27 - Bride kidnapping. Americas.

What this episode covers

Bride kidnapping. Americas.  The practice of kidnapping children, teenagers and women from neighbouring tribes and adopting them into the new tribe was common among Indigenous peoples of the Americas. The kidnappings were a way of introducing new blood into the group. Captured European women sometimes settled down as adopted members of the tribe and at least one woman, Mary Jemison, refused rescue when it was offered.  Brazil.  The trope of the captured Indigenous (great, great) grandmother is a standard origin myth for many white Brazilian families, captured in the widely use phrase "my (great, great) grandmother was an Indian caught in the rope" (the phrase Índia pega no laço). The phrase reflect "in part" the facts of centuries of female abductions by colonialists that continued even into the 20th century. For example, in a paper discussing the phrase, Indigenous academic Mirna P Marinho da Silva Anaquiri reports a quote from a teacher in Goiânia interviewed as part of her fieldwork:  As a child I witnessed an Indian woman arriving at the farm where my father worked, tied to the tail of a horse. The guy riding on the horse, and her, tied with a rope to the horse's tail; this - for me - is that image. And this "pega no laço" [caught in the lasso] is so generalized that it seems common, natural - nobody is shocked.... ..They... locked her in this wooden box.. ..This happened in 1961, I was four years old.  — A teacher in Goianápolis, reported in Anaquiri, 2018.  Helena Valero, a Brazilian woman kidnapped by Amazonian Indians in 1937, dictated her story to an Italian anthropologist, who published it in 1965.  United States.  Cases exist within some Mormon Fundamentalist communities around the Utah-Arizona border; however, accurate information is difficult to obtain from these closed communities. Most of these cases are usually referred to as forced marriages, although they are similar to other bride kidnappings around the world.  Mexico.  Among the Tzeltal community, a Mayan tribe in Chiapas, Mexico, bride kidnapping has been a recurring method of securing a wife. The Tzeltal people are an Indigenous, agricultural tribe that is organised patriarchally. Premarital contact between the sexes is discouraged; unmarried women are supposed to avoid speaking with men outside their families. As with other societies, the grooms that engage in bride kidnapping have generally been the less socially desirable mates.  In the Tzeltal tradition, a girl is kidnapped by the groom, possibly in concert with his friends. She is generally taken to the mountains and raped. The abductor and his future bride often then stay with a relative until the bride's father's anger is reported to have subsided. At that point, the abductor will return to the bride's house to negotiate a bride-price, bringing with him the bride and traditional gifts such as rum.  The largest Comanche raids into Mexico took place from 1840 to the mid-1850s, when they declined in size and intensity. The captured Mexican girls often became one of several wives of Comanche men.  Chile.  Among the Mapuche of Chile, the practice was known as casamiento por capto in Spanish, and ngapitun in Mapudungun.   Contemporary chronicler Alonso González de Nájera writes that during the Destruction of the Seven Cities in southern Chile Mapuches took over 500 Spanish women as captives. In the case of the women it was, in the words of González de Nájera, "to exploit them". The capture of women initiated a tradition of abductions of Spanish women in the 17th century by Mapuches. Wikipedia: Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 License.This episode includes AI-generated content.

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