Slavery – the state of being the property of another human being without rights or freedom and forced to engage in service to their owner.
Slave is almost as old as human civilization. Almost every major culture at every point in history has practiced it in some form. Today, it is illegal in every country and is understood as one of the worst atrocities in human history.
When most people imagine slavery, they think of Black slaves in the American South, stolen from their homes and condemned to servitude for the rest of their lives and those of their children. Slavery has had many other forms too: slave soldiers, sexual slavery, domestic slavery, galley slaves, and more. Each conjures up images of harsh masters and powerful empires squeezing the weak for all they are worth.
That might fit your view of the American South or Rome, but it probably doesn’t fit your view of Native Americans. The popular image of the Native Americans as perfect peace-loving people leaves no room for something as awful as slavery, except when they were forced into it by invading Europeans.
But the truth is much darker. Like any human beings, Native Americans were more than capable of enslaving other people. From Alaska to the Andes, they invented slave systems of their own before Europeans arrived, and continued to practice it long afterwards. Native Americans could enslave the old and the young, the native and non-native, the Black and the White, and history has mostly forgotten it.
In this video, we will explore the dark history of slavery by Native Americans.
#darkhistory #historydocumentary #slavetrade
Sources: Barbara Krauthamer, Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, (2013)
Charles C. Mann, 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus, (2005)
Christina Snyder (April 2018). “6 – Native American Slavery in Global Context”. In Noel Lenski; Catherine M. Cameron (eds.). What Is a Slave Society? The Practice of Slavery in Global Perspective
Donald Leland, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America, (1997)
Eliza Whitermire and James R. Carseloway, Account of Eliza Whitemire in 1935, https://www.african-nativeamerican.com/eliza_whitmire.htm
Joseph A. Tainter, Cahokia: Urbanisation, Metabolism, and Collapse’, Frontiers in Sustainable Cities 1, (2019)
Kathryn M. Koziol, ‘Performances of Iposed Status: Captivity at Cahokia’, in Debra Martin and Ryan Harrod (eds.), The Bioarchaeology of Violence, (2012)
Leland Donald, Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Pacific Coast, (1997)
Lynn V. Foster, Handbook to Life in the Ancient Maya World, (2002)
Manuel Aguilar-Moreno, Handbook to Life in the Aztec World, (2006)
Olivia Tencer, ‘It’s Complicated: Anti-Blackness, Freedmen Citizenship, and the Fight to Protect Tribal Sovereignty’, Rethinking Place: Bard-on-Mahicantuck, 28th February 2023, https://rethinkingplace.bard.edu/2023/02/28/its-complicated-anti-blackness-freedmen-citizenship-and-the-fight-to-protect-tribal-sovereignty/
William A Starna and Ralph Watkins, ‘Northern Iroquoian Slavery’, Ethnohistory 38.1, (1991)
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