The Normality of Brutality

I belong to a book group, and this month's reading is the work The Other Slavery, by Andres Renendez. It describes a world that I, as a once American history teacher, never really knew.

The Spanish, who took over the Southwest part of what is now the United States, and Mexico, back in the 16th Century were brutal to the Native peoples they conquered. That much I knew and imparted to my students. But what followed that, all the way into the 20th Century, is something that I and I'm betting a whole bunch of my fellow history teachers missed: the pervasive slavery of Native Americans.

The Spanish found caches of silver and gold in America, and enslaved indigenous peoples to mine them. the descriptions of the kinds of workdays these peoples had are terrifying and disgusting. They make the horrible cotton picking of the South by black peoples relatively easier by comparison.

But there were also guilty consciences. The Spanish crown came to try to ban slavery by the New Laws of 1542, which, of course, appalled the Spanish viceroys who were making enormous profits by the mining. The crown ran into a problem that the British crown did 200 years later: How do you enforce something that unpopular that's some 4000 miles away? They couldn't, and they didn't. The New Laws, gradually, were ignored. Slavery continued.

But it was practiced, too, by some Native peoples. When they conquered other tribes and/or defeated them in battle, they took prisoners and either put them to work themselves or utilized them as trading pieces for other things they believed they needed. This was practiced throughout the Americas. Thousands, even millions, of people lived deprived, short lives of subsistence.

Some of that was interrupted by a Native rebellion in 1680, which to a great extent succeeded in chasing the Spaniards out of New Mexico. But within a generation, they returned. By then, Native peoples had re-established conquered areas of their own, forcing the Spaniards to find newly profitable places--which they did, this time utilizing presidios and missions to launch their conquests from.

Renendez has done massive, tremendous research, so much so that this is the kind of book that almost writes itself. It must have taken him years to do it, and it won the Bancroft Prize in 2017. But his thoroughness in reporting is, upon reflection, staggering. It points the finger at many of what we might call "civilized" peoples, Native or European, and exposes them being quite the opposite.

Even Natives attacked and enslaved other Natives. Comanches were particularly active and adept at doing this. They raided settlements over an enormous acreage, considering it was done only with horses. 

All this was done in Mexico, in New Mexico, in Arizona, and in California. It went as far north as present-day Nebraska and Utah. People who needed extra labor to accomplish their tasks went on the road and rounded up those who were not themselves. There were hundreds of thousands of them, all told. And those who write the history textbooks missed nearly all of it.

What the captors must have thought--like the Europeans in Africa and the Americas, like the Muslims in the Near East--is that if they happened upon or heard about other peoples in lands they were visiting or exploring, they must by nature be inferior beings. No matter where or when, if you make that assumption, it makes it easier for you to attack, carry off, and subjugate them to doing your will.

That fundamental assumption has saturated humankind, probably from its beginnings. We mourn the unnecessary activities of those, like 47 and his ICE, who are still going out of their ways not to understand and assimilate newcomers who aren't European in ancestry. We reel in shock at this backwards, even barbarous treatment. 

But the sad fact is that it is merely continuing what part of humankind has always done to those it has brought under their control, based on some kind of supremacy. The one that is practiced inside the U.S. is ginned-up white supremacy; the one practiced in the hope of acquiring gold was based on the Christian religion. Over time, the two never drifted far apart.

It isn't necessarily hate that drove this, though plenty of it existed. It was condescension, too. For some reason, Homo sapiens has a need to consider themselves above someone else--and not just recognize and dote on it, but make captives out of those they judge inferior so they can stay that way. Our slavery, which debuted in 1619,  came along right in the middle of a great deal of it worldwide. 

Ironically, The Other Slavery notes that mandates that were called the New Laws, created by the Spanish crown and its king, who grew a conscience about it all after more than twenty years of it in North and South America, were supposed to end all new slavery there. But of course, enforceability proved difficult, with an entire ocean between the orders and the disagreeing ordered, not to mention settlements in this massive new land that were hundreds of miles apart at times. After a while, the New Laws were ignored.

As silver and gold mines grew, thousands were needed to pry the ores out of them. Superior Spanish war technology left the Natives helpless to resist.

Resist they did, though. Today, we think of the Navajos as a peaceful, gentle people. When they were captives of the Spanish in the 17th Century, though, they turned pretty nasty. 

In 1680, the Navajos somehow concocted a civil war which killed hundreds of Spaniards in New Mexico, and allowed them to gain a semblance of independence. The Spanish had tried to intimidate them by telling them that the Spanish god would be displeased with them if they resisted their new lifestyles, and that, if they obeyed like good little boys and girls, they would someday find a heavenly reward. But that meant that they had to be worked to death, and realizing that turned them sour toward Catholicism. The Spaniards made sure to remove all vestiges of the Navajos' former religious attentions. This they resented deeply, and made revolution easier to consider and attempt.

The more you read about Native slavery, the more it looks just like the brand we're used to considering more deeply in the American South. The sharecropping and tenant farming that created economic conditions that created a trap for many of the so-called free blacks during Reconstruction found an imitator in the encomiendas and the repartimiendos of the Spanish, as well as debt peonage, which held Natives in debt forever.

Slavery is still practiced worldwide. It has other names: Sex trafficking, for instance, or the smuggling of children for adoption. It all has the same basis: taking the lives of other peoples right out of their hands and forcing them to work in terrible conditions for a ripe and endless profit motive. Attempts to stem the human slaughters emerged with time: Mexico's independence movement, for instance, and U.S. Congressmen tried, but with only mixed results.

It's a shame: a shame that it happened at all, and a shame that a book exposing it took until 2017 to be written. But it's yet another indication that history needs cultivation. The deeper people dig, the more they find. The normality of brutality is again upon us--indeed, it never really went away--and we must continue to find its base. 

We must conclude, too, that it takes effort beyond the norm to continue to be good to ourselves and others. There continues to be too much dragging us in the other direction.

Be well. Be careful. With some luck, I'll see you down the road.

Mister Mark