Native American Adoption, Captivity, and Slavery in Changing Contexts ed. by Max Carocci and Stephanie Pratt (review)

In commemoration of the two-hundredth anniversary of the Parliamentary Abolition of the Transatlantic Slave Trade, the British Museum hosted the Atlantic Trade and Identity season, launched in 2007 to “explor[e] transatlantic trade and its relationship to slavery, resistance and diasporas.” Carocci and Pratt collected nine essays presented on February 17 and 18, 2008, at the Adoption, Captivity, and Slavery: Changing Meanings in Colonial North America conference, held at the museum. Their decision to place Native Americans at the center of the conversation about slavery in colonial America makes this work significant on its own. They write, “Programs of museums and academic institutions concerned with this anniversary showed that, contrary to the enormous coverage of the Atlantic middle passage, there was little or no reference to the pre-African origins of the slave trade in North America either in planned publications or in research symposia then taking place. The gap seemed especially puzzling given the well-documented British involvement in slaving campaigns against Native Americans decades before a systematic and formalized plantation system was instituted in North American through African forced labor at the beginning of the eighteenth century” (2). Slavery, in the United States especially, remains a highly racialized historical moment. Many resist the stretching of historical and interpretative frameworks Carocci and Pratt propose and document in this collection.

They affirm a simple truth in their introduction: “It has been finally proven that sending Native American captives as slaves to the Caribbean islands was a common procedure among all the colonial powers. With available figures at hand Gallay calculated that the British alone sent to the West Indies more than 51,000 people before 1715 in what some have rightfully called a ‘middle passage in reverse’”(6). The implications of this truth necessarily reshape what many have come to embrace as the narrative genesis of the United States, and its independence, via the black Atlantic, from Europe. This narrative relies on the silence, invisibility, and inaccessibility of Indigenous peoples and their knowledge—silence regarded overwhelmingly complete. This silence shapes the field.

Carocci and Pratt ask readers to consider this point seriously, and reform their paradigms accordingly: “Achieving the analytical clarity necessary for a deeper understanding of social and cultural realities that may appear universally similar despite differences in time and space, or pertaining to diametrically opposed epistemologies, is an arduous task because in a tumultuous era of transformations such as North America’s colonial period a multiplicity of practices may have simultaneously lived side by side, perhaps overlapping, or even replacing, previously existing models of social integration operating among different linguistic groups” (8; emphasis mine). Their language reveals the strengths to be found in this collection and where its limitations derive.

Their commitment to analytical clarity is evident in their choice of data and organization. They declare their intentions, in their introduction, in several sections, the first titled “Framing the Field” where they affirm the need to examine the very terms of discussion: captivity, slavery, and adoption. These terms hold subtle, complex, and highly contestable meaning over disciplinary fields, speech communities, and locations. The scholars represented in this volume confine the bulk of their research to written and archaeological archives; consequently this need is particularly crucial, as they read across these meanings to shape their arguments and observations. Carocci and Pratt allow for an understanding of slavery that encompasses Lauber’s idea of a “general practice of eliciting labor from individuals who had no decision-making autonomy throughout their life” (6) as well as Brooks’s argument regarding a “fine line between kinship and slavery” (11) in partial hope of answering those who dismiss Native American slavery as failing to meet “the categorical definition of slavery as a ‘chattel-oriented system of coerced labor’” (11). Significantly they fail to account for, or introduce, Patterson’s idea of the natal isolate.

In the third section of the introduction, “The Broader Context,” they offer essential rebuttal...