Even before the arrival of Europeans to the Americas, the practice of taking captives was widespread among Native Americans. Indians took captives for many reasons: to replace--by adoption--tribal members who had been lost in battle, to use as barter for needed material goods, to use as slaves, or to use for reproductive purposes. From the legendary story of John Smith's captivity in the Virginia Colony to the wildly successful narratives of New England colonists taken captive by local Indians, the genre of the captivity narrative is well known among historians and students of early American literature. Not so for Hispanic America. Fernando Operé redresses this oversight, offering the first comprehensive historical and literary account of Indian captivity in Spanish-controlled territory from the sixteenth to the twentieth century. Originally published in Spanish in 2001 as Historias de la frontera: El cautiverio en la América hispánica, this newly translated work reveals key insights into Native American culture in the New World's most remote regions. From the "happy captivity" of the Spanish military captain Francisco Nuñez de Pineda y Bascuñán, who in 1628 spent six congenial months with the Araucanian Indians on the Chilean frontier, to the harrowing nineteenth-century adventures of foreigners taken captive in the Argentine Pampas and Patagonia; from the declaraciones of the many captives rescued in the Rio de la Plata region of Argentina in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, to the riveting story of Helena Valero, who spent twenty-four years among the Yanomamö in Venezuela during the mid-twentieth century, Operé's vibrant history spans the entire gamut of Spain's far-flung frontiers. Eventually focusing on the role of captivity in Latin American literature, Operé convincingly shows how the captivity genre evolved over time, first to promote territorial expansion and deny intercultural connections during the colonial era, and later to romanticize the frontier in the service of nationalism after independence. This important book is thus multidisciplinary in its concept, providing ethnographic, historical, and literary insights into the lives and customs of Native Americans and their captives in the New World.

Slavery existed in North America long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. For centuries, from the pre-Columbian era through the 1840s, Native Americans took prisoners of war and killed, adopted, or enslaved them. Christina Snyder's pathbreaking book takes a familiar setting for bondage, the American South, and places Native Americans at the center of her engrossing story. Indian warriors captured a wide range of enemies, including Africans, Europeans, and other Indians. Yet until the late eighteenth century, age and gender more than race affected the fate of captives. As economic and political crises mounted, however, Indians began to racialize slavery and target African Americans. Native people struggling to secure a separate space for themselves in America developed a shared language of race with white settlers. Although the Indians' captivity practices remained fluid long after their neighbors hardened racial lines, the Second Seminole War ultimately tore apart the inclusive communities that Native people had created through centuries of captivity. Snyder's rich and sweeping history of Indian slavery connects figures like Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe with little-known captives like Antonia Bonnelli, a white teenager from Spanish Florida, and David George, a black runaway from Virginia. Placing the experiences of these individuals within a complex system of captivity and Indians' relations with other peoples, Snyder demonstrates the profound role of Native American history in the American past.

Captivity Narratives - Six True Stories of Indian Captivity - American Indian Slaves & Captives. Captivity narratives are stories of people captured by enemies whom they generally consider "uncivilized." Traditionally, historians have made limited use of certain captivity narratives. They have regarded the genre with suspicion because of its ideological underpinnings. As a result of new scholarly approaches, historians with a more certain grasp of Native American cultures are distinguishing between plausible statements of fact and value-laden judgements in order to study the narratives as rare sources from "inside" Native societies. Contemporary historians such as Linda Colley and anthropologists such as Pauline Turner Strong have also found the narratives useful in analyzing how the colonists constructed the "other," as well as what the narratives reveal about the settlers' sense of themselves and their culture, and the experience of crossing the line to another. Colley has studied the long history of English captivity in other cultures, both the Barbary pirate captives who preceded those in North America, and British captives in cultures such as India, after the North American experience. Accounts of captivity narratives based in North America were published from the 18th through the 19th centuries, but they were part of a well-established genre in English literature. There had already been English accounts of captivity by Barbary pirates, or in the Middle East, which established some of the major elements of the form. Following the American experience, additional accounts were written after British people were captured during exploration and settlement in India and East Asia. INCLUDES: A Narrative of the Life of Mrs. Mary Jemison, Who was taken by the Indians, in the year 1755, when only about twelve years of age, and has continued to reside amongst them to the present time. By James E. Seaver. Narrative of the Captivity and Restoration of Mrs. Mary Rowlandson By Mrs. Mary Rowlandson. Captives Among the Indians, First-hand Narratives of Indian Wars, Customs, Tortures, and Habits of Life in Colonial Times Edited by Horace Kephart Col. James Smith's Life among the Delawares, 1755-1759. The Narrative of Francesco Giuseppe Bressani, S.J., relating his captivity among the Iroquois, In 1644. Capture and Escape of Mercy Harbison, 1792. The Indian Captive: A Narrative of the Adventures and Sufferings of Matthew Brayton - In His Thirty-Four Years of Captivity among the Indians of North-Western America

Enthralling generations of readers, the narrative of capture by Native Americans is arguably the first American literary form dominated by the experiences of women. The ten selections in this anthology span the early history of this country (1682-1892) and range in literary style from fact-based narrations to largely fictional, spellbinding adventure stories. The women are variously victimized, triumphant, or, in the case of Mary Jemison, permantently transculturated. This collection includes well known pieces such as Mary Rowlandson's "A True History" (1682), Cotton Mather's version of Hannah Dunstan's infamous captivity and escape (after scalping her captors!), and the "Panther Captivity", as well as lesser known texts. As Derounian-Stodola demonstrates in the introduction, the stories also raise questions about the motives of their (often male) narrators and promoters, who in many cases embellish melodrama to heighten anti-British and anti-Indian propaganda, shape the tales for ecclesiastical purposes, or romanticize them to exploit the growing popularity of sentimental fiction in order to boost sales. For more than seventy years, Penguin has been the leading publisher of classic literature in the English-speaking world. With more than 1,700 titles, Penguin Classics represents a global bookshelf of the best works throughout history and across genres and disciplines. Readers trust the series to provide authoritative texts enhanced by introductions and notes by distinguished scholars and contemporary authors, as well as up-to-date translations by award-winning translators.

In 1758 Peter Williamson, dressed as an Indian, peddled a tale in Scotland about being kidnapped as a young boy, sold into slavery and servitude, captured by Indians, and made a prisoner of war. Separating fact from fiction, Timothy Shannon illuminates the curiosity about America among working-class people on the margins of empire.

A Newbery Honor book inspired by the true story of a girl captured by a Shawnee war party in Colonial America and traded to a Seneca tribe. When twelve-year-old Mary Jemison and her family are captured by Shawnee raiders, she’s sure they’ll all be killed. Instead, Mary is separated from her siblings and traded to two Seneca sisters, who adopt her and make her one of their own. Mary misses her home, but the tribe is kind to her. She learns to plant crops, make clay pots, and sew moccasins, just as the other members do. Slowly, Mary realizes that the Indians are not the monsters she believed them to be. When Mary is given the chance to return to her world, will she want to leave the tribe that has become her family? This Newbery Honor book is based on the true story of Mary Jemison, the pioneer known as the “White Woman of the Genesee.” This ebook features an illustrated biography of Lois Lenski including rare images and never-before-seen documents from the author’s estate.

"Billy J. Stratton's critical examination of Mary Rowlandson's 1682 publication, The Soveraignty and Goodness of God, reconsiders the role of the captivity narrative in American literary history and national identity. With pivotal new research into Puritan minister Increase Mather's influence on the narrative, Stratton calls for a reconsideration of past scholarly work on the genre"--Provided by publisher.

Captives Among the Indians is an autobiographic collection of four short stories by James Smith. Excerpt: "On the third day, when twenty-two or twenty-four miles from Three Rivers, and seven or eight from Fort Richelieu, we fell into an ambuscade of twenty-seven Iroquois, who killed one of our Indians, and took the rest and myself prisoners. We might have fled, or killed some Iroquois; but I, for my part, seeing my companions taken, judged it better to remain with them, accepting it as a sign of the will of God."