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

by James F. Brooks

This sweeping, richly evocative study examines the origins and legacies of a flourishing captive exchange economy within and among native American and Euramerican communities throughout the Southwest Borderlands from the Spanish colonial era to the end of the nineteenth century.

Indigenous and colonial traditions of capture, servitude, and kinship met and meshed in the borderlands, forming a "slave system" in which victims symbolized social wealth, performed services for their masters, and produced material goods under the threat of violence. Slave and livestock raiding and trading among Apaches, Comanches, Kiowas, Navajos, Utes, and Spaniards provided labor resources, redistributed wealth, and fostered kin connections that integrated disparate and antagonistic groups even as these practices renewed cycles of violence and warfare.

Always attentive to the corrosive effects of the "slave trade" on Indian and colonial societies, the book also explores slavery's centrality in intercultural trade, alliances, and "communities of interest" among groups often antagonistic to Spanish, Mexican, and American modernizing strategies. The extension of the moral and military campaigns of the American Civil War to the Southwest in a regional "war against slavery" brought differing forms of social stability but cost local communities much of their economic vitality and cultural flexibility.

Genres: History, Nonfiction, American History, Native American History, Anthropology, Native American, Indigenous

416 pages, Paperback

First published May 14, 2002

Reviews

[Ess Kay · Rating 4 out of 5]

James E. Brooks explores geographic and economic determinism as it plays out in three distinct areas of the southwestern borderlands: plains, pasture and mountain. Each area of interaction between the Spanish and indigenous populations utilized the exchange of women and children to shore up labor need and in the process created a complicated web of kinship between communities. For Brooks, “[n]ative and European men fought to protect their communities and preserve personal repute yet participated in conflicts and practices that made the objects of their honor, women and children, crucial products of violent economic exchange” (3). That exchange would create an often complicated relationship between and within the societies intermingling. Brooks charts the changing nature of the relationship between unfree labor and kinship as bordering communities continued to intermingle culturally and genetically, creating complicated relationships that no longer tied into a caste system, nor could be relegated outside of it. Captives became the unifying, if paradoxical, force behind frontier societies, and a necessary redistribution of labor, goods and genetic variation.

Brooks provides a nuanced examination of the political, economic and social blending that was made possible through this redistribution of labor. Not only were kinship ties expanded, but so were lines of communication, which enlarged trade networks throughout the southwest. Coerced labor went beyond the black/white division of the southeast, creating the vehicle by which conflict and reconciliation would play out between the Navajos, Comanches, Kiowas, Apaches, Utes, Pueblos, and New Mexico colonists. This social interaction would have been impossible had the Iberians and the Indians not had a similar convention of shame and honor predicated upon the ability to both protect and control their familial units, sharing "a particular resonance between indigenous and European notions of honor and shame, of male violence and exchange imperatives" (9). Brooks suggests, and makes great effort to substantiate, that without the underlying scaffolding of this code of honor, kinship groups would not have developed between societies and slavery in the southwest would have been more akin to that of the southeast; rather than a community building enterprise it would have simply been labor exploitation. Gender and class inequality was exacerbated by this redistribution, but the southwest did not develop the racial divide that the southeast did. The honor code was necessary as they "negotiated interdependency and maintained honor by acknowledging the exchangeability of their women and children" (40).

This theory seems to hold until the nineteenth century, when additional consumer markets in the expanding United States required exponential increase of labor and redistribution of unfree labor. This issue was exacerbated by small pox epidemics in some tribes, which further escalated the need for captive taking in order to shore up population numbers in addition to the increase for labor. It is at this juncture in Brooks’ exploration that the honor code upon which this exchange hinged is eclipsed by economic need. There are still opportunities for the “other” to be assimilated into the group, but greater violence and abuse of the captured labor force begins to enter Brooks’ narrative. Whether this is simply a result of the scale increasing or a per capita increase in violence is hard to determine. The kinship ties that once connected markets and communities seem to disappear and are replaced by exploitation of skills, be it language or craft, as a central determining factor of assimilation opportunity. The complex social world was beginning to come undone as it tried to take advantage of emerging commercial markets and navigate between political states, further exacerbating gender inequality among the captured and increasing bloodshed, “especially if Mexico or the United States attempted to subsume them within state-regulated markets and political authority” (257). As Brooks eloquently states, “in subduing the pastoral borderlands, the American and Mexican states sundered long-term connections of kinship and community and superimposed new, 'state-sponsored' ethnic identities upon a complex mélange" (368).

Brooks’ scholarship is immense, encapsulating ecclesiastical records, folk lore, statistical evidence, legal documentation, linguistics, ethnography and anthropology. His narrative style brings his subject into easy focus, balancing the scholarship with the story. His recounting of ceremony is both elucidating and moving. What he teases out of these documents to support his thesis is an amazing reexamination of a societal practice that is generally overshadowed by the Mission system abuses and genocide. He challenges us to see beyond the looming shadow of atrocity and casts light on the interconnectivity of the cultures and peoples of the southwest. He pushes the dialog beyond one of Indian adaptation for survival into one where they have a decisive hand in the shaping of their evolving world by pushing the boundaries of identity and kinship into new, complex relationships that go beyond stratification, creating the melting pot that America strives to be. Even if it starts with Spanish interaction rather than the preferred British one that dominates the American scholastic institution.

Brooks eloquently and systematically breaks down the historic convention that proposed New Mexico colonials and indigenous populations existed in two culturally separate spheres, coming into limited, primarily violent contact. The interconnectivity, "that knitted diverse peoples in a social fabric at once intimate and distant" is fascinating, and surely must have played out in other borderland communities (103). Brooks challenges us to go beyond the façade of violence, beyond the easy binary of colonized and colonial and to see the complicated array of possibilities that change creates. It is an important reexamination of borderlands history and the history of slavery in New Mexico that entices historians to expand the scope beyond New Mexico and reassess the relationships between colonials throughout Latin America.

[Michael · Rating 3 out of 5]

Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands by James F. Brooks tackles the cultural exchange that took place on the frontiers of European influence in North America. Brooks argues that the communities on these borderlands established this exchange ostensibly to navigate cohabitation, while simultaneously asserting the power of the men within these communities. He describes the world they created as “a mutually recognizable world of violence and retribution, of loss and redemption that drew the protagonists together while forcing them apart.” (40) This new approach adds gender as a primary factor in the dealings between borderland cultures, especially in Brooks’ understanding of the development of kinship through intermarriage. Through conquest marriages, slavery and kidnapping women are converted to interchangeable commodities like livestock. Brooks argues that the violent nature of the borderland subsistence was mediated by and at the expense of women. (26)
Brooks’ stated purpose is to cast “shadows across a tenaciously sunny romanticism” characteristic of the popular conceptions of the relationship between indigenous cultures and Europeans. (365) In doing this Brooks re-evaluates the previously accepted model of assimilation that took place in this region, comparing it to the Moors and Spaniards in the Iberian peninsula as well as the relations between other tribes in the South West. Brooks paints a picture wherein survival, both corporeal and cultural, created a system of human trafficking that lead to mixed communities; specifically by slaves being adopted into the master culture.
Brooks begins his book with an enactment of los Comanches, a sort of festival that Brooks feels encapsulates the themes he intends to touch on. The first chapter then continues to talk about the context for cultural exchange in the borderlands and in the Iberian peninsula. Beginning with Native Americans in the borderlands, he details the role of sacred violence in facilitating “mutually productive” exchanges that traded women and children between cultures. (17) Brooks suggests it was possible for these exchanged individuals to be adopted by their host cultures. (18) Next, Brooks analyzes the European concepts of gender and honor as represented in the relations between the Moors and Europeans in Spain, pointing out conquest marriages and the gifting of women. Finally, he explores the beginnings of the relations between the Spanish and the indigenous people of the southwest to explain the themes for the rest of the book. From here, the book is organized chronologically with each chapter broken up into smaller themes. Chapter two deals with the establishment of diplomatic relations forged over the system of human trafficking that developed between the two cultures. Chapter three investigates the development of sheep pastoralism in New Mexico, particularly in light of the effect Spanish colonialism had on native economic structures. Shifting populations and higher demand for commodities drove captive acquisition and trading. Chapters four through six continue the narrative of subsistence and cultural exchange resulting in increasing exchange between communities in the southwest. Chapter seven discusses the effects of the increasing influence of the American government over the region and concludes with a reshaping of the Plains Indians and their territories. Coming to the conclusion of the book, chapter eight explores the changes caused by American settlement especially in relation to the American understanding of slavery. Over the course of the book, Brooks develops his picture of the borderland communities and their network of exchange. Though the players change, circumstances are continually plugged back through Brooks’ concept of a violent coexistence made habitable with human trafficking.
Throughout the book Brooks is largely guided by the relation between gender and power. Much of Brooks’ work finds women and children in positions equivalent to chattel, interchangeable for the purposes of men. There are elements of a post-colonial critique of imperialism spread through the book, but Brooks asserts that there was a system of cultural exchange via human trafficking in place well before the arrival of Spanish colonists.
Brooks relies on a wide variety of sources to make his points. Due to the nature of some of the areas Brooks touches on, particularly interactions within indigenous groups before the arrival of the Spanish, Brooks falls back on ethnography to piece together plausible stories. His most powerful points are made when employing primary sources developed by Spanish and other Europeans. Brooks demonstrates a keen understanding of the European mindset and he manages the precarious task of balancing secondary sources well. Since half the book requires the poorly documented subaltern perspective, both that of indigenous culture and that of the women who were victims in this system, Brooks’ ability to mold a concise ethnography is tantamount.
Overall, Captives & Cousins achieves its stated purpose of casting light on the uglier aspects of the culture developed in the southwest borderlands. Brooks writes eloquent and poignant prose, pulling together many different sources in a concise and easy to understand form. The post-colonial nature of Brooks narrative reflects on the desire to dispel myth and nostalgia shared by Geary in Myth of Nations, but the inclusion of gender and power yields more practical, applicable results. In later chapters, the introduction of the American government strengthens Brooks’ model of violent coexistence with Americans struggling to grasp the violent society they have inherited. Unfortunately Brooks chooses to merely summarize the the unravelling of this system, simply explaining in a few paragraphs the eventual dissolution of human trafficking among plains residents. In all, Captives & Cousins is a fantastic collection of sources and interpretation on the long glossed over topic of this other form of North American slavery.

[David Nichols · Rating 5 out of 5]

The 2003 Bancroft Prize for best book in American history was shared by two pathbreaking studies of a long-neglected subject: the enslavement of Native North Americans. Of the two prize-winners, James Brooks's CAPTIVES AND COUSINS is perhaps the more difficult to follow (compared with Alan Gallay's straightforward narrative of the INDIAN SLAVE TRADE), but also richer in ethnographic detail and analysis. Focusing on slavery in the southwestern American borderlands, Brooks argued that the institution was as much a social and gender construct as an economic system. Slavery grew out of Pueblo, Athabascan (Apache and Navajo), Comanche, and Spanish ideas about shame and hierarchy, and strengthened patriarchy in all of the participant nations, turning women into exchange objects and emblems of male honor. Perhaps it goes without saying that Indian slavery generated more violence than any purely European intrusion did, but the employment of captives as translators and their exchange as hostages also allowed rival nations to maintain long-term diplomatic relationships with one another.

The Indian slave trade, Brooks observes, pre-dated the Spanish entradas; Spain did not introduce violence and social inequality into western North America. However, Spanish guns and goods fueled slavery's expansion to an unprecedented degree. Pueblo Indians, previously the prey of their more nomadic neighbors, joined with Spanish raiders in the seventeenth century to capture and enslave hundreds of Utes and Athabascans. There were at least 500 of these “genizaro” (non-Christian) slaves in New Mexico on the eve of the 1680 Pueblo Revolt. This number grew to 5,000 during the two centuries after the Spanish re-colonized New Mexico (1700-1880), when they, the Pueblos, the Utes, and Navajos continued to raid across the colonial border for captives. New Mexican land-owners and Indian herdsmen kept many of these captives as bound laborers, sometimes nominally free but slaves in all but name. They also used slaves as diplomatic pawns, whose exchange people allowed neighboring nations to maintain a shaky peace and the profitable commerce that accompanied it.

Slavery also flourished on the southern Plains, where the Kiowas and Comanches took between 5,000 and 10,000 Indian captives between 1540 and 1820, and another 3,000 Mexican and Anglo-American hostages in the 1850s and '60s. Slaves served the same purposes for the southern Plains Indians as for New Mexicans and their Indian neighbors: they were captive laborers, concubines, emblems of male honor, and diplomatic instruments. Slavery not only enriched the Comanches and Kiowas, it made them into two of the most important commercial entities in the mid-continent. It also helped New Mexico transform itself in the nineteenth century from a Mexican dependency into a semi-autonomous commercial entrepot, trading in Comanche bison hides, Pueblo textiles, Navajos' sheep, and human beings. It was not until the 1870s and '80s that the United States brought this slave-based economy to an end, banning the sale of bound laborers and confining the Navajos and southern Plains Indians to reservations.

It is hard to overstate this book's academic importance. I still remember hearing Catherine Clinton's excited recommendation of Brooks's book, which struck her and other historians (including myself) as that rarest of things, a book-length treatment of an entirely new subject. CAPTIVES AND COUSINS, along with the Gallay book mentioned above, paved the way for a succession of studies of Indian slavery, including Robbie Ethridge and Sheri Shuck-Hall's innovative MAPPING THE MISSISSIPPIAN SHATTER ZONE Zone (2009), Christina Snyder's incandescently brilliant SLAVERY IN INDIAN COUNTRY (2010), and Brett Rushforth's magisterial BONDS OF ALLIANCE (2012). It also energized or inspired new scholarship on the colonial-era southwest and on the interrelationship between captivity, gender subordination, diplomacy, and power; award-winning books that owe a debt to Brooks include Ned Blackhawk's VIOLENCE OVER THE LAND (2006), Pekka Hamalainen's COMANCHE EMPIRE (2008), and Brian DeLay's WAR OF A THOUSAND DESERTS (2008). In the process Brooks dramatically expanded the new field of “continental history,” which focuses on the long-neglected North American interior, its peoples, and the interactions between them. Apart from its occasionally meandering and difficult prose, the only significant flaw of CAPTIVES AND COUSINS is a product of its success: its conclusions are now beginning to seem a little old-fashioned. That this happened in only a decade is testament to the massive body of subsequent scholarship that this book, with its explosive intellectual force, helped to inspire.

[Kelly Bradford]

Worth reading for all around New Mexico history and to add nuance to your understanding of slavery. Slavery is a very different practice in different cultures, and it is eye opening to read about an instance that started long before Europeans came to the Americas, and unrelated to the Atlantic slave trade. This book won the Bancroft prize in American history, as did two other books on "Indian" matters in the 2000s: Indian slave trade in the South, and a political history of the "Comanche Empire". I don't read much in academic-authored/audienced history, but I read these three books and this was the most readable and valuable of the lot.

[Singodsuperior · Rating 3 out of 5]

Brooks focuses on the intricacies of the captive economy in the Southwest.

Brooks analyzes the origins of this captive economy, in which he writes both Indians and Spaniards had similar captive exchange economies before European contact in the Southwest. Furthermore, Brooks emphasizes the thriving of this economy without American involvement until the late nineteenth century.

Moreover, women and children are analyzed to express there importance in the economy, as well as the how new forms of kinship were created with both sides integrating women and children in their societies in different ways.

[Eric · Rating 3 out of 5]

Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands is full of detail. It is a superb sociological survey of the southwest borderlands and is quite scholastic in nature. I picked up the book to read out of subject interest and had a little trouble getting though it as the topic was so much more than I'd ever would have imagined. I would have loved to have had an entire university course with professor's lectures using this book. Not the greatest for a 'casual read' but and amazing resource for academic endeavors.

[Paul · Rating 3 out of 5]

In his book Captives and Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands James Brooks writes a social history about the unique economic world of the colonial Southwest between 1540 and 1880. Natives in this region lived with two seemingly contradictory economic realities. First, they developed a culture that respected male honor and based male honor on their ability to provide for, protect, and control their wives, children and communities from outsiders. Second, these societies depended on outside groups for economic goods and for captives to serve as adopted members of families, wives, and laborers. The arrival of the Spanish in this region complicated matters by adding an additional group who shared a similar notion of male honor. For James Brooks, the major difference between slavery in the Desert Southwest and the South is that slaves in the former would often be incorporated into the families for their captors while that never happened in the South.
One theme that repeats in this book is the unique place that slavery played in Southwestern societies. In contrast to other parts of North America, slaves in this region were not only used for labor, but also formed an important part of people’s family structure. They also served as important intermediaries between groups and regions and helped to tie them together.
On the plains between New Mexico and Missouri, natives groups such as the comanches and pawnees developed a social and economic system that depended on taking captives for use as slave labor, wives, and trade goods. Slaves, and the need for labor, served as a constant source of contention in the region as groups attacked other groups to gain more slaves, but they also helped to create ties between groups as slaves often married into their captor’s families. The Spanish became full participants in this system upon their arrival in the region. This system of exchange, kinship building, and captive taking served as a precursor to formal diplomatic relations by 1786.
The arrival of the Navajo in the Desert Southwest in the fifteenth century added a new participant to this system of exchange. Najavos and Pueblos benefited, during good times, by trading meat and skins for squash and corn. The Spanish introduced sheep to the region and altered this relationship as Navajos became pastoralists and competition for land and labor increased. Captives served, once again as source of convention while linking the people of the region together through lineage. The Spanish also needed captives for labor and created mixed families, and Navajos became their main trade partners in trading human captives.
In the mountains Utes, Comanches, and Jicarillas served two essential purposes. First, as rescued former slaves, or indios rescados, many of the groups in the mountains owed loyalty to the Spanish and served as military slaves, or genizeros. In this region, as in others, the Spanish worked to maintain a caste system to prevent the intermingling of blood. This conflicted with the needs and cultural norms of people living in the mountains who integrated captives into their society through marriage but did not need them for labor due to their hunter-gatherer based economy. In addition to serving as a defensive barrier, they also served as a link between the peoples of the Pueblos and the plains which facilitated the movement of trade goods between the two regions.
By the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, Kiowas and Comanches both developed economies and social systems that centered around the horse. Kiowas respected rank and possession of horses helped a person to maintain and rise in rank and, thus, served not only an economic purpose, but also a social purpose as a symbol for male wealth. For Comanches, who were more egalitarian, horses were a vital part of gaining manhood as they served as bride price in negotiating marriages. Thus, a young man could only hope to enter full manhood by having horses. In both groups, young men who did not have horses raided to gain the wealth in horses they needed to enhance their position in society. The Spanish in New Mexico relied on these groups to supply them with horses through trade or to serve as auxiliary troops. As Camanches and Spanish came into conflict, people of mixed ethnicity served an important role in peace negotiations.
The integration of this region into the market economies of New Spain, Mexico, and the United States in the late seventeenth and eighteenth centuries had several effects. First, as demand for pelts from sheep increased, raiding for labor, competition over land, and grazing intensified. Increased populations in the Desert Southwest increased demand for bison meat, while trade with American merchants increased demand for bison pelts placing unsustainable pressure on bison populations. Meanwhile, New Mexicans took slaves from Navajos mostly to work as agricultural laborers and weavers as demand for these goods increased. Since animals increasingly served as a bride price, many found that they could increase their flocks by increasing their female family members through raiding and adoption. Trade and raiding increased concurrently intensifying a system of dependence and rivalry between the various inhabitants in the region. Finally, poor natives raided wealthy sheep owners to increase their flocks.
Between Mexican independence and the American Civil War the Mexican and American Governments' attempts to regulate the economy and introduce reforms resulted in widespread rebellion as natives sought to maintain their traditional methods of resolving conflict and maintaining trade. Meanwhile, trade and raiding intensified at the local level as demand for labor and wives increased. Both the Mexicans and the Americans attempted to use native American militias to establish authority in the face of rebellion, but such efforts only resulted in increased raiding as militias captured livestock on human contraband. The Utes and Pawnees increasingly found themselves relegated to auxiliary troops of the American army and unable to provide for themselves independently.
Several factors lead to the end of the unique brand of slavery in the Desert South West. After the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, native groups increasingly incorporated the capitalist system of the United States. Hunts for bison increased, and as those herds declined, native groups started to focus on raiding herds in Mexico to gain pelts for trade. Ironically, during this period the tendency of Americans to pay cash bounties to redeem slaves and increased trade reinforced the local slave economy. After the Civil War, the US military struck against groups whose raiding was seen as the behavior of renegades and pacified Native raiding by military force. This helped to weaken the slave trade and the realization that cash redemption for captives was reinforcing the system resulted in ending this practice. The incorporation of the region into the US legal system replaced the kinship-based identities with one based on incorporation into a nation state.
Brook’s book is a very easy read and is worth the time for anybody who is interested in colonial history and Native American societies. Having said that, the value of the book is found in its focus on a colonial region that eventually became part of the United States but is often neglected because it was not part of the thirteen original colonies. Most of the information on Native Americans comes from written accounts about the various groups from European sources. This has the value of actually being written, but the possibility of misunderstandings and distortions remain due to potential mistakes in translation and misinterpretations due to cultural differences. This is of course not unique to Brook’s work, but needs to be taken into account in any book that relies on similar source information. We can be confident that Brook’s work is accurate, because many of the sources also come from Native Americans who had learned the Spanish language.
Question: According to James Brook, one of the stated reasons that he wrote this book was to fight against that tendency to romanticize native american cultures. What advice would he give about teaching to groups who dismiss such reinvestigation as cynical revisionism?

[Jacob Vigil · Rating 5 out of 5]

I had known about this book for a long time and it sat on my shelf for years. I knew it was a must-read for anyone interested in New Mexico and Indigenous history. I finally picked it up and while I first had issues with how the book was organized, and whether it traced a coherent argument/thread, by the middle chapters Brooks had well established his thesis and demonstrated it through such wide ranging research and intelligent analysis.

I could say so much about this book, the threads and tangents I wanted to explore further in the footnotes, the compelling thesis and the way it brilliantly complicates and interrogates colonialism, identity, the advent of capitalism, race, kinship, nationhood and many other concepts in American history. But at the heart of it, what made me love this book was that it was a well-executed and thorough piece of scholarship about a region and history that I belong to. I saw myself in these stories, in the statistics and movements and relationships Brooks describes, from the early days of Spanish settlement all the way to the dawn of the 20th century. To see the story of my family and ancestors told in this way is incredibly powerful. A work of academic scholarship is not and cannot be the definitive or only word in the story of New Mexico and New Mexicans. But it has to be part of it, and in that role, this book excels. Rarely have I ever had the chance to see me and my people in a solid and well-rendered work of academic history. For that reason, this book will always rank among my favorites.

It has its problems, places where I would have rendered a different or more critical analysis of things (such as the experience of women and girls in captivity and the linkages to contemporary MMIW, or a broader comment on the devastation that colonialism wreaked even while emphasizing the agency and power and resilience of those caught up in it). But it is a monumental and important work of American history, Indigenous history, borderlands and Latino history.

[Loretta Miles Tollefson · Rating 5 out of 5]

There are different explanations for the trade in captured Native Americans that occurred in New Mexico between the Spanish entrada and the late 1800’s. Some say it was the result of justified retribution for Native American raids, others say it was an deliberate expansion of a system of slavery. Still other people have other reasons. Captives and Cousins moves beyond these explanations to examine the way the culture of capture and servitude throughout the Southwest borderlands affected all the communities involved, both for good and ill.

While Brooks doesn’t condone what the slave trade in the borderlands, he does point out that both Native and Spanish-speaking communities took part in it. More importantly, he proposes that the resulting mingling of cultures enabled a cultural flexibility that may not have otherwise occurred.

Because of its subject matter, Captives and Cousins isn’t an easy read. However, I believe it is an important one. The book’s value lies not only in its nuanced exploration of an aspect of New Mexico’s history most of us would rather not think about, but also its demonstration of a way to think about other uncomfortable aspects of our history.

We tend to want simple solutions to complex issues. Brooks demonstrates that life is complex, that what appears horrendous can sometimes be of benefit, and that there are no simple answers. If you’re interested in reading and thinking about a difficult topic explored by an author who’s not interested in descending into either outrage or cultural self-congratulation, I recommend Captives and Cousins.

[Kylie Miller · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a complicated review because overall the content of the book is fascinating and so overlooked in history. However, if I wasn’t learning some really interesting information and perspectives, I probably wouldn’t have even finished the book. The book’s organization is kind of all over the place and hard to follow, and some parts seem unnecessarily overdescriptive and therefore diverging from main points. While I could probably tell you main points of the book, those points are not clearly explained throughout the book. Such an interesting topic, so it’s disappointing that the writing meant I trudged through.

[T · Rating 3 out of 5]

3.5 downgraded. Appendixes are incredible. Decentering sexual violence isn't.

[Karen · Rating 3 out of 5]

I feel like this work has been largely replaced by Comanche Empire.