Skip to content
ADVERTISEMENT
Sign In
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
  • More
  • Sections
    • News
    • Advice
    • The Review
  • Topics
    • Data
    • Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion
    • Finance & Operations
    • International
    • Leadership & Governance
    • Teaching & Learning
    • Scholarship & Research
    • Student Success
    • Technology
    • Transitions
    • The Workplace
  • Magazine
    • Current Issue
    • Special Issues
    • Podcast: College Matters from The Chronicle
  • Newsletters
  • Events
    • Virtual Events
    • Chronicle On-The-Road
    • Professional Development
  • Ask Chron
  • Store
    • Featured Products
    • Reports
    • Data
    • Collections
    • Back Issues
  • Jobs
    • Find a Job
    • Post a Job
    • Professional Development
    • Career Resources
    • Virtual Career Fair
    Upcoming Events:
    College Advising
    Serving Higher Ed
    Chronicle Festival 2025
Sign In
The Review

The Forgotten Slaves

By Margaret Ellen Newell December 11, 2016
A line engraving depicts a captured Native American being sent into slavery by colonists in the 17th century.
A line engraving depicts a captured Native American being sent into slavery by colonists in the 17th century. The Granger Collection, New York

Ruthless European slave traders emptying villages and forcing terrified victims onto ships bound for the Atlantic. Lines of chained humans marching toward slave markets under the watchful eyes of armed guards. Violent slave owners using torture and rape to force more work out of their captives.

To continue reading for FREE, please sign in.

Sign In

Or subscribe now to read with unlimited access for as low as $10/month.

Don’t have an account? Sign up now.

A free account provides you access to a limited number of free articles each month, plus newsletters, job postings, salary data, and exclusive store discounts.

Sign Up

A line engraving depicts a captured Native American being sent into slavery by colonists in the 17th century.
A line engraving depicts a captured Native American being sent into slavery by colonists in the 17th century. The Granger Collection, New York

Ruthless European slave traders emptying villages and forcing terrified victims onto ships bound for the Atlantic. Lines of chained humans marching toward slave markets under the watchful eyes of armed guards. Violent slave owners using torture and rape to force more work out of their captives.

These searing images might bring to mind the terrible history of African slavery in the United States. But in fact they describe historical events in the Bahamas, Central Mexico, and the American continent’s Western frontier — and the slaves were Indians.

In popular culture and in scholarship, slavery is having a moment. Racial strife in the present is drawing new attention to the racialized injustice and inequality in our past. Recent and acclaimed books by Edward Baptist, Sven Beckert, and Walter Johnson have illuminated the economic calculations behind planter cruelty and the connections among slavery, capitalism, and American expansion. But these books, and movies like 12 Years a Slave, have also reinforced the popular “black and white” image of slavery — an injustice perpetrated by whites against Africans and their descendants, mainly in the antebellum South.

REVIEW

The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America,
by Andrés Reséndez

(Houghton Mifflin Harcourt)

This image is about to change, thanks to a slew of works on Native American slavery, a relatively new field that gained energy from the explosion of interest in American Indian studies since the 1980s. Recent research has shown us that most enslaved persons in the Americas before 1700 were Indians; that Indians constituted a sizable proportion of the global slave population thereafter; and that Europeans enslaved Indians from Quebec to New Orleans, and from New England to the Carolinas. Works such as Pekka Hämäläinen’s The Comanche Empire (Yale University Press) have explored changing traditions of slavery within Native American societies, while other scholars, notably Alan Gallay and Brett Rushforth, have tackled the enslavement of Indians by French and English colonists.

Still, huge gaps in our understanding remain. In his beautifully written (and National Book Award-nominated) The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America, Andrés Reséndez offers a tour-de-force account of the enslavement of Indians in the New World, and in the process broadens our definitions of slavery. Part of the challenge of the subject is that Indian servitude took many forms, making victims hard to identify in the records. Reséndez, a professor at the University of California at Davis, offers a capacious but defensible definition, including peonage; rebels sentenced to servitude; orphans and vagrants bound to service; victims of the mita (a forced labor quota imposed on Indian villages); and ostensibly free wage laborers whose employers never paid them.

Using this definition, Reséndez estimates the number of Indian slaves in the Americas at between 2.5 million and 5 million — fewer than the approximately 12.5 million Africans enslaved between the 15th century and the late 19th century, but a staggering number nonetheless. Moreover, he argues that population loss due to enslavement was in fact much greater in the Americas than in Africa. Slavery, not merely epidemic disease, was the primary cause of the high mortality rates of 70 percent to 90 percent that some Indian societies experienced.

In revealing the centrality of slavery to colonization, The Other Slavery amounts to a searing indictment of empire. Starting with Christopher Columbus, who touted enslavement as a way of financing empire, successive waves of conquistadores and colonizers profited from the trade in humans. Some, including Columbus, exported Indians to the Old World in a “reverse middle passage,” but the vast majority of the enslaved remained in the Americas.

Reséndez describes the boomtown mining centers of Mexico, notably Parral, which spurred a trade in slaves over a thousand-mile radius and even reached into the Philippines. Two hundred years later, California Gold Rush entrepreneurs such as John Sutter also exploited female Indian labor. Even the Euro-Americans determined to eschew Indian slavery — including Jesuit missionaries, the Mormons, Kit Carson, and the U.S. Army — ended up participating in it. Missions in Sonora became militarized presidios that enslaved and relocated thousands of Seri Indians. Brigham Young eventually temporized with a law that permitted Mormons to “ransom” captive children and hold them in bondage for 20 years.

ADVERTISEMENT

One of Reséndez’s major contributions is his pursuit of the story of Indian slavery from Spanish America north into the 19th- and 20th-century United States, showing the continuities. Involuntary servitude continued in California and the Southwest even after the Civil War. Reséndez implies that “the other slavery” didn’t end until well into the 20th century because its many forms made it difficult to stop via statute, and because too many landowners had a stake in its continuance.

The book arrives amid a lively debate over slavery and capitalism. While Eric Williams’s 1944 Capitalism and Slavery (University of North Carolina Press) suggested that the African slave trade capitalized British industrialization, The Other Slavery reveals that Indian slavery funded colonization itself. Moreover, since Indian slavery flourished from large industries to small households and farms, Reséndez’s work opens up new paths for thinking about how slavery made it possible for many Americans — not just big planters — to participate in the market revolution.

The long story of Indian slavery also speaks to the persistence of unfree labor within ostensibly free-labor capitalist economies. Reséndez concludes that today’s human trafficking and the exploitation of immigrant workers are the direct heirs of the practices he traces.

The book leaves the reader with lingering questions, especially regarding gender and race. Most Indian slaves were female in Spanish America, with women commanding higher prices than men. Was this a testimony to the importance of female labor or an indicator that Indian women’s sexual services were a key element of the slave trade?

ADVERTISEMENT

And how did Native American slavery factor into the emerging racial order in America? Since gender and ethnicity surely play a role in whom society targets for abuse, we need to better understand how Indian slavery shaped Americans’ ideas about race and class, and vice versa.

Such questions are a testament to how much The Other Slavery has widened the field’s vistas. A rich, ambitious book that everyone in the field is talking about, Reséndez’s work proves that Indian slavery was an essential part of the American story from the beginning. That puts it in the heart of our continuing conversation about the legacy of slavery in the Americas, in company with Michelle Alexander’s The New Jim Crow (The New Press) and Ava DuVernay’s documentary 13th, works that examine other forms of unfreedom.

Indian slaves helped build America, at a terrible cost. Their story deserves telling.

Margaret Ellen Newell is a professor of history at Ohio State University and the author of Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery (Cornell University Press, 2015).

A version of this article appeared in the December 16, 2016, issue.
We welcome your thoughts and questions about this article. Please email the editors or submit a letter for publication.
Share
  • Twitter
  • LinkedIn
  • Facebook
  • Email
ADVERTISEMENT
ADVERTISEMENT

Related Content

Slavery and Capitalism
Turning West, Historians Take a Wider View of Early America
For Native Students, Education’s Promise Has Long Been Broken

More News

Vector illustration of large open scissors  with several workers in seats dangling by white lines
Iced Out
Duke Administrators Accused of Bypassing Shared-Governance Process in Offering Buyouts
Illustration showing money being funnelled into the top of a microscope.
'A New Era'
Higher-Ed Associations Pitch an Alternative to Trump’s Cap on Research Funding
Illustration showing classical columns of various heights, each turning into a stack of coins
Endowment funds
The Nation’s Wealthiest Small Colleges Just Won a Big Tax Exemption
WASHINGTON, DISTICT OF COLUMBIA, UNITED STATES - 2025/04/14: A Pro-Palestinian demonstrator holding a sign with Release Mahmud Khalil written on it, stands in front of the ICE building while joining in a protest. Pro-Palestinian demonstrators rally in front of the ICE building, demanding freedom for Mahmoud Khalil and all those targeted for speaking out against genocide in Palestine. Protesters demand an end to U.S. complicity and solidarity with the resistance in Gaza. (Photo by Probal Rashid/LightRocket via Getty Images)
Campus Activism
An Anonymous Group’s List of Purported Critics of Israel Helped Steer a U.S. Crackdown on Student Activists

From The Review

John T. Scopes as he stood before the judges stand and was sentenced, July 2025.
The Review | Essay
100 Years Ago, the Scopes Monkey Trial Discovered Academic Freedom
By John K. Wilson
Vector illustration of a suited man with a pair of scissors for a tie and an American flag button on his lapel.
The Review | Opinion
A Damaging Endowment Tax Crosses the Finish Line
By Phillip Levine
University of Virginia President Jim Ryan keeps his emotions in check during a news conference, Monday, Nov. 14, 2022 in Charlottesville. Va. Authorities say three people have been killed and two others were wounded in a shooting at the University of Virginia and a student is in custody. (AP Photo/Steve Helber)
The Review | Opinion
Jim Ryan’s Resignation Is a Warning
By Robert Zaretsky

Upcoming Events

07-31-Turbulent-Workday_assets v2_Plain.png
Keeping Your Institution Moving Forward in Turbulent Times
Ascendium_Housing_Plain.png
What It Really Takes to Serve Students’ Basic Needs: Housing
Lead With Insight
  • Explore Content
    • Latest News
    • Newsletters
    • Letters
    • Free Reports and Guides
    • Professional Development
    • Events
    • Chronicle Store
    • Chronicle Intelligence
    • Jobs in Higher Education
    • Post a Job
  • Know The Chronicle
    • About Us
    • Vision, Mission, Values
    • DEI at The Chronicle
    • Write for Us
    • Work at The Chronicle
    • Our Reporting Process
    • Advertise With Us
    • Brand Studio
    • Accessibility Statement
  • Account and Access
    • Manage Your Account
    • Manage Newsletters
    • Individual Subscriptions
    • Group and Institutional Access
    • Subscription & Account FAQ
  • Get Support
    • Contact Us
    • Reprints & Permissions
    • User Agreement
    • Terms and Conditions
    • Privacy Policy
    • California Privacy Policy
    • Do Not Sell My Personal Information
1255 23rd Street, N.W. Washington, D.C. 20037
© 2025 The Chronicle of Higher Education
The Chronicle of Higher Education is academe’s most trusted resource for independent journalism, career development, and forward-looking intelligence. Our readers lead, teach, learn, and innovate with insights from The Chronicle.
Follow Us
  • twitter
  • instagram
  • youtube
  • facebook
  • linkedin