Monday, March 10, 2014

"The Comanche Empire" by Pekka Hämäläinen

I started reading Pekka Hämäläinen's book, "The Comanche Empire" to gain some insight on the Comanche's interactions with the Pueblos and the Apache. The Pueblos of Gran Quivira had been annihilated by the Apache in the 1660's, but in the 1760's, a century later, the valleys in the same highlands southeast of Albuquerque were thronged with Apache refugees trying desperately to escape the Comanche. Hämäläinen's book had little to say about this turn of events. Nevertheless, I got sucked into this revisionist Western history that maintains the rise of the Comanche should be understood in imperial terms. The Comanche dominion was a Native American empire that reduced its neighbors into dependency, including Spanish New Mexico (which came perilously close to annihilation in the 1760's, and was eventually saved by the diplomatic overtures of Governor Tomás Vélez de Cachupín (1762-1767; who emerges in Hämäläinen's telling as a real statesman, but severely overmatched by inadequate resources) and Governor Juan Bautista de Anza (1778-1788), who established a very productive détente with the Comanche in 1786. (Spanish Governor link).

I'm now very curious to the extent the détente with the Comanche affected relations with the Navajo. Did the Diné ‘Ana’í want to adopt the same kind of enviable relations the Comanche had with the Spanish?

It's an important to remember that the Comanche rarely numbered more than 40,000 people over a vast region. Population density was vapor thin, even considering other tribes and the European colonists. In addition, the Comanche never developed a bureaucracy. Is it reasonable to assert that an assertive Empire exists when there are hardly any people there? I think in this case, there is. Comanche adoption of horse culture allowed them to remain in surprisingly-close contact over their huge dominion. Unlike the more-atomistic Navajo, the Comanche had few internal subdivisions. In the early years, there were only three major subdivisions in the tribe: Yamparikas, Kotsotekas, and Jupes. The Comanche had come exploding out of the Sangre de Cristo Mountains onto the Plains in the early years of the 18th-Century, and all had a common memory and inheritance. And they discussed important matters frequently and adopted common policies and practices.

The Comanche enslaved many Mexicans and adopted them into the tribe. What surprised me was learning the extent to which the Genízaro communities of New Mexico started defecting away from the Spanish and began adopting Comanche ways, particularly the Genízaros from the communities of the Pecos River south of Las Vegas (precisely where my branch of the Valdez family originated). Genízaros in time became Chicanos. The town of San Miguel del Vado apparently started as a ghetto in the vicinity of San Miguel Church in Santa Fe, from where they were cleaned out and resettled on the frontier in 1793.

According to Wikipedia:
Genízaro is a Spanish word that evolved from the English word janissary, which was adapted from the Ottoman Turkish word yeniçeri. This referred to slaves who were trained as soldiers for the Ottoman Empire. In New Mexico, the term Genízaro was used to describe Native American slaves and servants. It also was used to describe many Pueblo Indians who were living in the Spanish settlements such as Santa Fe, Albuquerque, and Belen.

Beginning in 1692 Young Indian captives were sold into slavery in New Mexico. Many of the captives complained of mistreatment and were settled in land grants on the periphery of Spanish settlements according to a policy established by the Governors. These settlements became buffer communities for larger Spanish towns in the event of attack by enemy tribes surrounding the province.

...The settlements of Tomé and Belén, just south of Albuquerque, were described by Juan Agustin Morfi as follows in 1778:
"In all the Spanish towns of New Mexico there exists a class of Indians called genizaros. These are made up of captive Comanches, Apaches, etc. who were taken as youngsters and raised among us, and who have married in the province…They are forced to live among the Spaniards, without lands or other means to subsist except the bow and arrow which serves them when they go into the back country to hunt deer for food… They are fine soldiers, very warlike… Expecting the genizaros to work for daily wages is a folly because of the abuses they have experienced, especially from the alcaldes mayores in the past… In two places, Belen and Tome, some sixty families of genizaros have congregated."
Most Genízaros were Navajo, Pawnee, Apache, Kiowa Apache, Ute, Comanche, and Paiute who had been purchased at a young age and worked as domestic servants and sheepherders. Throughout the Spanish and Mexican period, Genízaros settled in several New Mexican villages such as Belén, Tomé, Valencia, Carnué, Los Lentes, Socorro, and San Miguel del Vado. Genízaros also lived in Albuquerque, Atrisco, Santa Fe, Chimayó, Taos, Abiquiú and Las Vegas.

By the mid-18th century, the Comanche dominated the weaker tribes in the eastern plains and sold kidnapped captives from these tribes to Spanish villagers. By the Mexican and early American period (1821–1880), almost all of the Genízaros were of Navajo ancestry. During negotiations with the United States military, Navajo spokesmen raised the issue of Navajos being held as servants in Spanish/Mexican households. When asked how many Navajos were among the Mexicans, they responded: "over half the tribe." Most of the captives never returned to the Navajo nation but remained as the lower classes in the Hispanic villages. Members of different tribes intermarried in these communities.

Today their descendants comprise much of the population of Atrisco, Pajarito, and Los Padillas in the South Valley of Albuquerque, and significant portions of the population of Las Vegas in Eastern New Mexico.
It would not be surprising if my Valdez forebears had been Navajos enslaved by the Comanche, sold to the Spanish, and eventually resettled by the Spanish on the Comanche frontier. Alternatively, they could have been traders (comancheros) or buffalo hunters (ciboleros), or even have had Comanche blood.

Western writer Larry McMurtry is skeptical of Hämäläinen's argument, but liked all the new information.
In his view there was a Comanche empire, a point he presses in nearly four hundred pages. His (to me) startling introduction, called “Reversed Colonialism,” makes the largest claims I’ve ever seen made for Comanche power. As a son of the Comancheria myself, they took me aback, which of course doesn’t mean that they’re wrong.

Here are samples of these claims, accelerating as the professor warms to his subject:
In the Southwest, European imperialism not only stalled in the face of indigenous resistance, it was eclipsed by indigenous imperialism.
And then:
For a century, roughly from 1750 to 1850, the Comanches were the dominant people in the Southwest…. To cope with the opportunities and challenges of their rapid expansion, Comanches created a centralized multilevel political system, a flourishing market economy, and a graded social organization that was flexible enough to sustain and survive the burdens of their external ambitions.
Blink a time or two and the reader might forget that the book at hand is about Comanches, rather than Microsoft.

And there’s more:
Comanches achieved something quite exceptional: they built an imperial organization that subdued, marginalized, co-opted, and profoundly transformed near and distant colonial outposts, thereby reversing the conventional imperial trajectory in vast segments of North and Central America.
That was the slider, here’s the fastball:
Comanches, moreover, did that during the eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, the high tide of imperial contestation when colonial powers jostled for preeminence across North America. The colonial Southwest was a setting for several dynamic and diverging imperial projects that converged and clashed in unexpected ways. As Spanish, French, British, and US empires vied with one another over land, commerce, and raw materials, Comanches continued to expand their realm, profoundly frustrating European fantasies of superiority.

The result was a colonial history that defies conventional wisdom. A long-standing notion has it that the course and contours of early American history were determined by the shifts in Euro-American power dynamics and the reactions of metropolitan headquarters in Madrid, London, Versailles, Mexico City, and Washington to those shifts. The Southwest, however, is a striking exception. Metropolitan visions mattered there, but they often mattered less than the policies and designs of Comanches, whose dominance eventually reached hemispheric dimensions, extending from the heart of North America deep into Mexico.

Indeed, Comanche ascendancy is the missing component in the sweeping historical sequence that led to New Spain’s failure to colonize the interior of North America, the erosion of Spanish imperial authority in the Southwest, and the precipitous decay of Mexican power in the north. Ultimately, the rise of the Comanche empire helps explain why Mexico’s Far North is today the American Southwest.
And yet Professor Hämäläinen immediately goes on to say that the Comanches
never attempted to build a European-style imperial system. A creation of itinerant nomadic bands, the Comanche empire was not a rigid structure held together by a single central authority, nor was it an entity that could be displayed on a map, a solid block with clear cut borders.
All these statements seem to me to represent conclusions, and I might have been less inclined to question them if I’d read them at the end of Professor Hämäläinen’s almost four hundred pages of text. As it is, questions pile up: How can the Comanche empire be centralized and multilevel on one page while lacking a central authority on the next? Where, by the way, is the heart of North America—I was thinking it was somewhere around Iowa City. Were there Comanches in Oaxaca, marking off “hemispheric dimensions”? And as a personal quirk, perhaps, I’d have to say that I hope for a little metropolitanism with my empires; at least some excellent architecture gets left behind, as in Mexico City, Cuzco, Tikal, and the Temple of the Sun, just to consider the New World. The Anasazi people didn’t have an empire, just a society, but they did leave us Chaco Canyon and Mesa Verde. The Comanches by contrast lived in disposable dwellings and left no architecture.

...I agree that Comanches were vigorous opportunists, who made the most of the weakness of colonial Spain, and France, and the fledgling Texans, when they came. But is this an empire? Or, conversely I suppose, why not call it an empire? The Comanches certainly did keep the Southwest boiling with conflict from the moment they appeared in the early eighteenth century to their defeat in the Texas panhandle in the 1870s. Certainly they vexed, fought with, defeated, or exploited virtually everyone they came in contact with. They early mastered the horse, which, both here and elsewhere, Professor Hämäläinen has argued was ultimately a mixed blessing, the fragility of the Plains ecosystem being what we now know it to be.

I supposed I just have a linearist’s preference for empires that can be displayed on a map, as they expand and shrink. The Comanches had many spheres of influence (that good old Paris Peace Conference term) and enjoyed supremacy in one place or another at given times. They were quick to exploit trade routes, exacting a kind of toll for traders along the Santa Fe Trail as soon as there was a Santa Fe Trail. And they invariably showed up at the big trade fairs in Taos and elsewhere—such fairs were the vivid predecessors of our own swap meets.

The Comanches spent fifty years successfully pushing the eastern Apaches west, but they didn’t eliminate the Apaches as a force to be reckoned with in the Southwest. Geronimo stayed out of US hands a decade longer than Quanah Parker and proved very aggravating to General George Crook, the American commander in many of the Indian wars.

Professor Hämäläinen is at his best when he traces the myriad Comanche trade patterns. The Comanches traded energetically with anyone who had anything they wanted, a practice particularly vexing to the Spanish:
The Americans, however, did not come as conquerors carrying guns, but as merchants carrying goods and gifts, and eastern Comanches eagerly embraced them as potential trading partners. The Comanches simply viewed the linkage between presents and politics differently from the Spanish. Gifts, Bourbon administrators argued, were contractual bonds that created a political bond, an exclusive bilateral union, whereas for Comanches the meaning of gifts was primarily of a social nature. Bourbon officials insisted that gifts should forbid Comanches from trading with foreign nations, but this was a narrow interpretation of loyalty and friendship that did not easily translate into the Comanches’ world view….
It certainly didn’t. One band of Comanches might be trading amicably in San Antonio while others were aggressively raiding in northern Mexico, taking slaves and horses that they would eventually trade.

The Comanches called themselves Nermernuh, or the People. T.H. Fehrenbach, whose Comanches: The Destruction of a People (1974) is still useful, mentions that one reason Comanche social organization has been little studied is because it was so loose as to barely make a Comanche society. They were patrilineal and saw that the incest taboo was strictly observed, but they lived short, hard lives and were so frequently on the move that they had no time to make pots or weave blankets. They lived in bands but were gregarious and felt free to change bands if they felt the urge. Decisions about where to trade or when to move camp were usually arrived at by consensus.

Professor Hämäläinen points out that once horse herds became a major source of capital, some tensions between Comanches as pastoralists and Comanches as hunter-gatherers developed, the two activities requiring somewhat different rhythms. Human history has taught us that no matter how abundant a natural resource—fish, grass, buffalo—may be, the human species is capable of rapidly laying it waste. Thousands of horses and millions of buffalo ate the rich grasses of the Great Plains near to depletion; the south Texas cattlemen who arrived with their herds in the 1870s were annoyed to find the plains already overgrazed.

...Although I mainly disagree with Professor Hämäläinen’s thesis, I nonetheless found his book to be immensely informative, particularly about activities in the eighteenth century. Also I discovered that a whole new discipline in the aggressive empire of revisionist western studies had somehow slipped under my radar: frontier-and-borderland studies. Gary Clayton Anderson’s book The Conquest of Texas, which I mentioned earlier, may belong in this field. It has much to say about the Indians and the Mexicans being unimpressed by US claims that they must stay within borders. Invariably, they didn’t. The Comanches particularly must have found the notion of borders they were supposed to stay within weird at best.

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