In many cases, Indigenous enslavement adds new dimensions to familiar histories of the Americas—and to some of their most famous actors. Christopher Columbus sold hundreds of Indians into slavery in Europe. Hernán Cortés owned hundreds of enslaved Indigenous people, more than anyone else in Mexico. The Pueblo Revolt, in 1680, during which Indians destroyed missions and churches and renounced their baptisms and Christian marriages, was a rebellion against the widespread enslavement of Pueblo Indians as much as it was a rejection of the Catholic Church. Tituba, one of the first women accused of being a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, was described by nineteenth-century chroniclers as a Black woman. Historians today, based on their readings of seventeenth-century documents, believe that she was an enslaved Indigenous woman from the Caribbean or South America. For Rael-Gálvez and other scholars, Indigenous slavery expands our understanding of the history of human bondage—who its victims were, where it took place, what it looked like, and when it ended.
Native Bound Unbound grew out of more than three decades of research by Rael-Gálvez into the history of Indigenous slavery. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, he created a database of thousands of Indigenous slaves held in Colorado and New Mexico. By the time he graduated, in 2002, he had begun a job as the state historian of New Mexico. Then, in 2009, he became the executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, in Albuquerque. In 2022, he began the Native Bound Unbound project, with a grant from the Mellon Foundation that allowed him to hire a team of students, professors, genealogists, and archivists to search for records of enslavement across the Americas. Researchers have since collected an abundance of materials which have revealed traces of the lives of enslaved Indians. They’ve dug deeply in some places, but not at all in others. “We have only just begun work that will extend across generations,” Rael-Gálvez told me.
The establishment of Native Bound Unbound coincided with a boom in scholarship on Indigenous slavery, much of which has focussed on specific regions in Latin America and the United States. An exception was Reséndez’s 2016 book, “The Other Slavery,” which took a more panoramic view of Indigenous slavery, from before the Spanish conquest up to the early twentieth century. “The Other Slavery” aimed to increase awareness of Native American slavery in the same way that Native Bound Unbound aspires to do. And yet, as Philip Deloria, a historian at Harvard, recently said on the podcast “Native America Calling,” “It’s been very hard to think about the ways that we can expand the narrative of Indigenous enslavement. . . . I can list off four or five or six really good books—academic books—on Indigenous enslavement that don’t seem to have made any difference in terms of the way that we think about the narrative.”
Deloria explained, “When we talk about slavery, we think about white columns, plantations in the Southeast, and African American slavery.” In fact, when African and Indigenous slavery are viewed together, it is easy to see how intertwined they are. The researchers at Native Bound Unbound have uncovered instances of African and Indigenous slaves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries working side by side in Latin American mines. Micaela Wiehe, a Native Bound Unbound researcher and Ph.D. student at Penn State, found marriage records from the sixteenth century, in and around Mexico City, which show unions between enslaved Indians and enslaved Africans. Boston newspapers in the early nineteenth century announced the escape of Indigenous slaves alongside African slaves. The Native Bound Unbound research team learned of a Black-presenting Choctaw man named Spence Johnson, who was captured in Oklahoma and taken to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was sold into slavery. He was freed after the Civil War, and spent the rest of his life in Waco, Texas. Julio Rojas Rodríguez, a doctoral candidate at El Colegio de México, who works for Native Bound Unbound and teaches history at the Cambridge School in Dallas, told me about a Cuban slave trader named Francisco Martí y Torrens who led expeditions to Africa and Mexico, where he purchased slaves and abducted previously free people to work on Cuba’s sugar plantations. To Rojas Rodríguez, figures such as Martí demonstrate how African and Indigenous enslavement “are part of the same big story—the story of slavery, the slave trade, and the replacement of slavery by new forms of coercive labor.”
