Episode 124: The Indian Slave Trade

**Lindsay** (0:09)
Okay, no funny jokes today. This one is going to be difficult. We're talking about some heavy themes in this episode.
When we discuss the topic of slavery, it's never pretty, and the Indian slave trade in the American West is no exception.
So there are lots of trigger warnings. We're talking about economies of humans, trafficking, dark stuff.

**Bryan** (0:30)
It is dark. What we hope is it will help illustrate how wild and desperate things were in the Western United States in the 1840s and 50s. And there's several reasons for this. Before we get into those, we do want to acknowledge the tricky territory that we are in as two white descendants of Mormon colonizers. We will try and be as respectful as possible. We're gonna use the most current thinking on terms like Indian, American Indian, Indigenous, Native American, First Nation, that kind of thing. All of these things have different connotations, meanings and uses, and we wanna be respectful of them.

**Lindsay** (1:01)
I think it's also important to recognize where we position in this story. Like Bryan said, we're descendants of people who directly displaced tribes all over America, but specifically in this story, the Shoshone, Blackfoot, the Utes, Paiutes, Navajo, Apache, Arapaho, Gosho and more. Because of this, I feel a responsibility to err on the side of acknowledging the harm white people caused to these tribes.
And it's tricky, it's really tricky because the disruption of Native life happened with the Spanish and then the French before the Mormons arrived. So it's messy, but there's also on the other side of it, this trope of this stoic, perfect noble savage and one that was only wronged by white people and that life was perfect before white encroachment and the indigenous tribes in the West had no problems until the Mormons arrive. And this is a mistake that white scholars will make too. They'll sort of pedestalize people. And it's just not true. American Indians are people and they're susceptible to all the vices and characteristics that all humans are. And that includes strategies for survival that sometimes aren't pretty.

**Bryan** (2:02)
With this noble savage idea, there's also a tendency on the other spectrum of things. And it's something that we witness with our Mormon friends and family. When you hear some of the horrible things that are happening between different tribes, there's these internecine conflicts among cultures. The Mormon brain wants to kind of let itself off the hook and say, see, look, they're being horrible to each other. Look how uncivilized they were. Our people rescued them from some of these practices.
And that's probably even more pernicious than the noble savage idea because that makes us think that we don't have to deal with the complexity and humanness of these groups.

**Lindsay** (2:36)
Yeah, I remember meeting one of the Bundy brothers and he told me, I was like, listen, dude, I can get with you on government overstep and land encroachment and property rights, but your family has like displaced this Paiute tribe out of their land. Like, how do you make sense of that? And it was just so easy for him to justify. He was like relying on old Mormon histories about how degraded these tribes were and how much in need of civilization they are. These are not old ideas. They still persist. They persist in corners of the Mormon and rural worlds in which we live. And they were ideas that directly contributed to these attitudes. So like, if you're holding on to them, if you're one that hears a story of, you know, Native American as a bad actor, and that like justifies the violence against them, like maybe check that impulse.
Here's a perfect example. I'm gonna quote Ned Blackhawk in his book, Violence Over the Land. He's the one who really helped shape my thinking. He's an Indigenous scholar who talks about the complexities within these groups while helping you understand like where this culture of violence comes from.
And he's going to illustrate how the human brain mistakenly assigns cause and effect to different scenarios. Here's what he says, quote, In Nevada, Eastern California and Central Utah, survival often necessitated integration into the region's evolving settler economies.
Facing enduring economic and environmental crises, many Indian families attached themselves to white farms, mining communities or ranches where Indian men and women worked in the most degraded sectors. Great Basin Indian impoverishment, a common trope in American literary and travel narratives become the clearest expression of such disruption as everywhere Indian peoples appear to be on the verge of extinction, impoverished beyond the hope of survival.

**Bryan** (4:22)
Then he quotes this example from American writer and observer Mark Twain, who observed the goshute Shoshone. Here's what he says, quote, It was along in this wild country that we came across the wretchedest type of mankind, the goshute Indians. From what we could see and all we could learn, they are very considerably inferior to even the despised digger Indians of California, inferior to all races of savages on our continent. Our goshutes are manifestly descended from the self-same gorilla or kangaroo or Norway rat, whichever animal, atom, the Darwinians trace them to. Great American writer.