Slavery among Native Americans in the United States
[5][6] Other slave-owning tribes of North America were, for example, Comanche[7] 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.
[2][3] Others, however, would stake themselves in gambling situations when they had nothing else, which would put them into servitude for a short time, or in some cases for life; captives were also sometimes tortured as part of religious rites, which sometimes involved ritual cannibalism.
[2][3] Adoptees were expected to fill the economic, military, and familial roles of the departed loved ones, to fit into the societal shoes of the dead relative, and maintain the spirit power of the tribe.
In the cultural practices of the Iroquoian peoples, also rooted in a matrilineal system with men and women having equal value, any child would have the status determined by the woman's clan.
[2] Other slave-owning tribes of North America included the Comanche of Texas; the Creek of Georgia; the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, who lived in Northern California; the Pawnee; and the Klamath.
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.
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.
[26] 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.
[29] The precise legal status for some Native Americans is at times difficult to establish, as involuntary servitude and slavery were poorly defined in 17th-century British North America.
[3][26] Especially in the southern colonies, initially developed for resource exploitation rather than settlement, colonists purchased or captured Native Americans to be used as forced labor in cultivating tobacco, and, by the eighteenth century, rice, and indigo.
[34] Traded goods, such as axes, bronze kettles, Caribbean rum, European jewelry, needles, and scissors, varied among the tribes, but the most prized were rifles.
[36] Virginia would later declare that "Indians, Mulattos, and Negros to be real estate", and in 1682, New York forbade African or Native American slaves from leaving their master's home or plantation without permission.
[34] Furthermore, Rhode Island also participated in the enslavement of Native Americans, but records are incomplete or non-existent, making the exact number of slaves unknown.
[26] In 1676, Massachusetts Bay Colony treasurer John Hull arranged public sales of at least 185 Native American captives from King Philip's War into slavery.
[2] In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, the English at Charles Town (in modern South Carolina), the Spanish in Florida, and the French in Louisiana sought trading partners and allies among the Native Americans by offering goods such as metal knives, axes, firearms and ammunition, liquor, beads, cloth, and hats in exchange for furs (deerskins) and Native American slaves.
[35][38] In 1680, proprietors ordered the Carolina government to ensure that enslaved Native Americans had equal justice[further explanation needed] and to treat them better than African slaves; these regulations were widely publicized, so no one could claim ignorance of them.
[38] During this era it was not uncommon for reward notices in colonial newspapers to mention runaway slaves speaking of Africans, Native Americans, and those of a partial mix between them.
[3] Those Native Americans nearer to European colonial settlements raided tribes farther into the interior in the quest for slaves to be sold, especially to British colonists in Carolina.
[23] In North Carolina, the Tuscarora, fearing among other things that encroaching English colonists planned to enslave them as well as take their land, attacked them in a war that lasted from 1711 to 1713.
[3][23] Numerous colonial slave traders had been killed in the fighting, and the remaining Native American groups banded together, more determined to face the Europeans from a position of strength rather than be enslaved.
[26][38] Many of the Native American remnant tribes joined confederacies such as the Choctaw, the Creek, and the Catawba for protection, making them less easy victims of European slavers.
[51] 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 sixteenth century.
[55] 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.
[57] 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.
[65]: 272 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.
[36][26][71] "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.
[3][4] The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole made the largest efforts of all the Native American peoples to assimilate into white society by implementing some of the practices which they saw as beneficial; adoption of slavery was one of them.
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.
[80] In either case, "The system of racial classification and hierarchy took shape as Europeans and Euro-Americans sought to subordinate and exploit Native Americans' and Africans' land, bodies, and labor.
[82][78] Some Native Americans may have had a strong dislike of slavery, because they too were seen as a people of a subordinate race than whites of European descent, they lacked the political power to influence the racialistic culture that pervaded the Non-Indian South.
