The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story Of Indian Enslavement In America, by Andres Resendez

As a narrative history that describes the process by which the native inhabitants of the Americas were, even potentially up to the present day, ensnared in various coercive relationships with elites that amount to states of unfreedom, this book does a good job. However, there are some things that keep this book from being as good a book as it could be. For one, the author has this absurd and foolish Marxist worldview that leads him to think of capitalist Western Europeans as uniquely commodifying other people and exploiting them, when such exploitation and commodification can be found in all cultures at all times, especially in pre-modern and non-Capitalist societies, which the author does not consider. Nor does the author recognize the ways in which white people have often served as victims of the same processes that the author laments others suffering from. This blind spot is lamentably a common one, but insofar as this book presents a look at a generally obscure phenomenon by which indigenous people served as slaves, indentured servants, peons, sharecroppers, or were “free” workers entrapped in various debt schemes, it is a useful book, though it must be admitted that such schemes have often been foisted on the rural poor of all backgrounds at all times and in all places, something that would be surprisingly well-suited to works that sought to escape the contemporary problem of identity politics.

This book is a bit more than 300 pages of core material, and it begins with a list of illustrations, maps, and appendices. This is followed by an introduction that seeks to frame this book as an exploration of another, more secret, sort of slavery to go along with the more familiar slavery of Africans and African Americans in the New World. The author moves in a generally chronological way, starting with the initial settlement of the Caribbean islands by the Spanish, especially Santo Domingo, and the demographic collapse that resulted form intense slaving in the area (1). This is followed by a discussion of the good intentions that led the Spanish to try to ban this slavery of indigenous Americans (2). A chapter follows that examines the complex life and cruel fate of a successful human trafficker who worked in both the Transatlantic slave trade and in the northern Mexican indigenous slave trade (3). A chapter then follows on the pull of silver in drawing unfree labor of various kinds to Mexican mines (4). A chapter on the campaign the Spanish royal government made against slavery and its difficulties in the face of local attachments to unfree labor (5) is then followed by a discussion of the role of the slavery of local tribes in the great rebellion of late 17th century New Mexico (6). The author examines the slave trading of powerful nomads like the Comanches, Utes, and Apache tribes (7), as well as the way that the Spanish efforts to build missions and presidios in the northern reaches of New Spain (the American Southwest) led to the proliferation of unfree labor among local inhabitants (8). The author talks about various contractions and expansions in this unfree labor during the first half of the 19th century (9), the interaction of Americans with this type of unfree labor (10), and the resulting new era of Indian bondage that followed contrary to American law (11). The author then talks about the difficulties of emancipation from this sort of slavery (12) up to the present day, along with an epilogue, acknowledgements, appendices, notes, and an index.

One of the things that this book gets right, and deserves to be taken seriously for, is the way it points to various sorts of labor exploitation as being an unrecognized cause of the demographic collapse of indigenous populations in the Americas. Indeed, if we look at the violence of slave raids, the harm and death due to labor exploitation, and the susceptibility to slaves that resulted from the mobility of unfree people and their being concentrated in mining towns, encomiendas, and urban cities to serve as domestics to diseases, the horrific losses that such people are viewed to have suffered begins to make some sort of sense, and various phenomena of the replacement of vanishing “Indian” slaves with black slaves and then with indentured workers from other areas begins to make sense as different stages of labor in order to make plantation agriculture and mining profitable endeavors within North and South America. There has always been work to do here that no one wanted to do that profited people with power that needed someone to do that work, and where it was possible to coerce the native population to do that sort of work in order to improve one’s life, that sort of solution has long been a desirable solution for successful invaders into a new land. That such invaders also often argued (not without reason) that they were performing a civilizing function also seems rather par for the course. The author’s difficulty in finding this sort of trade viewed honestly is testament to the fact that it is far easier to ban slavery in law than to eradicate the desire to have mastery over other people in our dark hearts.