Guests: Andres Resendez, Chip Thomas, Dianne Archuleta, James Brooks, Eric Carpio

Resources: 

• Charlie Glass and the mystery woman by Chip Thomas (2023)
• Perspective: The Other Slavery by Andrés Reséndez
• A Grim, Long-Hidden Truth Emerges in Art: Native American Enslavement by Patricia Leigh Brown (2021)

Slavery in the South(west)

Speaker 1 Last Highways from History Colorado is made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor, and by the Sturm Family Foundation, proud supporters of the humanities and the power of storytelling for more than 20 years. 

Noel Black Hey, it's Noel. And before we get started, I wanted to let you know that this will be the last episode of Lost Highways - for now. Since we launched the podcast in 2019, it's been an amazing privilege to share these overlooked and sometimes forgotten stories about Colorado and the American Southwest with you. There are a whole bunch of people I'd like to thank at the end of this episode, but I wanted to take a moment here at the beginning to thank all of you, our listeners, most of all.  We hope to see you again sometime down the road. 

Dianne Archuleta I first found out about my grandmother's story when I was in junior high school, and I had aunts who I was pretty close with at the time. I had a cousin that I used to hang out with, and they mentioned to me that I had a great great grandmother who had been a slave. 

Noel Black This is Dianne Archuleta. She's the director of History Colorado's El Pueblo Museum in Pueblo, Colorado. 

Dianne Archuleta And, to me at that time, I wasn't quite sure in what context, and so they showed me a book that had been written about her story from her owner's great granddaughter.  Being in sixth grade, not really sure what kind of history this related to, I perused the book, kind of read it. I didn't connect to it. I wasn't sure quite what I was reading, and so I gave it back. 

Noel Black She tucked the information away somewhere in the back of her mind and went about her life. Years later, she went to college and majored in history with a minor in Chicano Studies. 

Dianne Archuleta When I first started taking these courses, I started realizing, you know, that there was a lot more history out there that I was unaware of, especially related to who I am and where I come from. And so, as I started getting into this history, I remembered I'd heard about Native enslavement here in southern Colorado and in New Mexico, and I knew, remembered that my aunts had told me about my great great grandmother, and it dawned on me, the connection was finally made, like, wait a minute here, this is the story, this is what it means. Now I need to know more. 

Noel Black Dianne found a copy of the book she'd been shown in sixth grade. It's called Enchanted Temples of Taos, and it was written by her aunt, Dora Vasquez, who self-published the book in 1975. It tells the stories of Dianne's great great grandmother, Rosario Romero. Rosario was Navajo, and when she was a young woman, she'd been kidnapped and enslaved during the Long Walk in the mid 1860s, when more than 10,000 Navajo were marched to an internment camp in Bosque Redondo, New Mexico. With the exception of her sister and one year old daughter, her family was killed and she lived the rest of her life as the wife and servant of Padre Antonio Jose Martinez, the pastor of Our Lady of Guadalupe Church in Taos, New Mexico. 

Dianne Archuleta And after she was captured, they actually sold her daughter to a different family and because she was so distraught and they couldn't get her to become a servant, do her duty, like basically calm down and behave, is kind of what I'm pulling from this story, Padre Martinez went and purchased her daughter from the other family and brought her to her. And so I think that kind of, at least gave her some sense of, they did something kind, they brought my daughter back to me, and maybe just coming to terms with her situation. 

Noel Black As Dianne continued to research Rosario's life, she soon realized that her great great grandmother's story was far from unique. From the time of the earliest colonization of what's now the Southwest by the Spanish, up through the Mexican era and American settlement following the Mexican-American War in 1848, countless indigenous people had been enslaved, and many continued to be held in illegal bondage after the supposed end of American slavery following the Civil War and ratification of the 13th Amendment to the Constitution. 

Dianne Archuleta And it just, it struck me as sad because we go through K - 12, learning some historical pieces, you know, our curriculum isn't always very diverse, and it still can be better. But I didn't know, we heard of Black enslaved people brought from Africa, but not about Native Americans being enslaved, even into, well into the 20th century. 

Noel Black From History Colorado Studios, this is Lost Highways: Dispatches from the Shadows of the Rocky Mountains. I'm Noel Black. On this episode, we look back at the long overlooked and often forgotten history of indigenous slavery in the Southwest. Unlike chattel slavery in the South, where Black people were openly and legally bought and sold, indigenous slavery was a far less institutionalized form of forced labor and servitude. But slavery, as we'll see in this episode, takes many different forms, and we'll look at the ways power and economics in the borderlands helped to perpetuate slavery in the United States long after its official abolition. We'll look at the ways this history of indigenous slavery continues to affect descendants, some of whom struggle to reconcile their familial and genetic past with their sense of belonging in what has been their homeland for generations. 

Noel Black The story of how indigenous slavery has come to be more widely known in the past decade begins with an amazing, if unlikely, individual: an African-American street artist who goes by the name Jetsonarama, aka Chip Thomas, a physician who spent his career practicing medicine on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. 

Chip Thomas I was born in '57, for all it's worth, in Raleigh, North Carolina. 1968, when I was in sixth grade, the public school system in Raleigh was desegregated. Busing started the year before I was to enter junior high school, so busing started in '68. There was a lot of violence in the schools at that time with busing. 

Noel Black Chip's parents didn't want him dealing with the anger and violence toward Black kids in public school at the time.  They almost sent him to military school instead, he says. 

Chip Thomas But an incredibly fortuitous thing happened where I wound up in the mountains of North Carolina, in a rural community that was an intentional community that was founded by Quakers called Celo. 

Noel Black The Arthur Morgan Boarding School placed an emphasis on experiential outdoor learning and had a strong arts and crafts emphasis. It was during this time that Thomas discovered photography. 

Chip Thomas And after going into the darkroom, I decided I was going to get a, a manual camera, a film camera, and learn black and white photography. 

Noel Black Though he eventually went to medical school, Thomas's passion for photography never waned. Then, after he graduated in 1987, he took a job providing medical care on the Navajo Nation in Arizona. And, as luck would have it,

Chip Thomas My next door neighbor at the time had a dark room, and he encouraged me to develop film, and when he left after 18 months, he gave me his darkroom. 

Noel Black Thomas had grown up reading Life magazine, and he loved the documentary photography of W. Eugene Smith and Gordon Parks. But he was also intensely interested in hip hop and street art, which was just beginning to explode in New York City at the time. And he often thought about how he could bring his photography to public spaces in the spirit of graffiti. Then, in 2009, after years of shooting photographs of the people he cared for on Navajo land and mastering his skills in the darkroom, he took a trip to Brazil and met a group of artists who were blowing their photographs and drawings up into large scale works on paper that they would wheat paste to walls around the city. 

Chip Thomas And that, you know, that was like the visual storytelling, street art missing link for me, because here was someone who combined the photo documentary style that I love with, with street art. So when I came back to the Navajo Nation, it was, like, I've got to figure this out. 

Noel Black But there was just one problem. The rural Navajo Nation in northern Arizona wasn't exactly an urban environment with endless walls where he could paste his blown up photos.  So he began pasting giant photographs that celebrated Navajo people and culture up on the walls of abandoned roadside buildings. For Thomas, it was the complete realization and integration of his life's work as both a physician and a photographer. 

Chip Thomas For me, I really, organic, complementary practice developed and that, you know, when I saw patients in the clinic, I was attempting to help restore health and create an environment of wellness within the individual. 

Noel Black It was important for Thomas that his photographs give back to the Navajo Nation that he felt had given so much to him. 

Chip Thomas The Navajo Nation is 27,000 square miles in size, home to roughly 180,000 people with an abundance of natural resources, including coal, oil, natural gas, uranium, water and aquifers. Yet, even now, roughly 25% of people living out there don't have running water or electricity, even with those natural resources, and the unemployment rate is over 50%, the teen suicide rate is roughly twice the national average. So, I was selective in the photographs that I chose to put into the community, attempting to reflect back to the community the beauty they shared with me. 

Noel Black Some of the large scale photographs Chip wheat pasted around the reservation include a happy young Diné mother holding her baby to her naked chest on the brick wall of an old warehouse, three elder Navajo code talkers and their military uniforms on the plywood wall of a roadside jewelry stand, a woman laughing at the sky on the side of a shed. 

Chip Thomas I was attempting to create an environment of wellness in the community that, again, was complementary to the work that I was doing in the clinic. So yeah, the, the two practices definitely went hand in hand. 

Noel Black Then, after years of working mostly alone on the reservation, Chip's unusual street art practice started to get a lot of attention across the Southwest. By 2018, UC Berkeley architecture professor Ron Rael, who pioneered the practice of 3D-printed adobe structures, and his cousin, Esteban Rael Galvez, the state historian of New Mexico, were identifying and documenting all the historic adobe buildings in Colorado San Luis Valley. They'd both grown up in the valley and wanted to engage and bring attention to the history of those structures. So they invited Chip Thomas to do a large scale photography project on the side of a depression era adobe schoolhouse. 

Chip Thomas One of the buildings he identified was owned by Lafayette Head. Lafayette Head was an Indian agent who came from Missouri, friends with the Kit Carson family, who went on to become the first Lieutenant Governor of Colorado Territory and who was asked by Andrew Johnson, I forget the year, I think it was 1865, so it was after the Civil War. Slavery had been abolished. But he, Andrew Johnson, was hearing reports about ongoing enslavement of Native people in the Southwest, which both pre- and post-dates African slavery. 

Noel Black President Johnson asked all his Indian agents in the Southwest at that time to compile  lists of enslaved Indians in each county. But Lafayette Head, who was stationed in Conejos County in the San Luis Valley and played a major role in the forced removal of Ute Indians onto reservations in southwest Colorado and Utah, was the only agent to comply with President Johnson's request, but Head himself was also keeping indigenous slaves. 

Chip Thomas So Ron, as I said, identified the dwelling of Lafayette Head and there's a building on that property that Ron and his cousin Esteban are, like, 90% certain was used to house the enslaved people in the Lafayette Head household. 

Noel Black Thomas had heard about indigenous slavery. 

Chip Thomas Certainly having been on the rez for 36 years, I'd heard about during the Long Walk, Navajo, Diné people, especially women, were captured and taken as slaves and people I worked with, nurses on the Nation at the clinic where I was, talked about enslaved people and their families, the people who had been taken away as enslaved people. So I'd heard something about this, but I didn't know, again, that it both pre- and post-dated African slavery and was as wide in practice as it was.  So, I mean, I wasn't shocked to, you know, I was intrigued, you know, and just really wanted to dig in and learn as much as I could about this. 

Noel Black That was when Chip picked up Andrés Reséndez's book, "The Other Slavery."

Andrés Reséndez The traditional story is that indigenous enslavement was a phenomenon of the 16th century, but we know that it endured through the 19th century and well into the 20th century. 

Noel Black This is Doctor Andrés Reséndez, professor of history at the University of California, Davis, and the author of "The Other Slavery". His book brought much broader attention to the subject when it was published in 2016. Reséndez says the enslavement of darker skinned people, often those from close to the equator, was based in bizarre, racist ideas about temperature and weather that dated back to ancient Greece. 

Andrés Reséndez And the idea was that climate was somehow connected with human temperament and that, where you lived, whether in a hot zone or a temperate zone or a, or a cold zone, really shaped who you were as a person, what types of traits you had. And by the time of Columbus, we have, very explicit linkage of this. We have scholars who are creating bands of weather and assigning social traits based on that. 

Noel Black People in cold climates, northern Europe and Scandinavia, for example, were thought to be naturally courageous but not so smart. People who lived in hot climates near the equator were thought to be clever. 

Andrés Reséndez And so, and obviously there was a silver lining for the people living in the temperate areas, the Mediterranean, meaning that they had the perfect balance between cleverness and temperament and that, and for them, it was pretty obvious that the great civilizations that they had witnessed up until then, i.e. the Greeks and the Romans and then the Portuguese and the Spanish, lived in these temperate areas and it was no surprise to them that they had been able to subdued people in other areas, of course. 

Noel Black And slavery was common in temperate Europe long before Columbus set sail across the Atlantic in 1492. 

Andrés Reséndez So if you went especially to the Iberian Peninsula or the Italian Peninsula, which were the two places where this institution was more established, you could see markets offering any number of slaves coming from different parts of the greater Mediterranean area. 

Noel Black And there were rules. There were lawful and unlawful slaves, and lawful slaves were legally obtained by kings and queens waging lawful wars. 

Andrés Reséndez And there were also, procedures to distinguish between lawful slaves and unlawful slaves. So in Spain, for example, a Spanish official had to interview both the would-be purchaser and the seller, but more critically also the slave himself or herself, to make sure that this slave had not been the product of a kidnapping expedition or something of that effect. 

Noel Black There was a dark, built-in absurdity to these roles, but illegal slavery was, even then, thought to be immoral. But that didn't stop the growing trade in kidnapped slaves from Africa. 

Andrés Reséndez There was a wide variety of slaves coming from parts of the Atlantic. So, for example, there were the famous Guanches, the indigenous inhabitants of the Canary Islands, and increasingly by the Portuguese there were, peoples from Western Africa who were being introduced into the slave markets of Portugal and Spain, and some of them drifted all the way into, into the Italian peninsula. 

Noel Black In the 1480s, Columbus traded along Africa's Gold Coast, including the Castle of Saint George del Mina in what is now Ghana, where he saw the lucrative possibilities of establishing a fortified trading post on foreign soil. 

Andrés Reséndez That time, it was a trading post that traded primarily in gold and, ivory and things like that, and slaves were not the primary commodity yet. 

Noel Black And Columbus believed he'd be able to set up a similar kind of outpost once he arrived in his intended destination, India, and that the gold, spices and other commodities would pay for it. 

Andrés Reséndez But it turned out that he was not finding what he was looking for, as you say, he was not finding the precious spices, he was not finding the, India or China or Japan, but these islands that he encountered were very well populated. And of course, in the meantime, the, the costs of sending additional ships to supply the Spanish who had remained there was mounting, and there, there was a very strong pressure to try to find something to, to offset these costs, and slavery was an obvious way to do that. 

Noel Black At first, Columbus tried to take indigenous slaves back to Europe, but the voyage was long. Many died, and the King and Queen of Spain were uncomfortable with simply capturing and importing slaves from this new world. When Columbus and those who followed did find gold and silver, it was clear that enslaving indigenous people to extract the precious metals there in their own homeland was far more lucrative. 

Andrés Reséndez There was an early phase of gold production in the Caribbean that was short lived, but then that early gold phase was superseded by a much larger silver phase, as the silver became the backbone of the colonial enterprise in the Americas. 

Noel Black And so the Spanish conquest of the Americas became, as time went on, a project of mass enslavement, and those indigenous peoples who weren't killed by disease or conflict were conscripted to extract the commodities that fed Spanish colonial expansion for centuries. 

Andrés Reséndez So this is something that began in the 16th century, in the 1520s. 

Noel Black Surface gold at that time was plentiful and relatively easy to remove with surface digging and panning. But,

Andrés Reséndez By the 1790s, or even into the early 19th century, Mexico, for example, was producing upwards of 50 or 60% of the silver extracted around the world. So all of that required untold amounts of labor because, unlike gold, the silver tended to be amalgamated with other minerals and, they tended to be organized around veins that usually went way down. And remember, this is before the introduction of explosives. 

Noel Black The ore had to be crushed into a fine powder and processed with reagents. 

Andrés Reséndez And for that, well, you needed a lot of labor. 

Noel Black Reséndez says it's likely that the labor conditions at the mines, which included extreme exhaustion, starvation and dehydration, claimed as many lives as disease. And there was a correlation, because when workers died, the Spanish would conduct raids to kidnap more slaves, which would, in turn, spread more disease. And so the cycle would continue as they pressed farther into what is now South America and north into what later became the American Southwest. 

Andrés Reséndez So one of the things that is pretty interesting when you look at the history of the Southwest is that when you get to places like New Mexico and Colorado, in the shorthand version of history, they seem like the northernmost reaches of the Spanish Empire, where basically colonizers arrive and, friars arrive, and there's really no clear sense of what they are doing there. Why are they going there to these godforsaken places? 

Noel Black But again,

Andrés Reséndez We know that some of the earliest, settlers were connected to some of the most important silver families farther south in what is now Mexico, and that they went there to prospect for more silver and/or to find laborers for their silver operations. 

Noel Black In 1631, at the southern end of what is now the state of Chihuahua, Mexico, one of the richest silver mines in the world was discovered near the town of Parral. Many of the indigenous people in the region were nomadic, and were able to resist Spanish attempts to enslave them when more labor was needed. So the Spanish started looking instead to the various tribes of Pueblo Indians around new colonies in the Rio Grande Valley to the north. 

Andrés Reséndez It was a region with settled indigenous populations that produced an agricultural surplus and had both food, and they could also send laborers. 

Noel Black There were an estimated 40,000 Pueblo Indians at the time, and the Spanish enslaved many of them and took them to Parral, says Reséndez. 

Andrés Reséndez So this is how New Mexico became integrated with this mine of Parral. So that, that's a story that makes a lot more sense and these mining connections are sometimes left out from the traditional accounts of why New Mexico, existed. 

Noel Black Reséndez isn't entirely sure why the history of human trafficking and enslavement of Pueblo Indians at the Mexican silver mines isn't more commonly known. But he has a theory. 

Andrés Reséndez I mean, one crazy idea is that maybe mining is not that sexy of a topic. 

Noel Black In his research, Reséndez looked closely at baptismal records in and around Parral in the years just prior to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680.  The cause of the revolt, which drove the Spanish from the Rio Grande Valley for over a decade, is often attributed to religious oppression by the Catholic Church. But the baptismal records reveal a significant rise in indigenous slave trafficking at that time, and the uprising against the Spaniards and Mexican settlers, he says, was far more widespread than previously thought. 

Andrés Reséndez The Pueblo Revolt of 1680, it was a revolt that went well beyond the pueblos. There were many other groups involved, up and down this corridor, going from the silver mines of Parral all the way to New Mexico, as well as in some of the regions going towards the Pacific Ocean to the, to the west. And while I don't deny that religious animosities certainly played a role, I think that a very important factor was certainly the, the slaving going on during the years leading up to the Pueblo Revolt of 1680. 

Noel Black Recent research that included the work of Lakota scientist Doctor Yvette Running Horse Collin has revealed that horses were reintroduced to North America, ran wild on the plains, and were incorporated into some indigenous cultures long before the Pueblo Revolt. But the estimated 1,500 horses the Spanish left behind when they were killed or fled in 1680 radically transformed the lives and cultures of many tribes in the Southwest. It also dramatically transformed relations between the tribes themselves. 

Andrés Reséndez The horse allowed indigenous peoples to do everything better and in a bigger scale, to explore farther afield, to hunt better, to wage war more efficiently. So horses have these amazing quality of improving every aspect of human activity. What is interesting, of course, is that some indigenous groups adopted the horses more readily, and they grew into these equestrian empires, and others did not. 

Noel Black The Comanche, in particular, quickly integrated the horse, which gave them enormous advantages and power over the other tribes in the Southwest. And with that power, they became even bigger players in the slave economy there at the time. 

Andrés Reséndez This is a part that is really probably one of the most difficult parts of the story to relate to that you, that some of these groups were both victims and victimizers at the same time, but that was what happened. 

Noel Black The culture and slave economy that the Spanish had created throughout the Southwest had taken hold, and now that the Comanche had the horse, they began in the early 1700s to rule over a growing area called the Comancheria that eventually covered what are now Kansas, Oklahoma, southern Colorado, eastern New Mexico, much of Texas, and the northern parts of eastern Mexico. 

Andrés Reséndez So during this time, Comanches conducted raids all over the region. They, interestingly enough, they and they acted as a, as a real empire, meaning they had very clear strategic alliances. So, for example, they did not, they held a truce with New Mexico because it was so close and it was up their, their outlet market, so to speak, they, they sold captives and they sold animals to the, to the New Mexicans. But they were able to conduct raids deep into Mexico, as far south as close to central Mexico, which is, an amazing, I mean, if you consider the terrain, if you consider the distance, it's an amazing, enterprise that we are talking about. 

Noel Black They captured Apache, Navajo, Mexicans, and later, even early American settlers and delivered them to Spanish slave markets in New Mexico or kept them for their labor. It's hard to know how extensive their slaving enterprise was. But, says Reséndez, 

Andrés Reséndez Many lines of evidence point that it was a fairly common activity. We also know that this is all entangled in the legal system, because, in the end, slavery was technically prohibited. It required all of these euphemistic terms and all of these different institutions that were slavery in all but name. 

Noel Black Again, unlike chattel slavery in the South, which was legal at the time, the Spanish had rules about slavery, which was largely prohibited except in the case of prisoners of war. But it was still widespread. And,

Andrés Reséndez That required a certain amount of deception. 

Noel Black This, says Reséndez, is one of the biggest reasons so few people are aware of indigenous slavery. The other reason, as time went on and the Mexicans won their independence from Spain and early American settlers began colonizing the Southwest, is that it just didn't look the same as chattel slavery. By the time Andrés Reséndez's book, "The Other Slavery - The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America", was published in 2016, many people in the San Luis Valley of Colorado had just begun to learn the truth about their ancestry. 

Chip Thomas So this is the fascinating part. So, to confirm their family histories that, you know, we are of a Spanish bloodline or Mexican bloodline in the 2000s, when the DNA testing became more prevalent, people started getting testing done in the San Luis Valley that indicate that they were part Native, that, you know, contradicted what the family histories were, were saying. 

Noel Black The revelations had raised lots of difficult and painful questions for locals, and the Fort Garland Museum held a series of community conversations about the history and legacy of indigenous slavery in the region. Eric Carpio became the director of the museum around this time in 2017. 

Eric Carpio We had worked with several scholars, you know, up to this point, but the conversations with community and with descendants and with tribal partners were still, you know, pretty difficult. 

Noel Black For some, the genetic tests challenged long held issues around familial status in the valley. 

Eric Carpio You know, the benefits that, historically, individuals here in the valley or in this region would gain by being closer to or by being, by identifying with their European ancestry, I mean, you go back and look at the Spanish caste system, you know, really sad, like where, you know, it defined your role in society, your placement in society based on the purity of your, of your blood. 

Noel Black For others, it was a reckoning with the fact that their ancestors had held slaves or discovering that trusted family members had lied. Whatever the case, says Carpio,

Eric Carpio I think through that convening and through those conversations around, you know, the history of the region, it became really apparent, I think, to the folks here, in community museums in southern Colorado, that this history of indigenous enslavement was one of those topics that was worth, you know, exploring further and really, you know, engaging in dialog with the community. 

Noel Black One of the scholars Carpio brought to Fort Garland to help better understand the history of indigenous slavery in the Valley and why so few had known anything about it, was Doctor James Brooks, professor of history at the University of Georgia and author of the book "Captives and Cousins - Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands". In the early 1980s, Brooks was collecting oral histories for his research on 19th century Hispano culture in southern Colorado. Most of the people he interviewed claimed an unbroken lineage with Spanish conquistadors. 

James Brooks And yet, when they talk about their neighbors, they have these Indians in the closet. 

Noel Black During one of the interviews with a man and his wife, the husband excused himself for a moment. 

James Brooks And while he's out of the room, his wife turns to me and whispers, his grandmother was an Apache. And, I, so, oh, okay. So. And that's when I began looking into the baptismal records, and then afterwards, you know, marriage registers and all. And I realize that there are all these children who are enumerated as creados or creadas, which is a kind of a gentle way of saying "enslaved dependent child". A creado, creado is someone you've taken into the household to raise up. 

Noel Black Brooks says we have Franciscan recordkeeping to thank for so much of this history being preserved. 

James Brooks Because not only did they note creado or creada as, as someone being, baptized, but they also often gave tribal derivation. 

Noel Black At the time he was doing the work, it wasn't immediately apparent that what he'd stumbled upon was a form of slavery. It was just so different from what Americans understand as enslavement, from the history of chattel slavery in the South that we learn about in school. 

James Brooks I was calling it a captive exchange system. And Cynthia Bradley, who was an Africanist historian in the department, at UC Davis, where I was writing that dissertation, I was complaining to her about nomenclature or whatever one day, and she said, have you ever looked at kinship slavery in Africa? And I thought, noo, and that's when I realized I had a case where kinship and, and enslavement were into, intimately related. 

Noel Black Kinship slavery, says Brooks, involves the assimilation of the enslaved into the family and culture of the enslavers, often over multiple generations. 

James Brooks Forms of enslavement, violent capture and assimilation, oftentimes globally, include the quality of at least biological incorporation across generations because enslaved women get raped in almost all cases.  But, in some cases, it's a flexible category that you can go from a category of bondage to a category of kinship, where suddenly you're beginning to have rights and responsibilities to relate people, related people, which means there's a form of cultural assimilation going on there. 

Noel Black And this kind of enslavement has existed almost everywhere at different times in history, often side by side with more overt forms of coerced labor.  Again, part of what can make this form of slavery so hard to identify and quantify, says James, is that it's often largely invisible to outsiders. For one thing, he says,

James Brooks The kinship is absolutely denied, no matter what the biology tells you, and we know exactly what the biology tells us. But there would never be any suggestion that there was real kinship. 

Noel Black And descendants themselves, in some cases, may not even know. But beyond all this, one of the biggest differences with chattel slavery is that there were often no clear lines between perpetrators and victims. 

James Brooks And then when I realized that not only were Hispanos taking Indian children as captives, but powerful militarized Indian groups were taking Hispano children and women as captives. And that's when I thought, oh my God, this is a reciprocal raiding economy where you're exchanging both livestock and human beings in ways that are different and distinctively different than anything we see in the classic South. 

Noel Black And in the borderlands of the Southwest at the time, it wasn't just, as Brooks says, Hispanos and Indians, but Hispanos and multiple tribal nations and, later, American settlers, participating in this economy as their various fortunes all rose and fell over the centuries. 

James Brooks I think in the, in the case of, of the borderlands, because up until the American conquest, nobody really had a monopoly of power in the region that neither, neither the Spanish nor the Mexican era, there were never enough official troops stationed in that area to, to really achieve dominance. 

Noel Black Because of this tenuous balance of power between so many different tribes and groups, slaves also became valuable for diplomacy. 

James Brooks And once you have parity of power, how do you figure out ways to communicate with each other? These captives, enslaved people are really valuable because they're multilingual, they have, you know, flexible loyalties, shall we say, you know, that they can switch sides if they want to because they can speak two languages. And that keeps everybody a little more honest, a little more cautious, and so they're simultaneously, it was, experiencing the deepest form of exploitation that we know and our most valuable players and agents in intercultural commerce and in diplomacy. 

Noel Black Through the 1700s and the years after Mexican independence in 1821, the shifting balance of power in the Southwest helped create the conditions for a robust economy of raiding and trading of everything from livestock to slaves.  The tribes, the Spanish and New Mexicans, says Brooks, all engaged in a nonstop exchange of hit and run assaults, counterattacks, ransoms, swaps and sales. Livestock would be stolen from Spaniards or Mexicans, and then another tribe would raid the tribe that stole that livestock for the ransom. But they wouldn't steal back the whole herd. 

James Brooks Both sides knew that they could keep a portion of the livestock that they rescued from thieves for their own, which meant that there was a great incentive for people to thieve in livestock interculturally because if you heard that somebody had just stolen a thousand sheep from somebody, go from down in Albuquerque, you saddle up and head for Navajo country, you come back with 500, and you get to keep 200 of them. 

Noel Black In the years after the Pueblo Revolt, the Spaniards, Mexicans and Comanche all enslaved huge numbers of Apaches. Often they were taken and traded in the Comanche markets, in Texas or in Taos. But then, after the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo ended the Mexican-American War in 1848,

Andrés Reséndez Apaches, who had been one of the greatest victims of the silver trade and had been one of the victims of these equestrian powers like Comanches, in the 19th century, when the border between Mexico and the United States was redrawn, then they resorted to, staying on the American side and then conducting, expeditions into Mexico for the purpose of raids, but also in some cases for, capturing animals but also humans. 

Noel Black At that same time, in the mid-1800s, the Mormons became one of the first groups of permanent American settlers to arrive in the Southwest, adding yet another group to this increasingly complex network of people. The Ute, who had also become a major regional power, began to take slaves from neighboring Pueblo and Hispano communities and tried to sell them to Mormon settlers in Utah. 

Andrés Reséndez So by the time the Mormons arrived in what is now Utah in the 1840s, they found a landscape of enslavement already. So Spanish merchants and Utes and other groups had already, established the institution, had captured each other, and they had captives to sell. And of course, the Mormons, by establishing themselves in this region, became the obvious potential purchasers of these captives. So it became a market. 

Noel Black The Mormons weren't always willing buyers, though. They had a strange relationship to slavery. They didn't believe in it, but they also believed that slavery in the South was God's will. But the Utes would sometimes force the issue with violence against their captives. 

Andrés Reséndez We have horrifying accounts, torturing children until they were purchased or even killing them, because of the refusal of some Mormon settlers from purchasing these captives. 

Noel Black The Mormons believed that American Indians were descended from ancient Jews. 

Andrés Reséndez However, they had separated themselves from the right path, and they had migrated to the New World in ancient times. They call them Lamanites, this, this tribe that had separated from Israel. And because they had grown apart from God, they had grown darker and they had become fiercer, which explained the presence of Native Americans. But there, of course, there was a silver underlining to all of this, which is that they could be redeemed. 

Noel Black And so, the Mormons justified their purchase of slaves as a way of both saving them from torture or death, and as a means for ultimately converting them. To be clear, Brooks isn't implicating any one group, whether the Mormons or Ute, the Comanches or the New Mexicans.  The entire Southwest, the part of the country that until 1848 was Mexico, had been swallowed by an economy of slavery, where so many different cultures had converged without any one dominant force. 

James Brooks Throughout, for the better part of the period I cover in the book, people are kind of equal, and when you're equal, you're equally vulnerable. 

Noel Black Of all the shifting power dynamics and changing fortunes of the many cultures of the Southwest that participated in the slave economy in the 17 and 1800s, there's no more tragic story than that of the Navajo, or the Diné, as they call themselves. Like the Pueblo Indians of the Rio Grande Valley, the Diné were a largely settled culture in the canyonlands of eastern Arizona and western Mexico. They were farmers, shepherds and artisans famous for their pots and their rugs. They kept sheep for their wool and meat, and for long periods of time, they were considered quite wealthy.  During their period of greatest prosperity, they also kept slaves. 

James Brooks There was actually a Navajo term for slave, naalté, and that some Navajos, ricos, they had the wealthy headmen, held dozens of these for herding sheep and weaving, weaving those beautiful Navajo blankets. 

Noel Black And sometimes the Spanish or the New Mexicans would invade their lands looking for stolen livestock and take some of their women and children. 

James Brooks So everybody is involved up to their elbows in it. 

Noel Black But their fortunes took a turn for the worse once the Americans arrived in the mid-1800s. 

Andrés Reséndez The Navajo is a great example of these phenomena that we were talking about before, of the victims and victimizers at the same time. So I think the, what's stunning about the Navajos is that if you look at the church records, at the baptismal records, you see, the number of Navajo children being inducted into New Mexican households go very, go way up in the 1860s, in the years of the, of the American Civil War. 

Noel Black American settlers and miners had been moving west for more than a decade, often encountering fierce Indian resistance to their encroachment. For the American government, this became known as the, quote, Indian problem. Indigenous people who had long inhabited the supposed new frontier were in the way of what America and its politicians believed was their manifest destiny, their God-given right to colonize the United States all the way to the West Coast. Troops and Indian agents had been sent west to manage the conflicts that arose during the 1850s, but the stakes got higher when the Pike's Peak Gold Rush began in the 1850s, and when Civil War broke out, the Union sent more troops to defend the gold mines from Confederate seizure. 

Andrés Reséndez There was an early clash between Southerners and Northerners in New Mexico. 

Noel Black The Battle of Glorieta Pass in New Mexico was one of the final battles in the Confederacy's attempt to take control of the Southwest during the Civil War.  Though the Union was driven back, they famously sent a regiment around the pass to destroy the South's supply wagons and release their horses, which forced them to retreat. Though it largely ended the South's campaign in the West, it also left a large number of Union troops stationed there with little or nothing to do. 

Andrés Reséndez And so in the meantime, they wanted to make themselves useful, and, what better way than to address the quote, unquote Indian problem? 

Noel Black Some Union officers, hoping to make names for themselves, decided to use their time and their troops to address the so-called Indian problem. Most famously, in Colorado, Colonel John M Chivington, who allegedly led the flanking attack on the supply train at Glorieta Pass, orchestrated the brutal massacre of more than 230 Cheyenne and Arapaho men, women and children at Sand Creek in what's now the eastern plains of southern Colorado on November 29th, 1864.  And in New Mexico,

Andrés Reséndez It was decided that that was the way to address the Indian problem, is to go after the Navajos. 

Noel Black The infamous frontiersman and scout Kit Carson was called in. 

Andrés Reséndez And so there was this essentially scorched earth invasion of canyons, Shay, and forcible relocation of the Navajo Nation to the Bosque Redondo reservation in, eastern New Mexico. 

Noel Black Known as the Long Walk, the forced relocation to Bosque Redondo, 300 miles away in eastern New Mexico, split the roughly 10,000 Diné people into small groups of 50 that were vulnerable. 

Andrés Reséndez It was not just, U.S. soldiers, but also Mexican auxiliaries, as well as other auxiliaries, traditional enemies of the Navajos, who wanted to get paid not in cash, but in captives as well. 

Noel Black Among those enemies contracted to oversee the march in return for money and slaves were the Ute. But word had gotten out about the march, and other raiding parties came and claimed slaves as well. Of the 10,000 Diné who'd originally set out on the Long Walk, only 8,000 made it to Bosque Redondo. Many died, and many were kidnapped to be sold or forced into servitude, in what often became kinship slavery relationships. Kit Carson himself took at least one slave into his home and renamed him Juan Carson. On April 8th, 1865, the year after the Long Walk, the 13th amendment to the Constitution, which outlawed slavery except as a punishment for crime, was initially passed by the House of Representatives. The Civil War officially ended the following day. Then, on April 15th, President Lincoln, who'd issued the Emancipation Proclamation on January 1st, 1863 at the height of the war, was shot and killed by John Wilkes Booth. And Andrew Johnson became a successor. Here's Chip Thomas again. 

Chip Thomas So he asked his Indian agents to do a survey and to compile a list of all the enslaved people in their respective counties. The only Indian agent to comply was Lafayette Head. 

Noel Black Again, Lafayette Head, who would go on to become Colorado's first lieutenant governor, was the Indian agent in Conejos County, Colorado, at the time. He'd been appointed to oversee relations with the Ute and the Jicarilla Apache. During that time, he established a sheep farm and a large estate where he held dozens of indigenous slaves. He recorded 149 slave names in the census, but didn't record his own. That ledger is one of the few remaining documentations of indigenous slavery that continued on long past the end of the Civil War.  When the 13th Amendment was ratified in December of 1865, slavery and all forms of indentured servitude became illegal throughout the United States, but just as in the South, slaveholders in the southwest figured out ways around the law for decades . Andrés Reséndez. 

Andrés Reséndez So debt peonage was probably the most common way to establish slave-like conditions in the Southwest and in many parts of Mexico and Latin America towards the 18th and 19th and well into the 20th centuries. So debt peonage had existed since the 16th century. There are instances of debt peonage, meaning people whose, who receive money, who is advanced to them by a, by an owner, and by virtue of this debt, they obligate themselves to repay the debt. And until they do so, they cannot leave the place of work.  Sometimes, oftentimes, their families are also implicated in this. 

Noel Black And that debt is usually set up to be extremely difficult, if not impossible, to repay. 

Andrés Reséndez And this transition occurred because previous forms of enslavement had been prohibited by law, and this was an easy way to continue this practice. By the mid-19th century, when the United States gets involved in this, the U.S. Government investigates these abusive labor conditions, especially in the West, and they uncovered many instances of debt peonage, and they single out New Mexico, the federal government, the U.S. Federal government, singles out New Mexico as the worst offender, in this, in this regard. 

Noel Black But again, on the surface, peonage didn't look like slavery, and it often involved kinship. So it could be very difficult to identify. President Andrew Johnson, himself a slaveholder at one time, even sent a representative to New Mexico to investigate and arrest anyone still keeping slaves, says James Brooks. 

James Brooks And he can't get a single jury to bring charges 'cause they're all related! It's like, whoa, I'm no, I don't see any problem here. 

Noel Black And those coerced intimate relations, which were often kept silent, ultimately led to generations of Genízaros, indigenous people who'd been disconnected from their tribes. The term comes from the Turkish word "janissary", the name for slave soldiers during the Ottoman Empire. For Dianne Archuleta, whose great great grandmother was one of the Diné abducted during the Long Walk, and the many others like her, who grew up in southern Colorado and northern New Mexico with no knowledge of their indigenous ancestors, the discovery in the 2010s that they were Genízaro was complicated and often painful. 

Dianne Archuleta Honestly, I really felt sad. I think growing up, you go through elementary, middle school, high school, you learn about the Founding Fathers, you learn about all these other parts of history of the United States, but you don't hear about what, what people went through in order for us to be where we are today and learning about that overly broad story, it felt very hard, but it also felt very, it made a lot of sense to me. It made a lot of sense to when we see things like generational trauma, generational poverty, like all of these things that continue to, all these things that continue to plague communities of color, like where do I fit into the story? 

Noel Black Dianne was part of the team that began to work on an exhibition about indigenous slavery at Fort Garland. It gave her the opportunity to connect with other Genízaro  people who'd just learned the truth about their ancestry. 

Dianne Archuleta It felt difficult to know that there were other families that went through this, but it also felt like this community that was yearning for information, and to be in my role that I was in at the time that I'm still in, well, here with History Colorado, I felt like I have that both can view both sides of it, the historical significance of it and both the, how you empathize with what that situation feels like. 

Noel Black As the conversations between community members began to move toward the idea of an exhibit, Chip Thomas was introduced to Eric Carpio at the Fort Garland Museum. Soon after, he did one of his wheat paste photographic murals on the building where Lafayette Head had allegedly housed his slaves. 

Eric Carpio One of the things that I really love about Chip's work, you know, everywhere, is that, you know, a lot of his work is on abandoned buildings or on structures that utilize the landscape. And so, you know, the imagery that he creates isn't just what's within the frame, right, isn't just what's within the photograph, but that everything outside of that image is also part of the story. 

Noel Black After meeting Chip and looking at his work, Eric Carpio invited him to help create an exhibit that would address indigenous slavery in the Southwest and San Luis Valley broadly, and at Fort Garland in particular. 

Eric Carpio Fort Garland, for a long time was known for, you know, being, Carson's last post before he left the military. You know, he would die, you know, less than a year after his post at Fort Garland, but he arrives at Fort Garland in June of 1866 and is here for about 18 months. 

Noel Black The fact that Kit Carson had also kidnapped at least one slave during the Long Walk, shortly before he took up his post as the commandant at Fort Garland, made the building itself an important part of the story Chip and Eric wanted to tell in collaboration with other community members.  Because of how sensitive the subject was to those in the Valley who had only recently discovered their indigenous or Genízaro ancestry, they decided to do very little in the way of explanation or interpretation.  So they decided to focus on Lafayette Head's handwritten census and to let it speak for itself. 

Eric Carpio There's 149 names on that list. 

Noel Black And although those 149 names do not include Lafayette Head's own slaves, they stand as fact and documentation of this long overlooked aspect of American slavery. So Chip suggested making the ledger the centerpiece of the exhibit. 

Chip Thomas So it's a beautifully written document, you know, it's just, it's kind of rococo in its presentation. It's a, it's a little over the top, but, you know, it's detailing this horrific event. So as soon as I saw that, I knew I wanted to blow it up and place it on translucent fabric and then do an interplay between the, I didn't have a lot of imagery to work with, but I knew that I wanted the centerpieces to be those two, lists that were created by Lafayette Head. 

Noel Black Once they settled on the ledgers and the fabric, they decided to hang the pieces in what was once the commandant's quarters at Fort Garland, where Kit Carson would have lived. The exhibit also included large scale blowups of historic photos of several enslaved people, including Juan Carson, who was abducted during the Long Walk. 

Chip Thomas It's, kind of a minimalist approach to sharing this, this other history. And in terms of my approach to it, I mean, that exhibition was one of the first times I didn't have an opportunity to use my own photography and was working solely with historical documents. But the document that struck me most was the Lafayette Head list. 

Noel Black There's an unquestionable ghostliness to the two pieces of cloth imprinted with the ledger pages that hang in the otherwise empty rooms.  As people pass through, the names almost seem to breathe. The simplicity of it, says Eric Carpio, has proven to be a powerful way to honor the truth. 

Eric Carpio Families here in the Valley who, you know, looking at that list, share that they have ancestors on both sides, right, in that they've got ancestors in that col,in that owner's column, but also in that, captive column. Everyone's got a place in the story, no one's off the hook, and everyone needs to be healed from this. 

Noel Black And healing, as Carpio, always requires the truth. 

Eric Carpio In order for us to, you know, get to a better place as, as individuals, as communities, as humans, would be to, you know, first acknowledge some of these painful, painful parts of our, of our history. So I think for me, that's been one of the most significant outcomes of the work, is really digging into those, those conversations and creating space for that kind of work to be done. 

Noel Black After Dianne Archuleta learned that her great great grandmother was Diné and that she'd been enslaved after the Long Walk, she sent in a 23 & Me DNA test and learned that she embodies much of the complex history of the Southwest. 

Dianne Archuleta Basically, I was broken down between 51% European, which is Spanish and Portuguese, and then 47.9% Native American. So, definitely feeling the, feeling that mestiza that I first learned about when I went back to college, like, started studying Mexico and, you know, all the way back to Cortez and, you know, all of those ways in which, we evolved, on this continent. 

Noel Black Archuleta is one of the many Genízaro descendants who discovered her own history at the same time others were learning the truth of their ancestry from home DNA tests. She says that participating in the community dialog and the planning of the unsilenced exhibit has helped her feel less alone. But sorting through the pain of the awakening to the magnitude of the history of indigenous slavery has been its own journey. 

Dianne Archuleta I got an opportunity to visit Bosque Redondo, and that's where they were taken from the Long Walk, and it really gave me just this, I could feel it when I got there, like I could feel the same thing when we went to, like, Sand Creek, I could feel it in the air of what had occurred here. 

Noel Black Healing from such an enormous reckoning with the reality that it existed for so long and among so many different people, she says, will begin when indigenous slavery gets taught in schools. 

Dianne Archuleta And so, maybe it's just an overall acknowledgment of this history by actually putting it in our books, by actually putting it in our curriculum for our kids in high school, like maybe it may not be completely appropriate for elementary, maybe some of it for middle school, but I think the true acknowledgment would be putting it through our U.S. history books.  If we're moving into the general direction with history, and we're putting that history out there for everyone to learn, I think that is a wonderful start. 

Noel Black For Andrés Reséndez and Chip Thomas, the history of indigenous slavery also holds important reminders for the present. 

Chip Thomas It was just fascinating learning these subtle difference, or not so subtle differences, you know, because, yeah, not all slavery looks the same, but it's important to point out that it is ongoing. It's still with us. 

Noel Black And indigenous women, especially, are still disproportionately enslaved in ways that are almost completely invisible to most people. He cites the pervasive contemporary reality of what's sometimes referred to as MMIW, or Missing and Murdered Indigenous Women. 

Chip Thomas So there's a phenomenon in the Americas of Native women who were just abducted, used sometimes for sex work, sometimes used for sex works, work and then killed. 

Noel Black Andrés Reséndez says his research into the history of the other slavery left him with a troubled view of humanity. 

Andrés Reséndez I had very mixed feelings when I finished writing and researching and writing this book. This does not reflect well on human nature. This is not a history of good and bad. This is a history of everybody who could do it, did it. So, so it speaks to something very fundamental. 

Noel Black In order to truly end slavery, he says, we have to understand that it's still hiding in plain sight and that anyone can be a perpetrator or a victim. 

Andrés Reséndez African slavery, which is the one that we are most familiar with, in some ways was a really strange part of history in that it was sanctioned by all the empires and nations of the world at the time, and it was perfectly legal. And to that extent it does not resemble the present day forms of human trafficking in that human trafficking it is illegal in most parts of the world, and yet it happens in covert ways, in ways very similar to what I call the other slavery in my book. So if there is a precedent for the present day forms of trafficking, it goes back to these other slavery because the enslavement of Native Americans was prohibited. And so I wanted to make that connection, and also to say that, that really ending this is extraordinarily difficult because it is not, not enough to, to pass laws to say that this cannot be done because traffickers are so crafty, they are able to move from one region to another, they are able to target one people and then move to another. So, so really, it requires a lot more than just passing a law. 

Noel Black Lost Highways is a production of History Colorado and History Colorado Studios. It's made possible by a major grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities: Exploring the Human Endeavor, and by a founding grant from the Sturm Family Foundation, with particular thanks to Stephen Sturm and Emily Sturm. If you'd like to explore our archives or read a transcript of any of our episodes, either as a matter of accessibility or because you'd like to use Lost Highways in your classroom, you can find them at HistoryColorado.org/LostHighways. The Merry Olivers composed the music for this episode and our theme is by Connor Bergall. And now, for some final thank yous. First off, I want to thank Stephen and Emily Sturm again. They brought the idea for the podcast and the initial Sturm Family Foundation funding to History Colorado. Thank you so much, Stephen and Emily. Thank you to the National Endowment for the Humanities, who funded the past four seasons of Lost Highways. We're beyond honored to have been able to work with you.  And to Shannon Jorn and Karen Antonacci in History Colorado's philanthropy department, we wouldn't have gotten or been able to manage these grants without you. Thank you to Chief Creative Officer Jason Hanson, who oversaw the launch and helped us shape the creative vision for the podcast. Thanks for putting up with more than your fair share of my grief and push back with good humor and grace over the past six years. Thanks also to Dawn dePrince, History Colorado CEO, for supporting our project. To Susan Schulten, our history advisor who always read the script and gave us feedback before anyone else. We've always been in awe of your love and dedication to the project. To Sam Bock, our editor, you always made things better without getting in the way, a rare feat in any form of media. Working with you was, yes, a true pleasure. To Tyler Hill, my longtime co-creator and co-host, there aren't enough words to thank you. Your commitment to always doing our absolute best work, to including the voices that needed to be heard, and to caring for the people whose stories were entrusted to us, was the fairy dust that made this podcast sparkle. To Maria Maddox for your tireless research, curiosity, empathy, and willingness to try things that made you uncomfortable. And to producer Dustin Hodge for bringing it home this last season.  To Lori Bailey, for her endless good cheer and deep well of resources on all things administrative.  To Ann Sneesby-Cook for her exhaustive newspaper and periodical research.  To Shawn Boyd, Shannon Vorrel, Abby Crause, Eric Carpio, Devin Flores, Terry Gentry, Kimberly Cronewall, Kris Jurgens, Kim Kennedy-White, and Aaron Marcus, for all the story ideas, camaraderie, and help along the way. A huge shout out to all our volunteers over the years, and especially Sharyn Zimmerman, our volunteer transcriber for the season. An enormous thank you to all those who served on our advisory group, especially Susan Schulten, Thomas Andrews, Tom Romero, and Cara Duguette.  A huge thank you to the entire staff of History Colorado, present and past, at all eight of our locations throughout the state of Colorado. Thank you to all of our guests, scholars and musicians who composed music for us. Without all of you, the podcast wouldn't have even left the ground. And finally, once again, thanks so much to all of you for listening. I'm Noel Black.