Blacks of the Land

"Beginning in the 1490s in the Caribbean, and through the slow demise of native slavery in North and South America over the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, millions of Amerindians were subjected to enslavement, captivity, and forced labor. Indian slavery was practiced across the Americas, at one point in time or another, in jurisdictions claimed by every European power that engaged in New World colonialism. Spanish, Portuguese, Dutch, English, Scottish, French, and Russian colonists held native Americans as slaves, exerting their mastery over them and dealing in them as chattel. In parts of the United States, Mexico, and Brazil, native slavery survived the ending of European colonial claims and the formation of independent nation-states, lasting well into the nineteenth century. By that point, however, the numbers of Amerindians held as slaves in Brazil and the United States were tiny compared to the masses of African and Afro-American captives that made up the absolute majority of the populations of the two country's plantation zones. Indian slavery thus seemed a small thing-economically, socially, demographically-when set alongside African and Afro-American slavery, on the a