Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America »

Christina Snyder is an Assistant Professor of American Studies and History at Indiana University.

Slavery existed in North America long before the first Africans arrived at Jamestown in 1619. For centuries, from the pre-Columbian era through the 1840s, Native Americans took prisoners of war and killed, adopted, or enslaved them. Christina Snyder’s pathbreaking book takes a familiar setting for bondage, the American South, and places Native Americans at the center of her engrossing story.

Indian warriors captured a wide range of enemies, including Africans, Europeans, and other Indians. Yet until the late eighteenth century, age and gender more than race affected the fate of captives. As economic and political crises mounted, however, Indians began to racialize slavery and target African Americans. Native people struggling to secure a separate space for themselves in America developed a shared language of race with white settlers. Although the Indians’ captivity practices remained fluid long after their neighbors hardened racial lines, the Second Seminole War ultimately tore apart the inclusive communities that Native people had created through centuries of captivity.

Snyder’s rich and sweeping history of Indian slavery connects figures like Andrew Jackson and Cherokee chief Dragging Canoe with little-known captives like Antonia Bonnelli, a white teenager from Spanish Florida, and David George, a black runaway from Virginia. Placing the experiences of these individuals within a complex system of captivity and Indians’ relations with other peoples, Snyder demonstrates the profound role of Native American history in the American past.

Publishers Weekly

“The American South, a familiar setting for bondage, reveals a new story,” in the hands of Indiana University assistant professor of history Snyder, who explores the Indian practice of enslaving prisoners of war in this instructive and remarkably readable book. “The South is more than the Confederacy,” she asserts; the major Native American nations (Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole) were not merely “villains or victims or foils, but leading players” in slaveholding. She reaches back to early Indian captivity practices—and how conceptions of captives and their roles in Indian communities changed with the arrival of Europeans and Africans. During the colonial period, captives were chosen on the basis of gender and age, not race, but as a nativist movement (“a collective identity as red people”) emerged in the late-18th century, Americans, black and white, became the “common enemy.” By the early 19th century—when, among other factors, black slaves became more highly valued—Africans were specifically targeted. Snyder breaks new ground in this study reveals pre-colonial Southern history and restores visibility to Native American history in the region.(Apr.)

• List of Figures


• Introduction

1. Inequality, War, and Captivity


2. The Indian Slave Trade


3. Crying Blood and Captive Death


4. Incorporating Outsiders


5. Owned People


6. Violent Intimacy


7. Racial Slavery


8. Seminoles and African Americans

• Conclusion


• Notes


• Acknowledg ments


• Index