Indian Slavery in Colonial America (review)

Slavery is an essential part of the American past. Usually the term evokes images of black Africans forced from their homes, shipped across the Atlantic in horrendous conditions, and working in the fields of wealthy whites in the southern slave economy. American Indians hardly matter in this story, but they should. The eleven essays in this volume demonstrate how slavery had a significant impact on the lives of native peoples across the continent in the era of European imperialist expansion. As Europeans connected new regions to the global market economy, they instigated a violent period of displacement, ethnogenesis, and extermination. Local balances of power and alliance networks shifted and took new forms as indigenous groups defended their own from enslavers and engaged one another in fierce competition for slaves and trade opportunities. At some point in time most indigenous groups became slave raiders, their targets, or both.

Indicating a tilted balance in the book, six essays focus on southeastern Indians. C. S. Everett explains how the enslavement of thousands of American Indians by Virginians preceded the mass importation of Africans, Alan Gallay places the foundations of South Carolina's African slave society in the enslavement of native peoples, and Joseph Hall and Jennifer Baszile chart Apalachicola and Apalachee responses and strategies. Denise Bossy discusses how Indian slavery was rooted on European traditions of purchasing bound labor and on indigenous practices of taking war captives, while Robert Ethridge analyzes the rise of the Chickasaws as a militaristic slaving societies. In all, the southern essays skillfully explain the complex economic (slaves as commodities and laborers), political (the concept of "just war," slavery as instrument of revenge and insult), and gendered (captive adoption, the impacts of enslaving women in matrilineal and matrilocal systems, slavery as empowerment or emasculation) significances of slavery in a specific region.

That Indian slavery was not a single straightforward system of exploitation but something of a fusion of practices and meanings is further demonstrated by the essays of Margaret Ellen Newell, Brett Rushforth, and E. A. S. Demers, which concern the shapes of Indian slavery in New England, New France, and Michilimackinac, respectively. Juliana Barr and James Brooks excavate the connotations of unfreedom in the southwestern borderlands. Barr describes how the outmatched and relatively weak Spanish in Texas never established a large-scale trade or labor system in Indian slaves. The situation in Texas differed not only from the British Southeast or French Louisiana but also from New Mexico, where, James Brooks explains, captive-raiding, enslavement of Indians, and slave labor played a central role in the formation of kinship and multiethnic communities. In Texas, native refugees escaping slave-raiding in nearby European provinces formed confederated communities that drew Spanish missions and presidios into the area by the early 1700s. Shortly thereafter Texas settlements became a target for Great Plains native groups like the Apaches and Comanches raiding for captives for trade in New Mexico and Louisiana. Seeking to defend themselves and to challenge the indigenous groups for dominance, the Spanish in turn engaged in retaliatory hostage taking and deportation of captives.

The essays in this book are interesting, insightful, fluently written, and thoroughly researched. For a better understanding of the "big picture" of Indian slavery, the book could have benefited from the inclusion of nineteenth-century America. When the United States took control of the continent, Indian slavery did not disappear overnight, but took new appearances. For example, still in the late 1800s the U.S. Army practiced a form of captive adoption in Arizona and elsewhere, taking native children from battlefields and keeping them as house servants, often against the will of the captured. As it stands, this collection brings much needed scholarly attention to the many faces of Indian slavery and hopefully indicates a growing interest on an exciting topic.