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Gallay, Alan, ed. Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Lincoln: U of Nebraska P, 2009.
The last half-century has seen an explosion in the understanding of transatlantic slavery. Multiple scholars have worked laboriously to uncover the history of the African diaspora and the experiences of African slaves in the Americas. To a lesser extent, Indian slavery has also been the recent focus of historians and anthropologists, though their stories were often investigated as separate events from those of Africans. Alan Gallay challenges this methodology, claiming that while slavery existed in the Americas long before the arrival of Europeans, the international slave trade dramatically affected indigenous peoples who underwent significant political, cultural, and economic changes. Those who would study slavery without considering the native experience would learn only half-truths. "Indian slavery was not peripheral in the history of Native America," claims Gallay, "but central to the story" (3). To field the broader questions of indigenous slavery in colonial North America, Gallay has assembled a wide array of scholars whose geographic foci expand from New France along the Eastern seaboard past the Gulf region into Texas.
Margaret Ellen Newell begins with an investigation of indigenous slavery in New England, where "Chattel slavery and freedom were at opposite ends of a broad spectrum, and many Indians occupied points along that spectrum in varying degrees of unfreedom" (34). There, concepts of who could be enslaved (nonwhite, mostly African "outsiders") began to change as the Crown asserted sovereignty over the colony throughout the seventeenth century. Indians, once considered "outsiders," became legally protected "insiders." However, new forms of forced servitude arose and many Indians were unfree well into the eighteenth century.
C. S. Everett suggests a reexamination of colonial Virginia, particularly Bacon's Rebellion, in which Nathaniel Bacon Jr. tussled with his cousin, Governor William Berkeley, for control of the colony. Everett points to eyewitness and participant accounts that claim the fight was never a rebellion-it was an Indian war. However, an even larger battle loomed in South Carolina, with a group formed in reaction to slave trades, known as the Yamasee. No colony experienced the Native slave trade more than South Carolina. From 1670 until the early 1700s, tens of thousands of American Indians were enslaved at the behest of Carolina traders....