Slavery among Native Americans in the United States

Slavery among Native Americans in the United States includes slavery by Native Americans as well as slavery of Native Americans roughly within the present-day United States. Tribal territories and the slave trade ranged over present-day borders. Some Native American tribes held war captives as slaves prior to and during European colonization, some Native Americans were captured and sold by others into slavery to Europeans, and a small number of tribes, in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, adopted the practice of holding slaves as chattel property and held increasing numbers of African-American slaves.

Pre-contact forms of slavery were generally distinct from the form of chattel slavery developed by Europeans in North America during the colonial period. European influence greatly changed slavery used by Native Americans. As they raided other tribes to capture slaves for sales to Europeans, they fell into destructive wars among themselves, and against Europeans.

Many Native American tribes practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America; but none exploited slave labor on a large scale.

Native American groups often enslaved war captives whom they primarily used for small-scale labor. Others however, were used in ritual sacrifice, usually involving torture as part of religious rites, and these sometimes involved ritual cannibalism.

There is little evidence that the slaveholders considered the slaves as racially inferior; they came from other Native American tribes and were casualties of war. Native Americans did not buy and sell captives in the pre-colonial era, although they sometimes exchanged enslaved individuals with other tribes in peace gestures or in exchange for redeeming their own members. Most of these so-called Native American slaves tended to live on the fringes of Native American society and were slowly integrated into the tribe. The word "slave" may not accurately apply to such captive people, for all the Iroquoian peoples (not just the Iroquois tribes) adopted captives, but for religious reasons, there was a process, procedures and a couple of seasons when such adoptions were delayed until the proper spiritual times. Such delayed adoptees, were held to add to the spiritual power of the clan group, and while performing forced labor as part of their ritual rebirth, were actually the antithesis of slaves in the white mans world.

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