PanThe New York Review of BooksThe story of Native American enslavement told by Reséndez becomes confused by the convoluted interplay of indigenous and imported systems of human servitude. Despite his claim of uncovering 'the other slavery,' when speaking of the forms of bondage imposed on Indians he fails to acknowledge that there was no monolithic institution akin to the 'peculiar' transatlantic one that would become identified with the American South, which imported Africans auctioned as commodities ... If Reséndez is claiming to encompass the full tragedy of Indian slavery 'across North America,' he does not distinguish among the different colonial systems of Indian servitude that existed under English, French, and Dutch regime ... Reséndez argues for continuities in this inhuman traffic right down to the present day. But his abrupt transition to the present after the defeat of the Comanches only reinforces our sense that his effort has been overly ambitious and weakly conceived.
