Comanche Diplomacy

thesis :

The Comanche ideas of diplomacy depended on their present circumstances and needs. They routinely changed their diplomatic stances from region to region and day to day. The Comanche's diplomacy was based on self interest and made ties to other tribes and nations only as long as said relationships were beneficial to them.

Quotes :

"Comanches' power complex was much more than a military creation; it was also, and indeed primarily, a political constrcution. Their colonization of the southern plains was a military enterprise built on astute and pragmatic diplomacy. As they swept across the southern pains, Comanches forged a series of strategic alliances, which buttressed their own strength while leaving their competitors variously defenseless and divided....They sustained their long-standing union with the Utes for decades, only to detach themselves from the alliance in the 1750's when the collapse of Apache resistance on the Llano Estacado turned Utes from useful allies into rivals."
p. 65

"Like most empires, the Comanche empire had many faces. Viewed from the north and east, it was an empire of commerce and diplomacy, an expanding transnational nexus that radiated prestige and power, absorbed foreign ethnicities into its multicultural fold, and brought neighboring societies into its sphere as allies and dependents. Viewed from the Southwest and Mexico, however, the Comanches showed a different kind of face. Here their empire brushed directly against Euro-colonial frontiers, and its tactics were often grounded in violence and exploitation."
p. 181


"What the Comanches did not do was to reciprocate Spain's generosity. Their recompense was the absence of violence. Holding a pronounced power advantage over Texas, they seem to have placed the spaniards in an ambiguous social space where they were not quite friends nor outright enemies"
p. 184

Kathryn Young, Brittany Thornton, Julia Field, Jason Jared