Essay On Native American Slavery

Often over looked in the history of colonial slavery is the impact of Native American slaves. Consequently, the most widely perceived view is Native slaves proved to be a less profitable endeavor than African American slaves, and therefore had little impact on the institution. Evidence points to the contrary. The use of Native Americans as slaves was an important part of the slave trading history of the Americas and deserves to be told. Examining the works of two historians who composed books on the Native American slave trade, it is easy to see just how varied and complex the use of Native slaves in the western hemisphere was. As a result, there is no uniformly accepted narrative available from which to tell, therefore no story is told.
There have been many attempts to create a cohesive story, but a consensus has been proven difficult. This essay is aimed at highlighting two of those attempts. Dr. Brett Rushforth endeavors to tell one version of Native American slavery by focusing on Native Americans and French colonialist in the Pays d’en Haut. Dr. Rushforth, an associate professor at …show more content…
Allan Gallay, professor of history at Texas Christian University, tells a completely different version in his book The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South 1670-1717. He paints a much more manipulative version of Native American slavery than Dr. Rushforth. While using a different method to convey his research Dr, Gallay does highlight some of the same points made in Rushforth’s book. He describes how most imperialist saw Natives differently than Africans. Europeans saw Natives as instinctly free people, not meant for enslavement, but Africans as bred for captivity. Although they shared similarities in their views on Natives and Africans, the types of settlements created in British controlled colonies was very different from the settlements found in New France, for this reason different conflicts and different relationships were