Revising the standard narrative of European-Indian relations in
America, Juliana Barr reconstructs a world in which Indians were
the dominant power and Europeans were the ones forced to
accommodate, resist, and persevere. She demonstrates that between
the 1690s and 1780s, Indian peoples including Caddos, Apaches,
Payayas, Karankawas, Wichitas, and Comanches formed relationships
with Spaniards in Texas that refuted European claims of imperial
control.
Barr argues that Indians not only retained control over their
territories but also imposed control over Spaniards. Instead of
being defined in racial terms, as was often the case with European
constructions of power, diplomatic relations between the Indians
and Spaniards in the region were dictated by Indian expressions of
power, grounded in gendered terms of kinship. By examining six
realms of encounter--first contact, settlement and intermarriage,
mission life, warfare, diplomacy, and captivity--Barr shows that
native categories of gender provided the political structure of
Indian-Spanish relations by defining people's identity, status, and
obligations vis-a-vis others. Because native systems of kin-based
social and political order predominated, argues Barr, Indian
concepts of gender cut across European perceptions of racial
difference.