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Making Sense of a Shattering World: Indian Slavery as Seen from San Agustin, by Alejandra Dubcovsky (History, UC Riverside)

In May 1680, an impressive force of Chichimecos (Westo), Yuchi, and Chiluques attacked the Mission San Buenaventura de Guadalquini (on St. Simons Island). They killed Spanish soldiers as well as Indians who resided within the mission area and took others captive; while some of these Tama and Yamasee Indians were Catholic converts, many were refugees who had escaped earlier Chichimeco raids. Since the 1660s, Indians living in Florida's missions had become the most common targets of slaving raids. Refugees and runaway Indian slaves reached San Agustín's gates with harrowing tales of suffering and destruction. Investigating the Spanish archives from this period, this paper explores how Spanish officials and Spanish Indians learned of the latest attacks, countered slaving raids, and attempted to make sense of the rapidly changing Southeastern landscape.

Dr. Alejandra Dubcovsky is Associate Professor of History at University of California, Riverside. She is also the inaugural fellow in the Program for the Advancement of the Humanities, a partnership of The Huntington and UC Riverside that aims to support the future of the humanities. 

Her first book, Informed Power: Communication in the Early American South (HUP 2016), won the 2016 Michael V. R. Thomason Book Award from the Gulf South Historical Association. Her latest articles include, “Writing Timucua: Recovering and Interrogating Indigenous Authorship,” co-written with Aaron Broadwell for The Journal of Early American Studies (2017), "When Archaeology and History Meet: Shipwrecks, Indians, and the Contours of the Early-Eighteenth-Century South,” which appeared in the Journal of Southern History (2018), and " Defying Indian Slavery: Apalachee Voices and Spanish Sources in the Eighteenth-Century Southeast," in the The William and Mary Quarterly (2018) and received Honorable Mention for the 2018 Carol Gold Award from the Coordinating Council for Women in History.