It is not often that a single work of history can change the course of an entire field and upset the received notions and received knowledge of the generations but that is exactly what The Other Slavery does ... This book is, arguably, one of the most profound contributions to North American history published since Patricia Nelson Limerick’s Legacy of Conquest and Richard White’s The Middle Ground. But it’s not necessary to be into history to understand its power: Our world is still the world Reséndez so eloquently anatomizes.
The Other Slavery is a necessary work that occupies a loaded historical landscape; Reséndez keeps a deliberate scholarly distance from the material, bringing forth evidence and constructing careful — even conservative — arguments. But that evidence speaks for itself, and the horrors quietly pile up ... The Other Slavery's understated just-the-facts reportage will likely surprise you. It's a study in the abuse of power that lays bare a shameful history, and suggests a clear, chilling line to our present. Everybody's guilty, and while The Other Slavery isn't a call to action, it makes an intellectual and emotional demand of its readers.
What Reséndez illustrates most poignantly is how Indian slavers were able for four centuries to slip under the law, oftentimes by amending laws prohibiting slavery to suit their purposes ... No other book before has so thoroughly related the broad history of Indian slavery in the Americas, and not just its facts but the very reason it has been overlooked.
The 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.
Reséndez is adept at untangling the intertribal slave trade, as well as the pernicious behavior of white settlers in northern California. Reséndez closes his smart, maddening account with the end of the Indian wars but leaves wide open the nature of the current Indian reservation system. How many of us understand the workings or consequences of that institution? By any other name - in the sex trade, on Florida's tomato farms, in Thailand's seafood-export industry, everywhere - slavery endures.
