Indian Captivity In Spanish America

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.

It was on the frontier, where “civilized” men and women confronted the “wilderness,” that Europeans first became Americans—or so authorities from Frederick Jackson Turner to Theodore Roosevelt claimed. But as the frontier disappeared, Americans believed they needed a new mechanism for fixing their collective identity; and they found it, historian Molly K. Varley suggests, in tales of white Americans held captive by Indians. For Americans in the Progressive Era (1890–1916) these stories of Indian captivity seemed to prove that the violence of national expansion had been justified, that citizens’ individual suffering had been heroic, and that settlers’ contact with Indians and wilderness still characterized the nation’s “soul.” Furthermore, in the act of memorializing white Indian captives—through statues, parks, and reissued narratives—small towns found a way of inscribing themselves into the national story. By drawing out the connections between actual captivity, captivity narratives, and the memorializing of white captives, Varley shows how Indian captivity became a means for Progressive Era Americans to look forward by looking back. Local boosters and cultural commentators used Indian captivity to define “Americanism” and to renew those frontier qualities deemed vital to the survival of the nation in the post-frontier world, such as individualism, bravery, ingenuity, enthusiasm, “manliness,” and patriotism. In Varley’s analysis of the Progressive Era mentality, contact between white captives and Indians represented a stage in the evolution of a new American people and affirmed the contemporary notion of America as a melting pot. Revealing how the recitation and interpretation of these captivity narratives changed over time—with shifting emphasis on brutality, gender, and ethnographic and historical accuracy—Americans Recaptured shows that tales of Indian captivity were no more fixed than American identity, but were consistently used to give that identity its own useful, ever-evolving shape.

Caught between the Lines examines how the figure of the captive and the notion of borders have been used in Argentine literature and painting to reflect competing notions of national identity from the nineteenth to the twenty-first centuries. Challenging the conventional approach to the nineteenth-century trope of "civilization versus barbary," which was intended to criticize the social and ethnic divisions within Argentina in order to create a homogenous society, Carlos Riobó traces the various versions of colonial captivity legends. He argues convincingly that the historical conditions of the colonial period created an ethnic hybridity--a mestizo or culturally mixed identity--that went against the state compulsion for a racially pure identity. This mestizaje was signified not only in Argentina's literature but also in its art, and Riobó thus analyzes colonial paintings as well as texts. Caught between the Lines focuses on borders and mestizaje (both biological and cultural) as they relate to captives: specifically, how captives have been used to create a national image of Argentina that relies on a logic of separation to justify concepts of national purity and to deny transculturation.

This bibliography is focused on the history of the imposition of policies upon Native Americans by the governments of other peoples. All of the books and articles included in this work were selected because they represent activities in which Native Peoples were forced into work, religion, or a lifestyle that ran contrary to their traditions.

Slavery existed in North America long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. For centuries, from the pre-Columbian era through the 1840s, Native Americans took prisoners of war and killed, adopted, or enslaved them. Christina Snyder's pathbreaking book takes a familiar setting for bondage, the American South, and places Native Americans at the center of her engrossing story. Indian warriors captured a wide range of enemies, including Africans, Europeans, and other Indians. Yet until the late eighteenth century, age and gender more than race affected the fate of captives. As economic and political crises mounted, however, Indians began to racialize slavery and target African Americans. Native people struggling to secure a separate space for themselves in America developed a shared language of race with white settlers. Although the Indians' captivity practices remained fluid long after their neighbors hardened racial lines, the Second Seminole War ultimately tore apart the inclusive communities that Native people had created through centuries of captivity. Snyder's rich and sweeping history of Indian slavery connects figures like Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe with little-known captives like Antonia Bonnelli, a white teenager from Spanish Florida, and David George, a black runaway from Virginia. Placing the experiences of these individuals within a complex system of captivity and Indians' relations with other peoples, Snyder demonstrates the profound role of Native American history in the American past.

This book studies the practice of poetic imitation and the themes of authority, piracy, and captivity in Juan de Castellanos’s Elegies of Illustrious Men of the Indies. The book offers a novel interpretation of the relationship between Castellanos’s poems and Alonso de Ercilla’s the Araucana and elucidates the complex poetic discourse Castellanos created to defend the interest of the first generation of Spanish explorers and conquistadors that settled in the New World in the sixteenth century.