Slavery among Native Americans in the United States

Many Native-American tribes practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America. Other slave-owning tribes of North America were, for example, Comanche of Texas, Creek of Georgia, the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, that lived along the coast from what is now Alaska to California; the Pawnee, and Klamath. Difference in pre- and post-contact slavery There were differences between slavery as practiced in the pre-colonial era among Native Americans and slavery as practiced by Europeans after colonization. Whereas many Europeans eventually came to look upon slaves of African descent as being racially inferior, Native Americans took slaves from other Native American groups, and therefore viewed them as ethnically inferior. Native Americans, in their initial encounters with the Europeans, attempted to use their captives from enemy tribes as a "method of playing one tribe against another" in an unsuccessful game of divide and conquer. During times of famine, some Native Americans would also temporarily sell their children to obtain food. The ways in which captives were treated differed widely among Native American groups. Captives could be enslaved for life, killed, or adopted. In some cases, captives were only adopted after a period of slavery. For example, the Iroquoian peoples (not just the Iroquois tribes) often adopted captives, but for religious reasons there was a process, procedures, and many seasons when such adoptions were delayed until the proper spiritual times. In many cases, new tribes adopted captives to replace warriors killed during a raid. In their society, slavery was hereditary after slaves were taken as prisoners of war Among a few Pacific Northwest tribes, as many as one-fourth of the population were slaves. ==European enslavement of Native Americans==

When Europeans arrived as colonists in North America, Native Americans changed their practice of slavery dramatically. One tool was the encomienda system; new encomiendas were outlawed in the New Laws of 1542, but old ones continued, and the 1542 restriction was revoked in 1545. As the demand for labor in the West Indies grew with the cultivation of sugarcane, Europeans exported enslaved Native Americans to the "sugar islands". Historian Alan Gallay estimates that between 1670 and 1715, 24,000 to 51,000 captive Native Americans were exported through Carolina ports, of which more than half, 15,000-30,000, were brought from then-Spanish Florida. These numbers were more than the number of Africans imported to the Carolinas during the same period. Gallay also says that "the trade in Indian slaves was at the center of the English empire's development in the American South. The trade in Indian slaves was the most important factor affecting the South in the period 1670 to 1715"; intertribal wars to capture slaves destabilized English colonies, Florida and Louisiana. Additional enslaved Native Americans were exported from South Carolina to Virginia, Pennsylvania, New York, Rhode Island and Massachusetts. Starting in 1698, Parliament allowed competition among importers of enslaved Africans, raising purchase prices for slaves in Africa, so they cost more than enslaved Native Americans. British settlers, especially those in the Southern Colonies, purchased or captured Native Americans to use as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, rice, and indigo. Accurate records of the numbers enslaved do not exist. Slavery in Colonial America became a caste of people who were foreign to English colonists: Native Americans and Africans, who were predominantly non-Christian. The Virginia General Assembly defined some terms of slavery in 1705: The slave trade of Native Americans lasted until around 1730. It gave rise to a series of devastating wars among the tribes, including the Yamasee War. The Indian Wars of the early 18th century, combined with the increasing importation of African slaves, effectively ended the Native American slave trade by 1750. Colonists found that Native American slaves could easily escape, as they knew the country. The wars cost the lives of numerous colonial slave traders and disrupted their early societies. The remaining Native American groups banded together to face the Europeans from a position of strength. Many surviving Native American peoples of the southeast strengthened their loose coalitions of language groups and joined confederacies such as the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection. Native American women were at risk for rape whether they were enslaved or not; during the early colonial years, settlers were disproportionately male. They turned to Native women for sexual relationships. Both Native American and African enslaved women suffered rape and sexual harassment by male slaveholders and other white men. The exact number of Native Americans who were enslaved is unknown because vital statistics and census reports were at best infrequent. Andrés Reséndez estimates that between 147,000 and 340,000 Native Americans were enslaved in North America, excluding Mexico. Linford Fisher's estimates 2.5 million to 5.5 million Natives enslaved in the entire Americas. Even though records became more reliable in the later colonial period, Native American slaves received little to no mention, or they were classed with African slaves with no distinction. For example, in the case of "Sarah Chauqum of Rhode Island", her master listed her as mulatto in the bill of sale to Edward Robinson, but she won her freedom by asserting her Narragansett identity. Little is known about Native Americans that were forced into labor. In the East, Native Americans were recorded as slaves. Slaves in Indian Territory across the United States were used for many purposes, from work in the plantations of the East, to guides across the wilderness, to work in deserts of the West, or as soldiers in wars. Native American slaves suffered from European diseases and inhumane treatment, and many died while in captivity. European colonists caused a change in Native American slavery, as they created a new demand market for captives of raids. The oldest known record of a permanent Native American slave was a native man from Massachusetts in 1636. New Hampshire was unique: it had very few slaves, and maintained a somewhat peaceful stance with various tribes during the Pequot War and King Philip's War. Colonists in the South began to capture and enslave Native Americans for sale and export to the "sugar islands" such as Jamaica, as well as to northern colonies. In December 1675, Carolina's grand council created a written justification of the enslavement and sale of Native Americans, claiming that those who were enemies of tribes the English colonists had befriended were targets, stating those enslaved were not "innocent Indians". The council also claimed it was within the wishes of their "Indian allies" to take their prisoners and that the prisoners were willing to work in the country or be transported elsewhere. The council used this to please the proprietors, and to fulfill the practice of enslaving no one against their wishes or being transported without their own consent out of Carolina, though this is what the colonists did. In John Norris' "Profitable Advice for Rich and Poor" (1712), he recommends buying 18 native women, 15 African men, and 3 African women. In the Illinois Country, French colonists baptized the Native American slaves whom they bought for labor. This practice of combining African slave men and Native American women was especially common in South Carolina. In the mid-18th century, South Carolina colonial governor James Glen began to promote an official policy that aimed to create in Native Americans an "aversion" to African Americans in an attempt to thwart possible alliances between them. In 1758, James Glen wrote: "It has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them Indians to Negroes." The dominance of the Native American slave trade lasted until around 1730, when it led to a series of devastating wars among the tribes. The incidents led warring women to dress as traders in effort to get captives before warriors. Though the Indian slave trade ended the practice of enslaving Native Americans continued, records from June 28, 1771 show Native American children were kept as slaves in Long Island, New York. Native Americans had also married while enslaved creating families both native and some of partial African descent. The pressures of slavery also gave way to the creation of colonies of runaway slaves and Native Americans living in Florida, called Maroons. Slavery in the Southwest Enslavement of Indigenous people by Europeans in the present-day Southwest began with Spanish expeditions to explore and conquer land in Central and North America in the 16th century. According to historian Almon Wheeler Lauber these expeditions all captured and enslaved people indigenous to the regions they explored, and in many cases the taking of slaves was as integral a part of these expeditions' goals as conquest and exploration were. Enslavement of Indigenous people by Spanish subjects was theoretically illegal, however the persistence of diverse forms of Indigenous slavery such as encomiendas, repartimientos, congregaciones, and capture in conflicts deemed "just" due to being fought against non-Christians show that this ban was generally enforced poorly or not at all. The 1680 Recopilación de las Leyes de los Reynos de las Indias upheld the ban, but also encouraged Spanish subjects to ransom Indigenous people held by Indigenous captors, convert them to Catholicism, and "detribalize" them through assimilation into Spanish culture. These ransomed captives would be assigned the legal status of "indios de rescate" (reformed Indigenous), and owed their ransomers loyalty and service in exchange for the cost of the ransom. As servants, the treatment of these people fell under the laws governing slavery. Continued enslavement of Indigenous people was justified by their Spanish captors through Christian theories of "just war", which held that slavery was justified as a means of converting those who rejected Christianity. Captives taken in just wars were generally expected to be freed following a finite term of ten to twenty years, but this was not well-enforced and public opinion sometimes dictated that perpetual servitude was more appropriate. The practice of procuring slaves through "just" wars declined in popularity following the 1692-1695 Spanish Reconquest of New Mexico. During the 18th and early 19th centuries, the slave trade in New Mexico took two main forms: large-scale annual trading fairs in which captives were formally ransomed, and small-scale bartering over captives in villages and trading places. Historian James F Brooks estimates that around 3 thousand members of nomadic and pastoralist Indigenous groups bordering New Mexico entered colonial society as slaves, servants, or orphans in this period. The practice surged in popularity following the expulsion of the Navajo from their lands in the 1864–1865 Navajo Campaign, with between 1,500 and 3,000 Indigenous people being enslaved in the territory at the time. During the 1860s the Federal government stamped down on the enslavement of Indigenous people. While this reduced the frequency of the practice it was never fully stamped out, continuing on into at least the 1960s. Following the 1847–1848 invasion by U.S. troops, indigenous peoples in California were enslaved in the new state from statehood in 1850 to 1867. Enslaving an Indigenous person required the posting of a bond by the slave holder. and officially legalized Native American slavery there in 1852. Within a decade over 400 Native American children were purchased and used as a vital source of labor in Latter-day Saint homes until slavery was banned by the federal government in 1865. US representative Justin Smith Morrill criticized LDS Church leaders and their theocratic laws on Indian slavery. He said that the laws were unconcerned about the way the Native Americans were captured, noting that the only requirement was that the Indian be possessed by a White person through purchase or otherwise. He said that Utah was the only American government to enslave Indians, and said that state-sanctioned slavery of Native Americans "is a dreg placed at the bottom of the cup by Utah alone". Within 50 years of Mormon settlement under Young and his successors John Taylor then Wilford Woodruff, the Native American population in what is now Utah was decimated by 86%, ==Native-American enslavement of Africans==

), and an unidentified girl of African-American descent. 1886 The earliest record of African and Native American contact occurred in April 1502, when Spanish explorers brought an African slave with them and encountered a Native American band. In the 16th century, Spanish settlements like St. Augustine and San Marcos coalesced along the coast of what is now Florida. In some instances, Native Americans and African Americans allied against European forces. In 1686, the Yamasee Indians fought alongside captive Africans in an attack on a garrison in South Carolina. The Spanish, looking for protection and minimal conflict, offered the captives freedom if they defended Spanish Florida. Thereafter, in the early colonial days, Native Americans interacted with enslaved Africans and African Americans in every way possible; Native Americans were enslaved along with Africans, and both often worked with European indentured laborers. "They worked together, lived together in communal quarters, produced collective recipes for food, shared herbal remedies, myths and legends, and in the end they intermarried." Because both races were non-Christian, and because of their differing skin color and physical features, Europeans considered them other and inferior to Europeans. The Europeans thus worked to make enemies of the two groups. In some areas, Native Americans began to slowly absorb white culture, and in time some Native American tribes came to own African slaves. They were the most receptive to whites' pressures to adopt European cultures. The pressures from European Americans to assimilate, the economic shift of furs and deerskins, and the government's continued attempts to "civilize" native tribes in the south led to them adopting an economy based on agriculture. A small number of Catawba owned Black slaves as well. Slavery itself was not a new concept to indigenous American peoples as in inter-Native American conflict tribes often kept prisoners of war, but these captures often replaced slain tribe members. Native Americans did not originally distinguish between groups of people based on color, but rather traditions. There are conflicting theories as to what caused the shift between traditional Native American servitude and the enslavement the Five Civilized Tribes adopted. One theory is that the "civilized" tribes adopted slavery as a means to defend themselves from federal pressure believing that it would help them maintain their southern lands. American Civil War Native American groups differed in their attitudes during the American Civil War. Some of those who fought in the war served the Confederacy, in part to protect slavery in their territories and also because the Confederate government had promised to recognize an independent Native American country after the war. Other traditionalist groups, such as Pin Indians and the intertribal Four Mothers Society, were outspoken opponents of slavery during the war. ==See also==