Indigenous Slavery in the Caribbean

Abstract

From 1492 until the 19th century, Spanish, French, English, and Dutch colonists enslaved hundreds of thousands of Native Americans and forced them to toil in the West Indies. The history of enslaving Indigenous peoples in the Americas has mostly been obfuscated by colonial European record-keeping practices. Indeed, the written records relegate Native slaves to a profound silence and invisibility, similar to archival erasures of enslaved Africans. While the methodological dilemmas of this topic are significant, there is a growing scholarship focused on Indigenous slavery in the Caribbean. The emerging historiography demonstrates how regional and international Indian slave trades were significant to the development of European colonies in the Americas and how Indian slave trades connected European colonies across national and geographic boundaries. The centuries-long legacy of enslavement and dispossession continues to impact Indigenous communities, often in negative ways. Yet despite all the horrors and violence of slavery, there has been a remarkable resurgence of Indigenous identities, communities, and political movements in the 21st-century circum-Caribbean.