The scholarly literature on Native American slavery in the Americas has rapidly expanded over the past 25 years. One of the most accessible book-length overviews is Andrés Reséndez, The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America (2016). Readers who want shorter, more distilled overviews should visit our Essays page.

General/Overview

Bialuschewski, Arne, and Linford D. Fisher. “Guest Editor’s Introduction: New Directions in the History of Native American Slavery Studies.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 1, 2017): 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-3688327.

Bossy, Denise I. “The South’s Other Slavery: Recent Research on Indian Slavery.” Native South 9 (2016): 27–53. doi:10.1353/nso.2016.0000

Chaplin, Joyce E. “Enslavement of Indians in Early America: Captivity without the Narrative.” In The Creation of the British Atlantic World, ed. Carole Shammas and Elizabeth Mancke, 45–70. The Johns Hopkins University Press, 2015.

DasSarma, Anjali, and Linford D. Fisher. “The Persistence of Indigenous Unfreedom in Early American Newspaper Advertisements, 1704–1804.” Slavery & Abolition, March 30, 2023, 1–25. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2023.2189517.

Fisher, Linford D. Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in American History. Liveright/WW Norton, 2026.

Gallay, Alan, ed. Indian Slavery in Colonial America. University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Goetz, Rebecca Anne. “European Enslavement of Indigenous People in the Americas.” Oxford Bibliographies, April 19, 2024. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199730414-0405.

Goetz, Rebecca Anne. “Indian Slavery: An Atlantic and Hemispheric Problem.” History Compass 14, no. 2 (February 1, 2016): 59–70. https://doi.org/10.1111/hic3.12298.

Guasco, Michael. “To ‘Doe some Good upon their Countrymen’: The Paradox of Indian Slavery in Early Anglo-America.” Journal of Social History 41, no. 2 (Winter 2007): 389–411.

Herndon, Ruth Wallis, and John E. Murray. Children Bound to Labor: The Pauper Apprentice System in Early America. Cornell University Press, 2009.

Lauber, Almon Wheeler. Indian Slavery in Colonial Times Within the Present Limits of the United States. Columbia University, 1913.

Pratt, Stephanie, and Max Carocci, eds. Native American Adoption, Captivity, and Slavery in Changing Contexts. Palgrave Macmillan, 2011.

Smyth, Noel. E. “Indigenous Slavery in the Caribbean.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Latin American History, 15 September 2022. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199366439.013.1054

Snyder, Christina. “Indian Slavery.” In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of American History. 2 December 2014. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780199329175.013.5

van Deusen, Nancy E. “In the Tethered Shadow: Native American Slavery, African Slavery, and the Disappearance of the Past.” The William and Mary Quarterly 80, no. 2 (2023): 355–388.

van Deusen, Nancy E. “Indigenous Slavery from Out on the Edge.” Ethnohistory 67, no. 4 (October 2020): 603–619. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-8579258

Whitehead, Neil L. “Indigenous Slavery in South America, 1492–1820.” In The Cambridge World History of Slavery, ed. David Eltis and Stanley L. Engerman. 3:248–272. Cambridge University Press, 2011. https://doi.org/10.1017/CHOL9780521840682.012

North America

New England

Brooks, Lisa. Our Beloved Kin: A New History of King Philip’s War. Yale University Press, 2018.

Cave, Alfred A. The Pequot War. University of Massachusetts Press, 1996.

DeLucia, Christine. “The Memory Frontier: Uncommon Pursuits of Past and Place in the Northeast After King Philip’s War.” Journal of American History 98, no. 4 (March 1, 2012): 975–997.

Desrochers, Robert E. Jr., “Slave-for-Sale Advertisements and Slavery in Massachusetts, 1704-1781.” The William and Mary Quarterly 59, no. 3 (July 2002): pp. 623–664.

Drake, James David. King Philip’s War: Civil War in New England, 1675–1676. University of Massachusetts Press, 1999.

Fisher, Linford D. “‘Why Shall Wee Have Peace to Bee Made Slaves’: Indian Surrenderers during and after King Philip’s War.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 1, 2017): 91–114.

Fickes, Michael L. “‘They could Not Endure that Yoke’: The Captivity of Pequot Women and Children After the War of 1637.” New England Quarterly 73, no. 1 (2000): 58.

Fitts, Robert K. Inventing New England’s Slave Paradise: Master/Slave Relations in Eighteenth-Century Narragansett, Rhode Island. Garland Publishing, 1998.

Herndon, Ruth Wallis and Ella Wilcox Sekatau. “Pauper Apprenticeship in Narragansett Country: A Different Name for Slavery in Early New England.” In Slavery/antislavery in New England, 2005.

Jordan, Winthrop D. “The Influence of the West Indies on the Origins of New England Slavery.” The William and Mary Quarterly 18, no. 2 (1961): 243–250.

Lepore, Jill. The Name of War: King Philip’s War and the Origins of American Identity. Alfred A. Knopf, 1998.

Newell, Margaret Ellen. Brethren by Nature: New England Indians, Colonists, and the Origins of American Slavery. Cornell University Press, 2015.

Newell, Margaret Ellen. “The Changing Nature of Slavery in New England, 1670-1720.” In Reinterpreting New England Indians and the Colonial Experience, ed. Colin G. Calloway and Neal Salisbury. .Colonial Society of Massachusetts, 2003.

Newell, Margaret Ellen. “Indian Slavery in Colonial New England.” In Indian Slavery in Colonial America, ed. Allan Gallay. University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Peters, J. Douglas. “‘Removing the Heathen’: Changing Motives for Indian Slavery in New Hampshire.” Historical New Hampshire 58, no. 3 (2003): 66–79.

Sainsbury, John A. “Indian Labor in Early Rhode Island.” New England Quarterly 48, no. 3 (1975).

Silverman, David J. “The Impact of Indentured Servitude on Southern New England Indian Society and Culture, 1680-1810,” New England Quarterly 74 (2001).

Mid-Atlantic and Southeast

Bowne, Eric E. The Westo Indians: Slave Traders of the Early Colonial South. University of Alabama Press, 2005.

Dubcovsky, Alejandra. “‘All of Us Will Have to Pay for These Activities:’ Colonial and Native Narratives of the 1704 Attack on Ayubale.” Native South 10 (2017): 1–18. doi:10.1353/nso.2017.0001.

Everett, C.S. “‘They shalbe slaves for their lives:’ Indian Slavery in Colonial Virginia.” In Indian Slavery in Colonial America. Ed. Alan Gallay. 67–108. University of Nebraska Press, 2009.

Gallay, Alan. The Indian Slave Trade: The Rise of the English Empire in the American South, 1670–1717. Yale University Press, 2002.

Goetz, Rebecca Anne. “The Nanziatticos and the Violence of the Archive: Land and Native Enslavement in Colonial Virginia – ProQuest.” The Journal of Southern History 85, no. 1 (February 2019): 33–60.

Johnson, D. Andrew. Enslaved Native Americans and the Making of Colonial South Carolina. Johns Hopkins University Press, 2024.

Negrin, Hayley. “Native Women Work the Ground: Enslavement and Civility in the Early American Southeast.” In Atlantic Environments and the American South. Ed. Earle, Thomas Blake and D. Andrew Johnson, 90–110. University of Georgia Press, 2020.

Ray, Kristofer. “Constructing a Discourse of Indigenous Slavery, Freedom and Sovereignty in Anglo-Virginia, 1600–1750.” Native South 10 (2017): 19–39. https://doi.org.10.1353/nso.2017.0002

Sachs, Honor. “‘Freedom by a Judgment:’ The Legal History of an Afro-Indian Family.” Law and History Review 30, no. 1 (February 2012): 173–203. https://www.jstor.org/stable/23209658

Shefveland, Kristalyn M. Anglo-Native Virginia: Trade, Conversion, and Indian Slavery in the Old Dominion, 1646–1722. University of Georgia Press, 2016.

Snyder, Christina. Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America. Harvard University Press, 2012.

Winston, Sanford Richard. Indian Slavery in the Carolina Region. Association for the Study of Negro Life and History, 1934.

Gulf Coast and Louisiana 

Blackbird, Leila K. “‘It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages:’ The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana Revisited, 1769–1803.” William & Mary Quarterly 80, no. 2 (July 2023): 525–558. 10.1353/wmq.2023.a903166

Blackbird, Leila K. “A Gendered Frontier: Métissage and Indigenous Enslavement in Eighteenth-Century Basse-Louisiane.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 56, no. 2 (Winter 2023), 205–212. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.0006

Ethridge, Robbie. “Raiding the Remains: The Indian Slave Trade and the Collapse of the Mississippian Chiefdoms.” In Light on the Path: The Anthropology and History of the Southeastern Indians. Ed. Charles M. Hudson, Thomas J. Pluckhahn, and Robbie Ethridge, 207–218. University of Alabama Press, 2006.

Lee, Dayna Bowker. “From Captives to Kin: Indian Slavery and Changing Social Identities on the Louisiana Colonial Frontier.” In Native American Adoption, Captivity, and Slavery in Changing Contexts. Ed. Max Carocci and Stephanie Pratt, 79–96. Palgrave MacMillan, 2012.

Smyth, Noel E. “The Obfuscation of Native American Presence in the French Atlantic: Natchez Indians in Saint Domingue, 1731–1791.” Ethnohistory 69, no. 3 (July 2022): 265–285. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-9705904

Usner, Daniel H., Jr. Indians, Settlers, and Slaves in a Frontier Exchange Economy: The Lower Mississippi Valley before 1783. University of North Carolina Press, 1992.

Webre, Stephen. “The Problem of Indian Slavery in Spanish Louisiana, 1769–1803.” Louisiana History 25, no. 2 (1984): 117–135. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4232338

Southwest and West

Bailey, Lynn Robison. Indian Slave Trade in the Southwest: A Study of Slavetaking and the Traffic in Indian Captives. Great West and Indian Series 32. Westernlore, 1966.

Barr, Juliana. “From Captives to Slaves: Commodifying Women in the Borderlands.” Journal of American History 92.1 (2005):19–46.

Blackhawk, Ned. Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West. Harvard University Press, 2006.

Brooks, James. Captives & Cousins: Slavery, Kinship, and Community in the Southwest Borderlands. University of North Carolina Press, 2002.

Conrad, Paul. The Apache Diaspora: Four Centuries of Displacement and Survival. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Kiser, William S. Borderlands of Slavery: The Struggle over Captivity and Peonage in the American Southwest. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017.

Madley, Benjamin. An American Genocide: The United States and the California Indian Catastrophe, 1846–1873. Reprint edition. Yale University Press, 2017.

Smith, Stacey L. Freedom’s Frontier: California and the Struggle over Unfree Labor, Emancipation, and Reconstruction. Reprint edition. The University of North Carolina Press, 2015.

Zappia, Natale. Traders and Raiders: The Indigenous World of the Colorado Basin, 1540–1859. University of North Carolina Press, 2014.

Northwest

Conthran, Boyd. “Lúgsh and Laláki: Slaves, Chiefs, Medicine Men, and the Indigenous Political Landscape of the Upper Klamath Basin, 1820s to 1860s.” In Linking the Histories of Slavery: North America and Its Borderlands, ed. Martin, Bonnie and James F. Brooks, 97–124. School for Advanced Research Press, 2015.

Donald, Leland. Aboriginal Slavery on the Northwest Coast of North America. University of California Press, 1997.

Had, Yvonne P. “Slavery in the Greater Lower Columbia Region.” Ethnohistory 52, no. 3 (July 2005): 563–588. https://doi.org/10.1215/00141801-52-3-563

Ruby, Robert H. and John A. Brown, Indian Slavery in the Pacific Northwest. The Arthur H. Clark Company, 1993.

Great Lakes / New France / Canada

Ekberg, Carl J. Stealing Indian Women: Native Slavery in the Illinois Country. University of Illinois Press, 2007.

Heerman, M. Scott. “Beyond Plantations: Indian and African Slavery in the Illinois Country, 1720–1780.” Slavery and Abolition 38, no. 3 (March 2017): 489–509. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2016.1252135

Rushforth, Brett. Bonds of Alliance: Indigenous and Atlantic Slaveries in New France. The University of North Carolina Press, 2012.

Rushforth, Brett. “Slavery, the Fox Wars, and the Limits of Alliance.” William and Mary Quarterly 63, no. 1 (January 2006): 53–80. https://doi.org/10.2307/3491725

Trudel, Marcel. L’esclavage au Canada français: Histoire et conditions de l’esclavage. Presses Universitaires Laval, 1960.

Caribbean and Atlantic

Arena, Carolyn. “Indian Slaves from Guiana in Seventeenth-Century Barbados.” Ethnohistory 64, no. 1 (January 2017): 65–90. https://doi10.1215/00141801-3688375

Beckles, Hilary. Caribbean Slavery in the Atlantic World. Ian Randle Publishers, 1998.

Bernhard, Virginia. Slaves and Slaveholders in Bermuda, 1616–1782. University of Missouri, 1999.

Boissevain, Ethel. “Whatever Became of the New England Indians Shipped to Bermuda to Be Sold as Slaves?” Man in the Northwest 11 (Spring 1981): 103–114.

Cave, Scott. “Madalena: The Entangled History of One Indigenous Floridian Woman in the Atlantic World.” The Americas 74, no. 2 (April 2017): 171–200. https://doi:10.1017/tam.2017.11

Deive, Carlos E. La Española y la esclavitud del indio. Fundación García Arévalo, 1995.

Fisher, Linford D. “‘Dangerous Designes’: The 1676 Barbados Act to Prohibit New England Indian Slave Importation.” William and Mary Quarterly, 3rd Ser., 71, no. 1 (January 2014): 99–124.

Goetz, Rebecca Anne. “‘The Unbridled Greed of the Conquistadors’: The Real Provisión of 1530 and the Legality of Native Enslavement in the Southern Caribbean.” In Beyond 1619: The Atlantic Origins of American Slavery. Ed. Paul J. Polgar, Marc H. Lerner, and Jesse Cromwell. 31–44. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2023.

Handler, Jerome S. “The Amerindian Slave Population of Barbados in the Seventeenth and Early Eighteenth Centuries.” Caribbean Studies 8, no. 4 (1969): 38–64.

Mira Caballos, Esteban. El Indio Antillano: repartimiento, encomienda, y esclavitud, 1492-1542. Muñoz Moya Editor, 1997.

Stone, Erin Woodruff. Captives of Conquest: Slavery in the Early Modern Spanish Caribbean. University of Pennsylvania Press, 2021.

Mexico and Latin America 

Chipman, Donald E. “The Traffic in Indian Slaves in the Province of Pánuco, New Spain, 1523-1533.” The Americas 23, no. 2 (October 1966): 142–155. https://doi.org/10.2307/980581

Graubart, Karen. “As Slaves and Not Vassals: Interethnic Claims of Freedom and Unfreedom in Colonial Peru.” Población y Sociedad 27, no. 2 (2020): 30–53.  http://dx.doi.org/10.19137/pys-2020-270203

Helms, Mary W. “Miskito Slaving and Culture Contact: Ethnicity and Opportunity in an Expanding Population.” Journal of Anthropological Research 39, no. 2 (Summer 1983): 179–197. https://doi.org/10.1086/jar.39.2.3629966

Nájera, José Luis Serrano. “Interethnic Mayan and Afro-descendant Relations through War, Trade, and Slavery during the Mayan Caste Wars, 1848–1901.” UCLA Historical Journal 28, no. 1 (2017): 1–28. https://escholarship.org/uc/item/0538c4tt

Millett, Nathaniel. “Law, Lineage, Gender, and the Lives of Enslaved Indigenous People on the Edge of the Nineteenth-Century Caribbean.” William and Mary Quarterly 78, no. 4 (December 2021): 687–720. doi:10.5309/willmaryquar.78.4.0687

Offen, Karl. “Mapping Amerindian Captivity in Colonial Mosquitia.” Journal of Latin American Geography 14, no. 3 (October 2015): 35–65. https://www.jstor.org/stable/43964629

Orias, Paola Revilla. “‘Pacified Indians’ and the legal fight against enslavement at the crossroad between free and unfree labour conditions (Charcas, 16th–18th centuries).” Labor History 61, no. 3 (2020): 76–89. https://doi.org/10.1080/0023656X.2019.1645321

O’Toole, Rachel Sarah. Bound Lives: Africans, Indians, and the Making of Race in Colonial Peru. University of Pittsburgh Press, 2012.

Reséndez, Andrés. The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America. Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, 2016.

Sherman, William L. Forced Native Labor in Sixteenth-Century Central America. University of Nebraska Press, 1979.

Valenzuela Márquez, Jaime. “Esclavos Mapuches: Para Una Historia del Secuestro y Deportación de Indígenas en la Colonia.” In Historias de Racismo y Discriminación en Chile. Ed. Rafael Gaune and Martín Lara, 225–262. Uqbar Editores, 2009.

van Deusen, Nancy E. Global Indios: The Indigenous Struggle for Justice in Sixteenth-Century Spain. Duke University Press, 2015.

Zavala, Silvio. La Encomienda Indiana, Tercera edición revisada. Editorial Porrúa, 1992.

Brazil

Chambouleyron, Rafael. “Indian Freedom and Indian Slavery in the Portuguese Amazon (1640–1755).” In Building the Atlantic Empires: Unfree Labor and Imperial States in the Political Economy of Capitalism, ca. 1500–1914. Ed. Donoghue, John and Evelyn Jennings, 54–71. Brill, 2016.

Miki, Yuko. “Slave and Citizen in Black and Red: Reconsidering the Intersection of African and Indigenous Slavery in Postcolonial Brazil.” Slavery & Abolition 35, no. 1 (2014): 1–22. https://doi.org/10.1080/0144039X.2013.825457

Monteiro, John M. Blacks of the Land: Indian Slavery, Settler Society, and the Portuguese Colonial Enterprise in South America. Tr. James Woodard and Barbara Weinstein. Cambridge University Press, 2018.

Monteiro, John Manuel. “From Indian to Slave: Forced Native Labour and Colonial Society in São Paulo during the Seventeenth Century.” Slavery and Abolition 9.2 (1988): 105–127.

Pelegrino, Alexandre. “From Slaves to Índios: Empire, Slavery, and Race (Maranhão, Brazil, C.1740–90).” Law and History Review 2022, 1–27. 10.1017/s0738248022000293

Schwartz, Stuart B. “Indian Labor and New World Plantations: European Demands and Indian Responses in Northeastern Brazil.” American Historical Review 83, no. 1 (1978): 43–79. https://doi.org/10.2307/1865902

Sommer, Barbara A. “Colony of the Sertão: Amazonian Expeditions and the Indian Slave Trade.” The Americas 61, no. 3 (January 2005): 401–428. https://www.jstor.org/stable/4490921

Dutch Atlantic

Arena, Carolyn. “Aphra Behn’s Oroonoko, Indian Slavery, and the Anglo-Dutch Wars.” In The Torrid Zone: Caribbean Colonization and Cultural Interaction in the Long Seventeenth Century. Ed. Louis H. Roper, 31–45. University of South Carolina Press, 2018.

Fisher, Linford D., Evan Haefeli, and Mark Meuwese. “Indigenous Slavery in the Dutch Atlantic” (article under review).

Hulsman, L. A. H. C. “Nederlands Amazonia: Handel met Indianen tussen 1580 en 1680” (Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Amsterdam, 2009), https://dare.uva.nl/search?identifier=455df16c-dc4f-4850-8be4-105a5cc59328

Johnson, D. Andrew and Carolyn Arena. “Building Dutch Suriname in English Carolina: Aristocratic Networks, Native Enslavement, and Plantation Provisioning in the Seventeenth-Century Americas.” Journal of Southern History 86, no. 1 (February 2020): 37–74.  https://doi.org/10.1353/soh.2020.0001

Meuwese, Mark. Brothers in Arms, Partners in Trade: Dutch-Indigenous Alliances in the Atlantic World, 1595–1674.  Brill, 2012.

Whitehead, Neil L. Lords of the Tiger Spirit: A History of the Caribs in Colonial Venezuela and Guyana, 1498–1820. Foris Publications, 1988.

Methods and Theory

Blackbird, Leila K. “A Gendered Frontier: Métissage and Indigenous Enslavement in Eighteenth-Century Basse-Louisiane.” Eighteenth-Century Studies 56, no. 2 (Winter 2023), 205–212. https://doi.org/10.1353/ecs.2023.0006

Carocci, Max. “Written Out of History: Contemporary Native American Narratives of Enslavement.” Anthropology Today 25, no. 3 (n.d.): 18–22.

Smith, Linda Tuhiwai. Decolonizing Methodologies: Research And Indigenous Peoples. 5th Edition. Zed Books, 2002.

Tuck, Eve, and K. Wayne Yang. “Decolonization Is Not a Metaphor.” Decolonization: Indigeneity, Education & Society 1, no. 1 (September 8, 2012). https://jps.library.utoronto.ca/index.php/des/article/view/18630.