I can't say I liked it but it was well written and had a significant message. I must say I didn't like the details of the violence and viciousness. It never ceases to amaze me how brutal men can be to other human beings. ( )

History of Indian slavery in North America, focusing mainly on the Spanish but in the later chapters discussing the US adaptation to this other slavery. Women and children were apparently preferred as slaves and different groups became sources of enslaved people or enslavers as political alliances changed. Spain’s rulers tried to ban slavery relatively early on, but it was nonetheless reinstated as peonage, which the author argues provides some lessons in the flexibility and relentlessness of exploitation today. ( )

While I have read many books touching on the history of Slavery and had come to the conclusion that I knew all there was on the subject, this book has shown otherwise! This is a great book which all should read.
Until I read this book I thought I knew all about this subject, having studied
the historical slavery issues one Rome, Greece, Africa, Mexico, South America, and the American Southern States Slavery. But this book concentration on slavery as it ultimately spread to Western American. While I had purchased this book a long time ago and had let it sit on the shelf, I am so happy to have found the time to read this illuminateing treatment on the subject of Slavery in the U.S. West and Southwest. ( )

Very few times do I read a book that opens up new and uncharted data. This is the case here when Dr. Resendez delves into the widespread enslavement of Native Americans in the Western Hemisphere for over 400 years. It starts with Christopher Columbus and follows to the American Southwest in the 1800's. The Spanish deserve the brunt of the blame but other groups including Native Americans themselves and the Latter Day Saints get involved. A well written and tremendously well researched award winning book. ( )

An interesting introduction to thinking about enslavement of American Indian people from the beginnings of colonization. Reséndez traces not only explicit enslavement, but also the ways in which enslavers (particularly Spanish enslavers) managed to keep systems of enslavement in place even when laws dictated they should fall apart. Through this analysis, Reséndez makes the systems of enslavement that still exist more legible as such.

His analysis does fail entirely to go into the ways that sexual violence was a major part of this--he makes clear that women were more highly valued on slave markets, but just erases the reasons for that, which mirrors the continual erasure of the amount of sexual violence that Native women experience to this day. This massive gap in his analysis really needs to be addressed, and the fact that it is not in this book is really a problem.

Nevertheless, undoubtedly this book will open doors for more historians to examine this phenomenon, and to begin to make connections intellectually between American Indian enslavement and African enslavement on the North American continent, making both avenues of thought more productive. ( )