Native-American Slavery and Territoriality in the Colonial Upper Great Lakes Region

Abstract

Studies of slavery in the Great Lakes region have general^ focused on African, rather than on Native-American slavery, and compared northern and southern institutions, touching only briefly on the importance of Indian slavery in the development of bound labor around the Great Lakes. Because of the strong interest in African-American history, in North America slavery has been viewed quite literally as a <cblack-and-white issue. This emphasis on African-American slavery obscures the crucial role that Native-American slavery and Native-American/white relations played in the labor systems of the Great Lakes region. Indian slavery, more familiar in South America, has been regarded as an offshoot of captivity in North America. Certainly, the enslavement of native peoples grew out of precontact captivity practices that were exacerbated by the introduction of European chattel slavery in the region. Indeed, demand for slaves and the value that the French placed on captives inspired some native groups, including the Foxes, Sioux, Ojibwas, and Iowas, to make war on their neighbors with the intent of gaining the material and economic benefits resulting from the slave trade.1 Russell M. Magnaghi has shown the vibrancy and resiliency of Indian slavery within the Great Lakes region, both in terms of the trade in slaves east to the St. Lawrence River Valley via Fort Michilimackinac and in their use as domestics or as laborers in the fur trade. It was only through the abolition of slavery in Upper Canada and the qualified enforcement of the Northwest Ordinance that Indian slavery eventually vanished from the upper Midwest. Yet most studies of Great Lakes slavery focus on French and British concepts of bound labor drawn from plantation slavery in the Atlantic world.