The Chronicle: Colloquy Live Transcript

Reshaping Our View of Slavery and the Southwest

Friday, May 16, at noon, U.S. Eastern time

How does an award-winning new book change our views of the history of slavery and of the American Southwest?

Historians are buzzing over the fact that a previously unknown scholar, James F. Brooks, has just won a series of top honors in their field for Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands (University of North Carolina Press, 2002). With its lively narrative prose and its use of anthropological research to analyze the little-known slave system of the Southwest, his book raises interesting questions about the American past -- and about how history should be written now.

» The Slave History You Don't Know (5/16/2003)

James F. Brooks is director of the press at the School of American Research, in Santa Fe, N.M., and is the author of Captives and Cousins. In the past year, the book has made an unprecedented sweep of the history profession's top prizes. Mr. Brooks received the Frederick Jackson Turner Award from the Organization of American Historians, honoring the work of a first-time author writing on an important aspect of American history. He shared the Bancroft Award, awarded by Columbia University each year to two authors of distinguished works in American history and diplomacy. And his book also received the Francis Parkman Prize, given by the Society of American Historians "to promote literary distinction in historical writing." Mr. Brooks will respond to questions and comments about his work on Friday, May 16, at noon, U.S. Eastern time. Advance questions are encouraged and may be posted now.

A transcript of the chat follows.

Scott McLemee (Moderator):
Welcome to this afternoon's online colloquy with James F. Brooks, the author of Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands, which over the past few months has won the three most prominent awards for history writing. It was Mr. Brooks's first book. That fact alone, though, doesn't account for how much curiousity it has generated about the author. All history may, in a sense, be regional -- but clearly some regions are considered a lot more regional than others. Only part of its impact comes from Mr. Brooks's contention that a distinct form of slavery emerged from the interaction of Spanish and Native American populations, beginning in the 16th century -- a chapter of history largely forgotten. Arguably, Mr. Brooks's analysis of slavery is only the tip of the iceberg. The history he reconstructs takes place in a landscape where ethnic groups both clashed and intermarried: a borderland where no state had much authority, where people were, in effect, making it up as they went along. Groups fused traditions and communities while "growing closer and closer apart." Somehow this merely "regional" process sounds more like the shape of things to come, worldwide, than the better-known historical events in New England or Dixie. A few questions have come in over the past few days -- some of which Mr. Brooks has already answered, with more now in front of him as he sits at his computer in Santa Fe. More are now welcome.

Question from Scott McLemee:
There wasn't room in the article to say much about the School of American Research -- though on reflection it does seem like an ideal place for someone who has written an interdisciplinary study of the borderlands. You mentioned that a very influential volume edited by James Clifford and George E. Marcus, Writing Culture: The Poetics and Politics of Ethnography, published by the University of California Press in 1986, came out of a seminar at SAR. But I'm not sure if that book's renown extends to the School itself. Would you tell us more about what SAR is, exactly? Is there anything on the horizon that will have the impact of Writing Culture -- or Captives and Cousins, for that matter?

James F. Brooks:
Indeed. Here we are on the verge of celebrating our first centenial (est. 1907), yet we remain -- at least outside of anthropological circles -- one of the better kept secrets in academia. Founded initially to promote research and publication in Southwestern archaeology, during the presidency of Douglas W. Schwartz (1967-2001) the School expanded its programs dramatically to support interdisciplinary research "on the human condition" -- past, present, and future. The Advanced Seminar program has led to field-shaping publications like Writing Culture, Basso and Feld's Senses of Place, and Ferguson and Whitehead's War in the Tribal Zone. I'm predicting (at least hoping) that our recent Remaking Life & Death: Toward an Anthropology of the Biociences, edited by Sarah Franklin and Margaret Lock, will be the Writing Culture of this decade, given the centrality of issues like organ-harvesting, bio-prospecting, and the patenting of life forms to today's world. A survey of the Resident Scholars we've hosted since the 1970s reads like a who's-who of anthropology and related disciplines. The Indian Arts Research Center is also a crucial intellectual node at the School -- hosting Native American artists through a variety of convocations and resident fellowships. With Richard M. Leventhal's appointment to the presidency in 2001, these programs are expanding with great energy -- and in both size and scope. Integral to his vision is the School's responsibility to foster even deeper cross-disciplinary conversations among academics that will reach into the public sphere, to take greater initiative in defining urgent questions for research, to make the SAR a center-place for Indigenous intellectuals and activists, and to integrate the intellectual and aesthetic work of the School into new forms that combine the social sciences and humanities. Take a look at our website: www.sarweb.org. Some have suggested I was nuts to walk away from tenure at a major public research university, but who wouldn't want to be a part of this?!

Question from Scott Sherman, Columbia Journalism Review:
What historians have influenced you the most, and why?

James F. Brooks:
What a daunting question -- any list would surely exclude some key figure who would be wounded to find her or himself omitted. My acknowledgements in Captives & Cousins will give you an idea of the vast number of important historians and anthropologists who helped to shape that book, and the text's footnotes will make clear that one cannot write a book with the geographic and temporal sweep of C&C without drawing on the work of innumerable specialists who seldom receive the recognition they deserve. But when I find I need inspiration in the art of writing history, I get it by visiting the works of Alan Taylor, John Demos, Jill Lepore, Jonathan Spence, and -- always -- Greg Dening. The smartest "borderland" study I've read recently is Mark Elliott's The Manchu Way: The Eight Banners and Ethnic Identity in Late Imperial China (2001) -- a wonderful treatment of just how people create and maintain identities amid these shifting ethnoscapes. On the philosophy of history and historiography, I very much admire (but don't entirely understand) Jacques Ranciere's The Names of History: On the Poetics of Knowledge (Eng. trans 1994). Hope that helps.

Question from Christopher Phelps, Ohio State University:
I have not been able to read the book yet, and it must be superb to have won all three of these awards, but I would like to hear a defense of the designation "slavery" to forms of captivity that mutate into kinship. Isn't it, conceptually, a bit of a stretch to amalgamate captivity and slavery, or to combine all forms of unfree labor as slaves? Should serfs be designated slaves, for example? Should indentured servants? Wouldn't the term "slavery" best be reserved for labor systems in which humans are classified as property? Switching to a scholarly frame of reference, have you encountered the powerful arguments along these lines by Joseph Inikori against the notion of "African slavery" predating the European slave trade, on the grounds that forms of captivity resulting from war in which the captives were absorbed in the end on relatively egalitarian terms into kinship structures is radically distinctive to the permanent structure of subordination and, especially, ownership characteristic of slavery?

James F. Brooks:
This is a vitally important question for debate, yet one that would probably require the 368 pages I devote to it in the book to satisfy (or not). I will say that I worked on this project for years before I came to think of it as a study in "slavery" -- and only then after I had read deeply in the literature on African slavery (which is mighty contentious, as you suggest). I finally came to believe that the creation of knowledge on the question would be better served by working with a broad definition of slavery borrowed from C. Meillassoux -- "a social system based on the exploitation of a class of producers or persons performing services, renewed mainly through acquisition [capture or purchase]" -- then sorting out and analyzing the various forms that emerged over time and across groups in the Southwest. And although I do argue in the Epilogue that SW slavery highlights the extraordinary modernity, brutality, and sophistication of the institution in the U.S. South, I cannot help but feel that those women and children captured and assimilated (not always for life -- one could often be delegitimated of kinship status and sold) did not experience their bondage as relatively egalitarian. The larger question, it seems to me, is the way that -- following the American invasion of 1847 -- new liberal notions of personhood and citizenship came to gradually grind away at not only SW slavery, but also at the associated forms of community and "belonging" (in its several meanings) that we see enacted across the centuries in the region.

Question from Robert H. Jackson, Independent Scholar:
I have not read Dr. Brooks's book, but have gotten an idea from the article in The Chronicle of Higher Education. The gist of the article is that the practice of slavery on the north Spanish frontier not only created animosity, but also closer relations. I am most familiar with Nijoras on the northern Sonora frontier, and Apache war captives. They certainly were incorporated into Spanish colonial society, although in an inferior status. Censuses and sacramental registers record the presence of the "slaves." Sonora was also subject to raiding by bandfs collectively known by the Spanish as "Apaches" during most of the 18th century, and the raiding was only moderated following concerted military action in the last decades of the century that was possible with military reform. The records from Sonora show that the "slaves" intermarried with the local indigenous population,and became an "underclass". How did this form of slavery condoned under the legal fiction of the ransoming of war captives bring the native peoples closer to the Spanish. The captives themselves and their children were brought into the Spanish world, but is there evidence that the presence of Apache war captives or Nijoras, captives from among the Colorado River groups, brought the Apache bands closer to the Spanish, or the Colorado River groups? The Spanish effort to establish settlements on the Colorado River failed with a revolt in 1781. Raids by Apaches continued under they were cowed by military action. What is interesting about the Sonora slavery is that the Spanish identified the Nijora in their records as a distinct ethnic group, or perhaps more accurately as a group perhaps akin to untouchables stigmitized by their status as war captives. The same records also distinguish between Nijora and Quechan from the Colorado River region also called Yuma by the Spanish. I am not that familiar with the Genizaros in New Mexico, other than the origin of their name. However, the fact that the Spanish used the term for a prolonged period of time shows their status in colonial New Mexico society. Comparisons with southern chattel slavery really is comparing apples and oranges, and this frontier phenomenon should be viewed within the context of practices in other parts of Spanish America.

James F. Brooks:
At last, some one working seriously on the Nijoras! I make only glancing reference to this category (status? identity? caste?) in developing my discussion of the genizaros of New Mexico, and even then only through reference to Dobyn's Southwest Journal of Anthropology (1960) article. I've long been puzzled why, given the amount of administrative exchange between Sonora and New Mexico in the 18th century, that there seems to be no cross-referencing in the documentary record? They certainly SOUND a lot like genizaros, but I wonder if their numbers were so few that they never developed the communities (or the ability to take political/military/legal action in defense of those communities) that we see in New Mexico. The irony in the genizaro case lies in the fact that just when they seem to have been developing enough influence to actually rework their status in the colony (1780-1810) the political ideology and disruptions of Mexican independence undercut their ability to claim a discrete identity. I do think that the record shows how genizaros worked to stitch the colony into wider economic relations with more distant indios gentiles...whether that holds true for the Nijoras will be seen when Dr. Jackson publishes this important research.

As to the apples and oranges question -- I endorse whole-heartedly the need for comparisons of slave systems across the Spanish American world, but also feel I learned a good deal about chattel slavery in the US South by working on the very different varieties of slavery found in the SW borderlands. Sometimes those dramatic differences or incongruities within a field of forced "sameness" (like the intellectual function of metaphor) provoke the most useful insights. Finally, I hope that C&C makes a pretty convincing case that SW slavery and US chattel slavery were in fairly constant dialogue after 1824 (when Americans began slipping slavery into Texas beneath the Mexican colonization laws) -- and that the Civil War as a "war against slavery" continued in the Southwest well after 1865.

Scott McLemee (Moderator):
Well, that was a monographic query -- with a suitably monographic reply. Most of the questions that have come in are a lot less specialized. We have time and room enough for more, so here's an invitation to readers to send them in.

Scott McLemee (Moderator):
This next question reflects one of the interesting implications spinning off from Mr. Brooks's work -- the idea that borderlands and hybrid cultures are, in effect, a global norm, not just an aspect of the American Southwest.

Question from Prof. Dr. J.H. Olila, Concordia International University Estonia:
Would you be willing to look at the Baltics with some of us here? The collapse of empires creates many borderlands with groups suddenly discovering their cultural neighbors sharing the same public spheres in new, ever-shifting constellations. For example, which Russian, Miami, or Latvian 'mafia' today is tomorrow's 'top dog'? And most difficult, 'top dog' of what? What is 'Estonia'? Are you 'Estonian' or 'Russian'? Are there Belgians?

James F. Brooks:
I would be delighted to do so, but only with a great deal of guidance! In truth, the very "extendability" of many of the questions in Captives & Cousins drove me to develop my current book project, Nations, Tribes, and Colours, wherein I ask similar questions across nineteenth century borderlands in Western Canada, the Argentine Pampas, Southern Africa, and the "Russian" Caucasus. You can get a taste of where I'm going with this project by looking at my essay "Life Proceeds from the Name: Indigenous Peoples and the Predicament of Hybridity" in Nancy Shoemaker's recent volume, Clearing a Path: Theorizing the Past in Native American Studies (2002). Just tell me when I should arrive!

Scott McLemee (Moderator):
A fine memorable exchange in the history of academic journalism: not only do we report on international scholarly exchange, we make it happen. Has anyone out there read Mr. Brooks's work? Aside from questions for the author, we welcome comments.

Question from Scott McLemee:
Besides writing Captives and Cousins, you've also edited a collection of essays, Confounding the Color Line: The Indian-Black Experience in America, published last year by the University of Nebraska Press. How do you understand the relation between that topic and your work on the Southwestern slave system?

James F. Brooks:
Confounding the Color Line was very much a labor of love -- born of the oral histories I collected with Euterpe Taylor (matriarch of the "Black Utes" of Colorado) and driven by my sense that there were a great group of (largely) junior scholars working on relationships between Indians and African-Americans who needed to have their research in print. This sense was concretized at one of the most exciting conferences I've ever attended -- the "Eating out of the Same Pot: Relating Black and Native Histories" hosted at Dartmouth in April 2000. The energy, excitement, and pain that swirled around that conference reminded me what history is all about -- people making sense of themselves through the force and vagaries of memory. For me, one of the central continuing questions in CTCL is how "mixed" peoples struggle to create a sense of "groupness" while simultaneously producing internal senses of difference, all the while situated in contexts that want to "group" them and "differentiate" them in the interests of dominant society. It's a question that remains, I think, an unresolved element in Captives & Cousins, to be entirely honest!

Question from Scott McLemee:
Were you worried about how your descriptions of American Indian slave practices could reinforce certain stereotypes about Indians? What reactions have you received from American Indians?

James F. Brooks:
I have worried that certain unsympathetic readers who are looking for reasons to denegrate contemporary Indian culture and sovereignty claims might seize upon elements of the book to argue that Indian peoples in the SW "were no better than" the Euroamerican colonizers in the region, or that the "mixedness" of peoples I describe in the book erodes the legitimacy of Tribal claims to discrete rights under federal treaty obligations -- I even felt compelled to give a paper at the Conference on Latin American History this past January on the topic, and will offer it again at the 51st International Congress of Americanists in Santiago, Chile, this coming July. I argue that we need to be very careful about making extensions across time without looking at the bigger picture of decimation and dispossesion of Indigenous peoples in the Americas -- and that culture, rather than biology, should be the key test of Indianness, and then always at the discretion of Indigenous peoples themselves. In terms of Indian response -- in the Fall of 2001 Dr. Jennifer Denetdale , then-president of the Navajo Studies Assocation, invited me to speak the the Navajo Studies Conference in Flagstaff, AZ. I gave a talk that compared Navajo and Araucanian slave systems in the 19th century, distinguishing between levels of integration in livestock economies and relationships with formative states. Several younger Navajo intellectuals took real exception to my charaterizations -- but at the same time, a group of Navajo grandmothers sitting in the front row said came to my defense, saying (roughly) "no, no, this is important, and we need to talk about this with you." Thus, even within a single community there can be many responses, and I just hope that the internal discussions that do take place are healing, rather than destructive. When I finished writing this book -- and in the broadest terms -- my heart broke for nearly all the peoples whose lives I treated therein. They were people trying to keep their families and communities together under often terrible circumstances, and did so, in part, through resort to things we consider deserving of condemnation. But are we very different today?

Question from Reader:
Are there key differences in the slave experience in the American Southwest and in Latin America? Do these differences shape the identity of people in those areas?

James F. Brooks:
This is just too big a question to handle well -- I hope that C&C will serve as a touchstone that Latin Americanists can use to compare the tremendous variety of slave system in their regions productively.

Question from Scott Jaschik, The Chronicle of Higher Education:
In discussing the history of African-Americans, it would be impossible not to talk about slavery. But this hasn't been the case for American Indians or Latinos. What impact do you think it will have on broader public discussion and research on these groups to have slavery viewed as a more central element in their history?

James F. Brooks:
I will be very interested to see if the stories in C&C begin to influence discussion around reparations for slavery -- which, strangely, began as an Africanist initiative and has now been largely domesticated as a US racial politics debate. I'm also interested to see if the emphasis on kinship in C&C is picked up and worked with in the US South -- like Ball does with Slaves In The Family. Is there a deeper kinship in the South than is evident in public memory, but talked about in private family memories?

Question from Jay Gaspar, Brenau University:
There's a line in the article suggesting that the slave system continues beyond 1865 in the southwest. Can you tell us a bit more about how the system continues? Thanks.

James F. Brooks:
Well into the 1870s American authorities (like Oliver O. Howard) were in the SW trying to get both Navajos and New Mexicans to repatriate their slaves. Our New Mexico state historian, Estevan Rael-Galvez, picked up this question in his Ph.D. dissertation (Michigan 2002) and followed the lives of slaves well into the 20th century. They show up in the WPA oral histories collected in the San Luis valley in the 1930s. I've interviewed Hispano families who (often uncomfortably) recall an Indian "Tia" or Tio" who lived with and worked for the family. On the other side, Louisa Wetherill, a white trader, inherited more than 30 "Ute slaves" from her adoptive Navajo grandfather in 1909.

Question from Martin Klein, University of Toronto:
Was enslavement common in the southwest before the coming of the Spanish and did it contribute to political change??

James F. Brooks:
Never to the extent that it was after colonization, but there is growing evidence -- although spotty -- that captures of women and children may have been more than merely opportunistic "snatches" (to use Meillassoux's term.) Debra Martin has done osteological work on an assemblage of bodies from an archaeological site in the La Plata valley (c. 1100-1200 AD) that seems to show a group of women who suffered very hard work and physical abuse during their lifetimes, and died well before others in the community. And this in an environment that was at its very best during the time in question -- she wonders if these were not enslaved war captives....The ubiquity of capture-and-assimilation (sometimes sacrifice) stories in origin narratives across Native America suggests that such patterns were not unusual.

Question from Scott McLemee:
One striking quality of your writing is that you've put history and anthropology together in a way that seems to work. There's a kind of texture to the writing that seems a lot closer to enthnography than most historical writing. (The footnotes reveal the archival digging, but the narrative itself somehow calls to mind "Notes on the Balinese Cockfight," minus the first-person element.) But when we met in Santa Fe, you expressed some reservations about how eager non-anthropologists are to announce that they are practicing ethnography. Given that your work at SAR Press makes you a full-time resident of the interdisciplinary borderlands, do you have any thoughts on how academic exchange ought to take shape? If there isn't a "central government" of scholarly authority to keep things in order, how do you keep from having everybody "doing ethnography"--even if all that means is that they own a tape recorder?

James F. Brooks:
Since Clifford Geertz is one of my models for graceful writing, and has perhaps the most distinctive analytical voice in anthropology, I take this as an extraordinary compliment. But beyond reiterating what I've said about the SAR in another response, I think I agree with Ian Hodder that the academy could use a good deal more "cacophony" than it has today --we should all be borrowing as much as possible from each other and creating a lot of noise -- harmony may emerge only after a good deal of discordance. One big concern I have is that while "Area Studies" have done a lot to push interdisciplinarity, it seems to me that we have moved toward a common language by thinning and lightening the intellectual rigor of the scholarly production. That only loses us adherents.

Question from Catherine Cocks, SAR Press:
So if the questions historians ask are boring, as you said in your Chronicle interview, why did you decide to become a historian? And what do historians need to do to make their questions more interesting?

James F. Brooks:
Perhaps I should ask "why did a fine historian such as yourself, Catherine, who asks quite interesting questions, agree to become the Executive Editor of an anthropologically-oriented publishing house?" And perhaps the answers would be quite similar -- sheer contingency. In truth, when I returned to finish my BA at Colorado in 1987, I thought I would become an archaeologist! Or a high school history teacher in Cuba, New Mexico. I've never been able to make up my mind which appeals to me more -- the archival detective work and freedom to write forceful narratives that the historian enjoys, or the right to ask big, abstract questions of empirical material that anthropologists hold dear. I've often said to my students that "historians are just anthropologists who don't like to talk to people, and anthropologists are just historians who don't like to read". If one can do both, one should try to be both.

Question from Missy Daniel, PBS, Washington, D.C.:
Can you pick up where the story in the Chronicle ends and say more about your work in progress and how the 21st century looks? What do you foresee? What might a 21st century version of the 19th century be like?

James F. Brooks:
Without going on forever, the premise behind Nations, Tribes, and Colours is that globalization -- while creating huge and frightening supra-states and economies -- has also reinvigorated local peoples and spurred increasingly complex migrations that result in "plural" societies who must negotiate daily life with each other fairly free of state moderation or control. This is pretty much what happened in the 19th century borderlands I'm using as the basis for the new book. Gender, as I argue in C&C, will be a central node of those negotiations, often in the most terrible ways, but occasionally in ways that may prove emancipatory. I'm hoping that inights gained from those cases might provide -- with absurd immodesty -- "a history for the twenty-first century."

Question from Emily Uzendoski, English Department, a small community college:
In the April 21&28 issue of The New Yorker magazine, under Annals of Labor, John Bowe's article, "Nobodies: Slavery in South Floride," describes and discusses modern forms of slavery. Question: Your research and Bowe's research suggest that we educators teach a limited perspective of slavery, thus leaving our students dismissive and ill-informed of the forms (mutations) of slavery. Are you going to connect your research to present practices of slavery in the U.S?

James F. Brooks:
I don't plan to make those connections, but I too took quick note of Bowe's article and thought that we need to somehow encourage a discussion about how slavery did not, in fact, disappear during the last decades of the 19th century. I've completely blanked on the author and the book, but there appeared about 3 years ago a treatment of the "New Slavery" in global terms. I am currently trying to put together a series of symposia on "The Many Slaveries of North America" that will pull together important young historians working on Indian slavery in Texas, Louisiana, and French Canada -- like Juliana Barr, Brett Rushforth, and Elizabeth Demers -- with anthropologists who have treated slavery among Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest and historians of chattel slavery in the British colonies (Ira Berlin is collaborating on this) to come up with new approaches to teaching the issue in High Schools and Universities. Just keep in touch!

Scott McLemee (Moderator):
Mr. Brooks has been discoursing at what must be a fairly brutal pace. So we may have a few minutes of "dead air" here as he catches up with the queue of incoming questions. I might as well step in for a bit to comment on an arresting moment while reading Captives and Cousins -- the pages describing how, in the 1500s the Spanish named purchased an Indian slave and named him "The Turk." Presumably he looked somewhat Middle Eastern to them; that is, he was like the Muslim captives they knew "back home." It is hard to express just how uncanny a moment that is -- an instant when you see terms like "globalization" or "multiculturalism" anew, in a historical context that goes much deeper than anything in the morning newspaper.

Question from Reed Anderson Miami University Oxford, OH:
In the 17th century "borderlands" area, the Franciscans and later the Jesuits used various kinds of "obligation" to exact work from indigenous people. I realize that the extent to which that was "slavery" in any true sense of the word is still a matter of debate. But where, within the panorama you develop in your book, do the missionary labor systems fit ?

James F. Brooks:
I'm not sure that the Franciscan and Jesuit levy systems would fall under the definition of slavery I offered earlier, but we certainly need renewed attention to just how those labor systems worked. The whole pre-revolt (1598-1680) period in the SW needs concentrated attention, since there is all sorts of contradictory evidence emerging from archaeological studies of the Missions that points to how little we know about relationships between missionaries and "their" Indians. Kate Speilmann's project at Quarai, Abo, and Gran Quivira (which I heard some papers from at the recent Society for American Archaeology meetings) suggests very diverse responses from with Indian communities -- pro-Franciscan factions, anti-Spanish nativists, accommodationists, etc. Jake Ivey has raised a bunch of important issues with his work on "Convento Kivas" and the mysteries at San Marcos. Let me know if you need citations!

Question from Tracy Brown, Autry Museum of Western Heritage:
I'm wondering about how ethnicity might have empowered women on the borderlands. In your book, you discuss the life of Juana la Coyota, a woman of mixed Indian-Spanish descent who lived at Zia pueblo. She was quite powerful within Zia society (I know the case from my own research), despite the fact that she had a long-standing liason with a married man. You also discuss her half-sister Juana Hurtado, also a coyota, who apparently had numerous children by different Spanish fathers but never really suffered any stigma for doing so. I have not come across a Pueblo woman with similar standing (as Juana la coyota, for example), and wonder what role (if any) the ethnicity of the two Juanas played in their being able to live somewhat outside traditional gender norms.

James F. Brooks:
Hi, Tracy -- great question. The mixed identities of the "two Juanas" certainly positioned them as "liminal" in Spanish colonial and Pueblo (and Navajo) society, and probably allowed them a somewhat larger field of maneuver. But I caution too that liminality cuts both ways -- it can create new spaces for agency, but also yields virtually no protection when things go wrong (no community or family to come to your aid). As to Pueblo women with strong roles in inter-ethnic negotation -- I've been hoping someone would do a Naranjo (Tewa) family history someday, from Pedro's role in the 1680 revolt to today's extraordinary group of women artists and educators. My colleague here at the SAR, (and coordinator of our Native American Heritage Program) Dolly Naranjo-Neikrug, is but one of a long line of astonishinglt gifted women.

Comment from T. Rasul Murray, Cross Posts Information Exchange:
While I welcome your work in this area, I am somewht concerned that your acceptance of the broader definition of slavery lends undue weight to the arguments of African complicity in the enslavement of African people by obscuring the different understandings of European enslavement among Africans (who viewed the process through their experience) and that of the Europeans.

Scott McLemee (Moderator):
The question of whether Mr. Brooks's work might not have implications for the Atlantic slave trade is an interesting one. But from interviewing him and reading his work, I'd say that the tendency of his analysis is, if anything, to underscore how distinct (how violently different) the Atllantic trade was from other forms of slavery.

Question from Kerry Block:
I am very curious to hear your perspective as to the way history is currently being researched, reviewed, and written about. How have your background, life experiences, and training, influenced the way you approach the study of history and the way you write about it and what concerns you most about the way history is being taught in our present day educational system?

James F. Brooks:
AGH! Too big! In the most general terms, I worry that historians -- through the specialization that make our knowledge "a mile deep and an inch wide" (just saw this in the latest Perspectives last night) -- have lost our readership. We need to think deeply but write broadly....

Scott McLemee (Moderator):
That sounds like a good note on which to end. The discussion has been an index of how many interesting topics this work touches and implies. Thanks to James F. Brooks for appearing today , and to everyone who wrote in with questions for him, as well as to the New Media team here at the Chronicle for arranging this afternoon's colloquy.