Читать книгу Lost Worlds of 1863. Relocation and Removal of American Indians in the Central Rockies and the Greater Southwest онлайн
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When, in 1860, the New Mexico legislature attempted to extend the Otero Code to male and female Indians, the governor vetoed the bill. The governor explained his action by saying: “The act apparently is founded on the supposition that the Indians acquired from the savage tribes were slaves; which is not the case; neither is it in the power of the legislature to make them such … . The normal or native condition of our Indian tribes is that of freedom and by our laws they cannot be made slaves either by conquest or purchase. We may hold them as captives or peons but not as slaves.”21 The governor, like most New Mexican citizens who held peons and captives, was in denial that their form of peonage or “enforced servitude of savages” was not a form of slavery. Only African slavery deserved that epitaph.
Indian slavery in New Mexico, intertwined as it was with peonage and kinship, took several decades to die. One example of this would be the ineffectiveness of President Andrew Johnson’s directive of June 1865 declaring that slavery in the territory of New Mexico was in violation of “the rights of Indians” and instructing his subordinates to participate in “an effective suppression of the practice.”22 The president’s letter elicited a response from Felipe Delgado, New Mexico’s Superintendent of Indian Affairs. To Commissioner of Indian Affairs, William Dole, he argued that: