INDIANS AND SLAVERY

INDIANS AND SLAVERY. Prior to contact with Europeans, American Indian groups throughout North America enslaved each other. From the Pacific Northwest to the Southeast, large confederacies and alliances often targeted smaller societies and took captives for laborers, warriors, or kinspeople. Many groups incorporated captives into their societies, and they generally did not keep captives in a state of perpetual or chattel slavery.

The nature and magnitude of Indian slavery forever changed following European contact. Desperate to secure immediate wealth, Europeans organized large slave-raiding campaigns against Indian populations and greatly encouraged intertribal slaving, particularly in the hinterlands of colonial societies. From California to Florida the Spanish enslaved captives directly, bought slaves from Indian groups, and institutionalized slave hierarchies within colonial society. Wealth, the Spanish believed, came from Indian labor and tribute. Despite the protests of the church, Indian slavery flourished. In New Mexico, detribalized Indian captives became known as genizaros and formed a distinct ethnic and racial group within colonial society. Similar hybrid racial and ethnic social relations characterized portions of French colonial societies along the Mississippi River, particularly at New Orleans and St. Louis. Most captives in these colonial societies were young children, especially girls, whose domestic and sexual labor became integral to colonial economies and demographic stability.

As the Indian slave trade remade colonial hinterlands throughout the North American continent, Indian groups often responded in kind to European and intertribal slaving. Groups migrated away from slaving societies, joined with neighboring groups for protection, and increasingly became fierce slavers themselves. In the Northeast and on the southern Plains the Iroquois and Comanches built large empires in which captive taking and slavery became important institutions. Along with the escalation of violence and disease, Indian slavery became a clear indicator of the disruptive and traumatic influences engendered by European contact and colonization. Although often grafted onto existing intertribal divisions and antagonisms, postcontact Indian slavery held little resemblance in scope or scale to pre-Columbian practices.

In English colonies, Indian slaves often labored for whites, but bonded laborers from England and later from Africa formed the majority of the servile labor force along the Atlantic Coast. In the Southeast, Indian captives were forced to labor on Carolina plantations, but increasingly Indian slaves were sent away from the continent to other colonies in the Caribbean. Creeks, Choctaws, and Cherokees enslaved each other and sold captives to the British in exchange for guns, ammunition, and supplies. As African American slavery grew and swept throughout the South, Indians incorporated runaways into their societies, returned slaves to white owners, and bought black slaves for their own slaveholding purposes. Desperate to maintain access to their homelands, Indians such as the Cherokees constructed plantation economies in an attempt to maintain viable livelihoods within southern society. Upon their eventual removal from the South to Indian Territory, slaveholding Indians took many black slaves with them. Other groups, particularly the Seminole and Creek Nations, offered former slaves community rights and privileges within their new societies.

Following emancipation, many African Americans moved west into Indian Territory and settled among Indian nations, where they developed extended kinship and community networks. The mixture of Indians and Africans became a defining characteristic of many Oklahoma and southeastern Indian nations.

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Lauber, Almon Wheeler. Indian Slavery in Colonial Times within the Present Limits of the United States. Williamston, Mass.: Corner House Publishers, 1979. Reprint of the 1913 original edition.

Perdue, Theda. Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540–1866. Knoxville: University of Tennessee Press, 1979.

NedBlackhawk

See alsoSlavery .