Native American slave ownership refers to the ownership of enslaved people by Native Americans from the colonial period to the American Civil War. Waves of European colonization (and the concurrent Atlantic slave trade) brought enslaved Africans to North America. Following this development many indigenous tribes began to acquire Africans as slaves. Many prominent people from the "Five Civilized Tribes" purchased slaves from their white neighbors and became members of the planter class.
The 1863 Emancipation Proclamation only applied to States in rebellion, and did not legally affect slavery in Native American areas that fought for the Confederate States of America. All slaves in the United States were legally emancipated upon the ratification of the 13th Amendment on December 6, 1865, just after the American Civil War. In practice, slavery continued in some Native American territories. The federal government negotiated new treaties with the "Five Civilized Tribes" in 1866, in which they agreed to end slavery.
Background
Holding humans in slavery was not a new concept to indigenous American peoples - in inter-Native American conflict tribes often kept prisoners-of-war, and these captives often replaced slain tribe-members. Intra-indigenous slavery also occurred in the Pacific Northwest and in Alaska, where it persisted until the late-19th century. Because prior to European contact, Native American practices of slavery largely arose from such inter-tribal conflict (rather than from purely economic exploitation) indigenous perspectives on the enslavement of Africans differed from more industrial European paradigms of slavery.
However, not all Indians slaves became slaves via warfare: an indigenous person could gamble away the rights to his own person, and thus become the slave of another Indian, or they could inherit enslavement, and thus be born slaves.
African Americans and Native Americans have interacted for centuries. The earliest record of Native American and African contact occurred in April 1502, when Spanish colonists transported the first Africans to Hispaniola to be held and work in slavery.Muslims in American History : A Forgotten Legacy by Dr. Jerald F. Dirks. p. 204. Some scholars argue that because of similarities between some African and Native American cultural artifacts, the two groups likely had transatlantic encounters before European discovery of the Americas - this has not however been proved. Regardless, by the 18th century, the holding of Africans in slavery by and with Native Americans became substantial in colonial America.
Native Americans and Africans had many interactions as parallel oppressed communities. Before the jump-start of the Atlantic slave trade, some European settlers enslaved many Native Americans, and major European-held colonies such as Virginia and South Carolina enslaved thousands (30,000-53,000) of Native Americans in the late 1600s through the 1700s with the occurrence of enslavement continuing into the 1800s.
Andrés Reséndez estimates that between 147,000 and 340,000 Native Americans were enslaved in North America, excluding Mexico. According to the National Park Service, "Native Americans, during the transitional period of Africans becoming the primary race enslaved, were enslaved at the same time and shared a common experience of enslavement. 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 of a shortage of men due to warfare, many tribes encouraged marriage between the two groups, to create stronger, healthier children from the unions.
However, Europeans considered both races inferior and made efforts to make both Native Americans and Africans enemies. Because of European fears of a unified revolt of Native Americans and African Americans, the colonists encouraged hostility between the ethnic groups: "Whites sought to convince Native Americans that African Americans worked against their best interests."Red, White, and Black, p. 105, . In 1751, South Carolina law stated: "The carrying of Negroes among the Indians has all along been thought detrimental, as an intimacy ought to be avoided." In addition, in 1758 the governor of South Carolina James Glen wrote: it has always been the policy of this government to create an aversion in them Indians to Negroes.
Even though the native Indians kept and worked black slaves, sometimes Native Americans resented the presence of African Americans.Red, White, and Black, p. 99. . The "Catawaba tribe in 1752 showed great anger and bitter resentment when an African American came among them as a trader." To gain favor with Europeans, the Cherokee exhibited the strongest color-prejudice of all Native Americans.Red, White, and Black, p. 99, .
Native Americans were rewarded if they returned people who had escaped from slavery, and African-Americans were rewarded for fighting in the late 19th-century Indian Wars.
Africans held in slavery replaced Native American enslavement and eventually many Native Americans were pushed off their land and forced to move westward. There are many examples of this forced removal, but one of the most famous was the Trail of Tears (1830s and 1840s) that forced people of the Cherokee nation and other tribes to move to present-day Oklahoma. The Cherokee took their black slaves on the Trail, or shipped their slaves by boat.
Indian slavers of Indians Large-scale indian slaving with modern weapons —in which Indians would raid other Indians to capture slaves— took place for around a century, from about 1620 to 1720. The main slavers were the Occaneechees, Westos, Chiscas, Chickasaws, and Iroquois; these have been defined as “militaristic slaving societies". Their territory was Eastern North America. The consequences of their slave raiding included “widespread dislocation, migration, amalgamation, and, in some cases, extinction of Native peoples”.
The Comanche and a few other Indian nations are considered “slave societies” with slaves constituting over 20% of the population, comparable to Rome, Greece, Portuguese America, and others.
Indian enslavement of Europeans during the era of European colonial rule Records of Indian enslavement of Europeans begin in 1528.
Enslavement of people of African origin
Indigenous Indians created well-structured networks to trade black slaves among themselves and with the colonists. There are conflicting theories as to what caused the shift between traditional Native American servitude, to the oppressive racialized enslavement adopted by the Five Civilized tribes. One theory is the civilized tribes adopted slavery as means to defend themselves from federal pressure, believing that it would help them maintain their southern lands. In this effort to avoid removal, some Native American tribes attempted to assimilate into white European society through strategies such as formal schooling, adopting Christianity, moving off the reservation, or even owning slaves. They were the most receptive to white pressures to adopt European cultures.
In the nineteenth century, European Americans began to migrate west from the coastal areas, and encroach on tribal lands, sometimes in violation of existing treaties. Bands along the frontier, in closer contact with traders and settlers, tended to become more assimilated, often led by chiefs who believed they needed to change to accommodate a new society; indeed, some chiefs were mixed-race and were related to elected American officials. Other chiefs had been educated in American schools, and had learned American language and culture.
Educated individuals mixed with European heritage were the most likely to become slaveholders and adopt other European practices. Others of their people, often located at more of a distance, held to more traditional practices, and such cultural divisions were the cause of conflict, for instance the Creek Wars (1812–1813) and similar tensions suffered by other Southeast tribes.
Another narrative postulates that Native Americans began to feed into the European belief that Africans were somehow inferior to whites and themselves. Some indigenous nations such as the Chickasaws and the Choctaws began to embrace the concept that African bodies were property, and equated blackness to hereditary inferiority. 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. Whether strategically or racially motivated the trade of humans promoted interactions between the "Five Civilized Tribes" and Africans held in slavery which led to new power relations among Native societies, elevating groups such as the Five Civilized Tribes to power and serving, ironically, to preserve native order.
The writer William Loren Katz suggests that Native Americans treated the people they held in slavery better than European Americans in the Southeast. Travelers reported enslaved Africans "in as good circumstances as their masters." A white Indian Agent, Douglas Cooper, upset by the Native Americans failure to practice a harsher form of bondage, insisted that Native Americans invite white men to live in their villages and "control matters." One observer in the early 1840s wrote, "The full-blood Indian rarely works himself and but few of them make their slaves work. A slave among wild Indians is almost as free as his owner." Frederick Douglass stated in 1850, "the slave finds more of the milk of human kindness in the bosom of the savage Indian, than in the heart of his Christian master. But references to indigenous peoples' kindness were generally to the sanctuary offered by underground railroads operated by non-slaveholding Native Americans -- not to Native Americans who kept people in slavery.
In contrast to whites who profited from keeping people enslaved for labor, Native Americans who enslaved people didn't use justifications for slavery nor maintain a fictional view of seeing the enslaved people they held captive as part of the family. However, the status of enslaved individuals could change if captors adopted or married an enslaved African American, but enslaved people as a whole had always been linked to their lack of kin ties. In the 18th century, many Native American women married freed or runaway African men due to a decrease in the population of men in Native American villages. Records show that many Native American women "bought" captive African men but, unknown to the European sellers, the women freed and married the men into their tribe. When African men married or had children by a Native American woman, their children were born free, because the mother was free (according to the principle of partus sequitur ventrum, which the colonists incorporated into law.)
In the 1790s, Benjamin Hawkins was assigned as the US agent to the southeastern tribes. He encouraged the major Southeast tribes to adopt chattel slavery in order to have labor for plantations and large-scale agricultural production, as part of their assimilation of European-American ways. He thought their traditional form of slavery, which had looser conditions, was less efficient than chattel slavery. However, the adoption and adaptation of Euro-American institutions did nothing to shield Native Americans from U.S. domination and created divisions within the tribes themselves. The pressures from European Americans and the U.S government to assimilate as well as the economic shift of furs and deerskins led to them adopting an economy based on agriculture.Snyder (2010), "Racial Slavery" [Ch. 7], in Slavery, pp. 182–212.