Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands

Name: Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands
Author: James F. Brooks
ISBN: 9780807899885

James F. Brooks

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Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands

James F. Brooks

award won

score

Captives and Cousins explores the complex web of captive-taking and slave trading that bound together the Pueblo Indians, Navajos, Apaches, Utes, New Mexicans, and Anglo-Americans who inhabited the Southwest borderlands for nearly three centuries. Working from extensive documentary sources, James F. Brooks traces how captive exchanges and kinship networks became the principal means by which these diverse peoples—separated by language, religion, and culture—negotiated power relations, distributed resources, and created community across a vast frontier region. Through careful analysis of individual lives and family histories, Brooks argues that captivity itself became a fundamental social institution that shaped the region's development and ultimately influenced the emergence of the Southwest as we know it today. Rather than viewing captive-taking as simply a destructive practice of warfare, he demonstrates how the integration of captives into kinship networks created new forms of social organization and economic interdependence. Captives and Cousins challenges conventional narratives of the colonial Southwest and offers new perspectives on how multiethnic communities emerged and persisted in one of North America's most dynamic and contested regions.

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