Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America (review)

Slavery is an age-old practice, its presence known in almost every civilization. In recent years, the topic of slavery among the southeastern Indians has received a great deal of interest. Historians and anthropologists have presented many accounts detailing the intricacies of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth-century Indian slave trade and the participation in the American system of chattel slavery by members of the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, and Creek tribes in the nineteenth century. In Slavery in Indian Country, Christina Snyder presents a cultural and intellectual understanding of how traditional Indian slavery and American chattel slavery were part of a longer continuum in the evolution of native concepts about captivity. According to Snyder, "captivity was not a static institution for Indians, but rather a practice that they adapted over time to meet changing needs and circumstances" (p. 4). Snyder demonstrates that although slavery existed among southern Indians well before the arrival of Europeans, it did not become an economic system of labor defined by race until Native Americans faced Americans' unquenchable thirst for land at the turn of the nineteenth century.

Snyder presents her study in eight chronological chapters. She begins in pre-Columbian times, guiding the reader through the foundations of southeastern Indian culture. Here she underscores the importance of kinship in these societies. "Captivity operated on a continuum that ranged from adoption on one end to slavery on the other, and the practice's adaptability explains its longevity" (pp. 44-45). The fate awaiting captives, dating from precolonial chiefdoms to the emerging nations of the early nineteenth century, therefore, depended largely on the role their new masters intended them to fulfill. In the precolonial era, captives enhanced the power and prestige of chiefs. Just before and in the aftermath of the Columbian Encounter, these chiefdoms fell apart. Disease and involvement in the Atlantic slave trade exacerbated the dissolution. After the break-up of chiefdoms, native peoples identified more with their kinship group or town, which magnified the divide between captive and kin.

Although contact with Europeans exacerbated the practice, the meaning behind captive-taking still found justification in clearly native meanings. As Snyder states, "the slave trade significantly enhanced the scale of captive exchange, but older notions of captivity did not simply vanish as a new slave market arose" (p. 76). Aggressive native groups, such as the Chickasaws, acquired captives not only as barter for the new European native market but also to bolster their emerging nation's population base and strength. In the fallout of the Indian slave trade, natives and newcomers continued to engage in violent conflict as Europeans and their African American slaves moved into the interior South in increasing numbers. In this emerging world of red, white, and black, however, Snyder provides multiple examples to show that during the eighteenth century native groups took captives without regard to skin color, and that the condition of those left in slavery was not inheritable. Neither apologetic nor condemning, Snyder admits that "native slavery could be dehumanizing—and even serve commercial ends—but it was also [still] a mutable, transitory state without basis in phenotype" (p. 151).

As previous scholars have shown, however, slavery in Indian Country eventually resembled the system of American slavery. Snyder situates the final transition of native notions of captivity in the wake of the American Revolution. In the early Republic, pan-Indian movements helped forge a racial identity among Native Americans. Native peoples developed a racial hierarchy, which incorporated white notions that blacks belonged at the bottom, to combat American encroachment and emerging notions of racial superiority. Although most captives by this time were black, Snyder refutes the notion that southern Indians had completely adopted the Peculiar Institution. In her final chapter, Snyder uses the unique relationship between Seminoles and African Americans to drive the point home that "two different captivity traditions merged in Indian country, where Native rules of...