evidence for that
[01:00:08.090]because the fertility rates of these Indian women
[01:00:11.640]were so low.
[01:00:13.510]So really, that condition that you're talking about
[01:00:19.520]of passing down from one generation to the next
[01:00:21.670]was not as relevant to these slavery.
[01:00:24.700]Slavery was different in that
[01:00:26.950]you could actually do something about it
[01:00:28.710]even in your lifetime.
[01:00:30.010]It was not a perpetual, it was a case by case
[01:00:33.220]and that really defines the approach,
[01:00:34.677]of the Spanish crown to these other slavery.
[01:00:37.663]Thank you. Thank you.
[01:00:39.930]Yes.
[01:00:41.784]Some of the reasons that you just described
[01:00:43.980]why slavery might not have been identified as slavery
[01:00:48.760]or documented as slavery because there's either loose terms
[01:00:52.220]and I'm always curious when I hear about Indians
[01:00:55.370]that are often referred to having captives
[01:00:58.860]or even the second
[01:01:00.501](mumbles)
[01:01:03.660]Is that part of the reason why it wasn't as well documented
[01:01:06.910]or it just wasn't
[01:01:08.176](mumbles)
[01:01:10.210]Completely.
[01:01:11.537]I mean, so it really requires detective's work
[01:01:15.800]because while African slavery was legal,
[01:01:21.950]it can be found easily in wills and bills of sale
[01:01:26.850]because they had to be to cross an ocean,
[01:01:30.120]they were counted along the way
[01:01:32.470]and you have the port records that give you
[01:01:34.650]a very good sense of their number
[01:01:36.820]and where they're coming from and who they were etc, etc.
[01:01:40.400]In this case, we're talking about a source of slaves
[01:01:43.710]that was procured and consumed in the same continent
[01:01:49.311]and that was illegal.
[01:01:52.353]So the record situation is very much more complicated.
[01:01:57.370]I mean, literally you didn't really want to write about this
[01:02:00.500]because it was illegal.
[01:02:02.461]However, there is a continuous paper trail
[01:02:08.000]spanning all of these all of these provinces
[01:02:11.910]in the new world from the 16th century
[01:02:14.480]all the way to the 19th century
[01:02:16.100]and even though sometimes the illusions are fairly vague,
[01:02:19.450]in other cases, we have investigations,
[01:02:21.610]we have unlikely discoveries.
[01:02:23.834]For example, the fact that as we were saying in the morning,
[01:02:27.930]the fact that Indian slavery was illegal,
[01:02:31.040]made it also a political football.
[01:02:33.040]If you had a rival, political rival,
[01:02:35.800]you could accuse that rival of illegally enslaving Indians
[01:02:39.870]on everybody who was somebody had Indian slaves.
[01:02:42.530]So everybody, nearly everybody could be liable
[01:02:48.280]to such an accusation.
[01:02:50.447]So in those sometimes investigations were made
[01:02:53.810]and then you get a better sense of that phenomenon.
[01:02:57.693]So, the record is a little more idiosyncratic,
[01:03:01.280]a little spottier, but there is documentation.
[01:03:06.205]There's enough documentation for this.
[01:03:09.080]And as I said I also in closing,
[01:03:12.321]so my estimate of 2.5 to five million is the best I can do
[01:03:18.530]but I admit that it is speculative
[01:03:22.380]and that I invite other people
[01:03:23.990]to come up with better estimates.
[01:03:26.540]I could spend the rest of my life
[01:03:28.410]trying to estimate the slaves
[01:03:29.393]were all of these different regions in the new world
[01:03:31.870]in 50 year intervals as I do.
[01:03:35.980]And I think people are doing it
[01:03:37.710]but we need to have a baseline to start a conversation
[01:03:41.240]in a more meaningful way.
[01:03:43.280]Yeah.
[01:03:44.465]So one here and then over there.
[01:03:45.298]Yes.
[01:03:46.131]Have you focused only on Spanish enslavement
[01:03:48.930]or can you compare what the Spanish did
[01:03:52.430]with what the portuguese or Dutch or French
[01:03:57.010]or English in terms of enslaving Native Americans?
[01:04:00.230]Yeah, well in my book, I mostly focus on the Spanish,
[01:04:04.190]Mexican and then Americans in the southwest.
[01:04:07.010]So it's a moving story from the Caribbean,
[01:04:10.860]to Mexico to the American southwest.
[01:04:13.170]But your numbers are for--
[01:04:14.300]For the entire.
[01:04:15.839]No, it's for the, my numbers are for the entire hemisphere,
[01:04:19.440]from Columbus to 1900 of all nationalities.
[01:04:24.110]There are many scholars working on say the English.
[01:04:27.250]So I mentioned Allan Galay for example,
[01:04:29.660]who comes with a startling number that
[01:04:35.647]from I believe it's 1780, 1680 to 1720,
[01:04:41.600]that 40-year period more Indians
[01:04:46.290]were shipped out of Charleston into the Caribbean
[01:04:50.010]than Africans were imported into the Carolinas
[01:04:52.710]just to give you a sense of the scales.
[01:04:55.260]So there are others scholars taking other parts,
[01:04:59.120]other pieces of these great phenomenon.
[01:05:02.800]And of course the whole field is right for comparisons
[01:05:05.720]because not everybody did it the same way.
[01:05:08.018]So yes.
[01:05:12.593](mumbles)
[01:05:21.860]By a different ethnicity, you mean non Indians?
[01:05:26.319](mumbles)
[01:05:30.740]So the native Americans.
[01:05:33.510]So people like Comanches, Eutes, etc
[01:05:37.250]enslaved other Indians primarily.
[01:05:41.750]So and again, I really rely on the work
[01:05:44.090]of Hakeem Martinez who has actually developed
[01:05:46.550]a very extensive database like case by case.
[01:05:51.440]In many cases they are Indians.
[01:05:53.810]The second most prominent were Mexicans
[01:05:57.727]and again that is a very complicated after 1821
[01:06:02.730]when Mexico becomes independent from Spain
[01:06:04.530]because Mexico abolished all references to race, right?
[01:06:09.930]So everybody's a Mexican citizen.
[01:06:12.380]So we don't know exactly who these people are
[01:06:14.410]but they are Mexicans.
[01:06:17.597]And of course they have some white people.
[01:06:20.100]White women for example, and entire books
[01:06:24.150]that became almost like a literary genre of the captive.
[01:06:28.730]The captivity narrative of White people held by Comanches
[01:06:32.876]or other groups.
[01:06:34.110]So they indeed took people from other races
[01:06:37.700]in the way that you're defining them.
[01:06:39.390]There is plenty of records about that.
[01:06:42.850]Yeah.
[01:06:45.180]I was just going to say
[01:06:47.230]it's so interesting because what you're doing
[01:06:50.385]Hollywood in many ways perceive what you were doing
[01:06:55.130]with Comencheros, the searchers,
[01:06:59.370]all kinds of great movies took place exactly--
[01:07:03.711]Absolutely.
[01:07:05.823]And so we have to pay more attention to Hollywood.
[01:07:09.469]Is that what you're saying?
[01:07:10.302]Yeah, I don't know.
[01:07:11.151](laughs)
[01:07:11.984]I mean, when you get into the nitty gritty of that,
[01:07:14.608]it is very interesting because the comencheros,
[01:07:17.870]these are traders, especially new Mexican traders
[01:07:22.280]who specialize in trading with the Indians
[01:07:26.080]and they also acted as intermediaries
[01:07:29.170]in cases when people were kidnapped.
[01:07:32.880]And so what's very clear is that white families
[01:07:36.130]who have the means and the money often engage
[01:07:39.040]these commentaries to ransom their family members
[01:07:41.940]whereas Mexicans or other Indians,
[01:07:44.620]did not have the resources, could not pay the ransom
[01:07:47.570]and so these other people,
[01:07:48.780]oftentimes the stayed with the Indian groups
[01:07:51.620]for longer periods.
[01:07:53.120]Yes.
[01:07:54.242]You ticked off the countries
[01:07:57.950]that were most closely associated with slavery.
[01:08:01.350]England and the Dutch and the Portuguese or Spanish.
[01:08:05.350]You said nothing about Germany.
[01:08:07.570]Of course Germany wasn't even a country until 1871
[01:08:12.680]but now I'm not an American history specialist
[01:08:15.630]but isn't it true that Germans in the United States,
[01:08:19.180]German-Americans by and large were not pro slavery
[01:08:23.120]even in the south and abolitionists in the north.
[01:08:27.070]I'm not sure that this is true, but I think it's true.
[01:08:32.380]If that is true, does this have anything to do
[01:08:35.040]with the fact that Germany was split
[01:08:37.350]and there was kind of no state approval
[01:08:41.340]of slavery or was there something in the religion
[01:08:45.279]of the Germans that made them oppose slavery?
[01:08:50.420]That's a great question for which I have no answer.
[01:08:52.606](laughs)
[01:08:53.996]I don't know to what extent German colonists
[01:08:57.780]in the midwest enslaved or did not enslave native Americans.
[01:09:02.780]Maybe somebody out here would know but I don't really know.
[01:09:06.680]I was gonna say in the Carolina,
[01:09:08.559](mumbles)
[01:09:22.070]The German speaking communities in the south were.
[01:09:26.123]I'm conflicted over whether or not they should be
[01:09:27.835](mumbles)
[01:09:34.720]Some of them did, yeah.
[01:09:37.670]This was African slaves.
[01:09:38.730]Yeah.
[01:09:39.820]Okay.
[01:09:43.010]Yes.
[01:09:45.220]I know the Spanish in particular
[01:09:46.990]were interested in converting the slaves to their religion.
[01:09:53.030]How much of a role does the idea
[01:09:56.220]of whether these other people had souls or not.
[01:10:00.960]Trade into this?
[01:10:02.348]Well, I mean obviously, the whole discussion
[01:10:05.330]about whether native Americans had a soul
[01:10:07.050]had everything to do with whether they were enslaveable
[01:10:10.700]or not, right?
[01:10:12.410]If they did not have a soul
[01:10:15.030]then they could be rightfully enslaved
[01:10:17.100]and if they did, then they would have to be
[01:10:19.020]painstakingly persuaded rather than enslaved.
[01:10:23.070]There was no ultimate verdict as to who won
[01:10:27.250]in that famous debate in 1550, 51
[01:10:31.470]between las casas and sepulveda.
[01:10:33.410]So even though everybody kind of assumes
[01:10:35.030]that las casas won.
[01:10:36.530]It sort of petered out on similar questions cropped up
[01:10:41.630]later on in the 16th century and the 17th century.
[01:10:45.340]I would say that the church did play a role
[01:10:48.120]first in the definition of...
[01:10:51.770]In the shaping of slavery.
[01:10:54.030]I'm talking about the 14th and 15th centuries
[01:10:56.919]and then in the movement to abolish
[01:11:00.616]the enslavement of Indians.
[01:11:03.090]So in 1537, the Vatican actually issued
[01:11:06.520]a very strongly worded document,
[01:11:11.580]urging for the liberation of all Indian slaves
[01:11:15.160]in the new world and this is something in the book,
[01:11:20.050]I go into these remarkable abolitionists campaign
[01:11:23.410]that the Spanish crown undertook
[01:11:25.670]in the final decades of the 17th century
[01:11:28.890]and they use these precedent by the church
[01:11:31.960]in order to try to bolster their case
[01:11:34.700]for the liberation of India.
[01:11:36.300]So the church did play a very significant role
[01:11:38.550]both in favor and against these slavery.
[01:11:42.690]Yep.
[01:11:48.230]Alright.
[01:11:49.063]Well thank you all so much for your great questions
[01:11:51.610]and for your time.
[01:11:52.536](applause)
[01:11:53.493]Thank you.
[01:11:54.490](applause)
[01:12:01.658]I want to say one word.
[01:12:05.003]I really want to thank our speaker, he's fantastic.
[01:12:07.410]I also want thank Katrina for arranging this.
[01:12:11.300]She spent a whole year planning for this event,
[01:12:14.420]spectacular turnout.
[01:12:16.230]So thank you Katrina. Thank you.
[01:12:18.423](applause)
[01:12:25.291]Andres is going to be outside signing books.
[01:12:28.030]Thank you.
[01:12:29.290]I will return this to you.
[01:12:30.818]It's great.

The screen size you are trying to search captions on is too small!

You can always jump over to MediaHub and check it out there.

Comments

0 Comments

2017 Pauley Lecture

Description

Searchable Transcript

Comments icon comment

Related Channels

Comments