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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It is true that there are among the citizens of this country a large number of Indian captives … but the object in purchasing them has not been to reduce them to slavery, but rather from a Christian piety on the part of the whites to obtain them in order to instruct and educate them in Civilization. … This has been the practice in this country for the last century and a half and the result arising from it has been to the captives, favorable, humane, and satisfactory.23
Like an earlier generation of New Mexicans, the post-Civil War cohort denied that their form of servitude was slavery. It was simply a historical and customary way of extending Spain’s original civilizing mission. This was the dominant “local” view until the early 1880s, and Indian slavery lasted in New Mexico well into the twentieth century.24
About two months after Johnson’s declaration a Hopi woman staggered into Fort Wingate. She said that she and her daughter had been attacked on the road from Cubero to Fort Wingate, and that she had been beaten and battered and her daughter kidnapped. She knew that some men in Cubero held her daughter, and she requested aid from the US military in retrieving her child. The military caught up with the man who had taken her daughter, but he protested that “he had assumed a debt which the woman contracted” and had initially taken both the woman and child as security or collateral against the debt. The matter was dropped. The merger of peonage and slavery was the way the Hopi woman and child had become servile workers in the home of the man from Cubero. Involuntary servitude was the norm and American reformers could not eliminate debt bondage, let alone slavery.25