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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Before leaving the topic of Indian slavery, mention should be made of the correlations between slavery and sexism and racism. It could be argued that the southwestern traditions of involuntary servitude were accompanied by patriarchy and gender oppression. Certainly Spanish overlords, the gente de razón of Mexican times, and American military elites considered the non-sedentary and semi-sedentary inhabitants of the Southwest (that is, the “wild Indians”) to be racially and culturally inferior to themselves. At the end of the nineteenth century most Americans considered the Indians to be “a vanishing race,” and therefore the conquest of their lands was justified. As an “absent” people their Native bodies were polluted, or as white Californians described them in the 1860s, Native Americans “were the dirtiest lot of human beings on earth … . [they wear] filthy rags, with their persons unwashed, hair uncombed and swarming with vermin.”³²

Or as a Proctor & Gamble ad for Ivory Soap

that appeared in 1885 illustrated: