My project, “Captive Fates: Displaced Apache Indians in the Southwest Borderlands, Mexico, and Cuba,” examines the forced movement of Indian captives from their homelands in the present-day U.S.-Mexico border region to the Caribbean, especially during the late-18 th and early-19 th centuries. Here the lines between slavery and freedom blurred as Indians were permanently exiled from their homelands and forced to labor indefinitely on port fortifications, tobacco plantations, and in households, even as Spanish officials asserted that they were not slaves but prisoners of war that should be educated and Christianized by their masters in order to become useful subjects of the king. Equally important to my project is an examination of the displacement, trauma, and natal alienation Native captives experienced and how those left behind understood and reacted to the frequent flows of men, women, and children out of the region. In the end, I hope that exploring the Apaches’ long march into exile will shift the way we think about the “Southwest Borderlands” as an isolated region, break new ground in comparative slavery, and add to the growing body of work that highlights the complex intersections between African and Native experiences in the Americas.