The unit centers two regions where Indigenous slave trades were structural rather than peripheral: the Carolinas and the Miskito Shore. These cases are not presented as exceptions. They are presented as evidence. They reveal how colonial economies depended on Indigenous captivity, forced mobility, and dispossession long before the Atlantic Slave Trade. The Carolina colony was designed as a commercial project. Profit came first. Indigenous enslavement was not an unintended byproduct of settlement. It was a deliberate strategy. Raids, wars, and trade networks worked together to funnel Indigenous captives into systems of sale and export. Imperial conflicts such as Queen Anne’s War intensified these dynamics, transforming warfare into a justification for mass enslavement. Entire communities were destabilized. Refugee migrations reshaped the Southeast. This was not only demographic collapse. It was the systematic destruction of Indigenous relationships to place, safety, and continuity.

The unit refuses easy moral binaries. Indigenous participation in slave raiding is examined without simplification. Students are asked to understand these actions within a landscape defined by colonial coercion, survival under pressure, and constrained choice. Power did not operate evenly. Neutrality was rarely possible. This framing preserves complexity while maintaining focus on harm and consequence. Lesson 2 shifts the focus from events to evidence. Runaway and captive advertisements are treated not as transparent windows into the past but as artifacts of colonial authority. These documents normalize Indigenous enslavement through language that reduces people to bodies, skills, and value. At the same time, they omit capture, violence, and family separation. What appears routine in the archive conceals extraordinary violence. These advertisements show how enslavement operated not only on people but on the historical record itself.

The absence of Indigenous voices in these sources is not framed as an unfortunate gap. Rather, it is evidence of who was allowed to speak. Who was allowed to speak. Who was assumed to be the reader. What ideas about ownership and permanence went unquestioned. Students learn to read silence as a product of power rather than a failure of documentation. The unit then expands outward to the Miskito Shore, complicating any single story of victimhood or resistance. Geography, imperial rivalry, and Indigenous political power intersected to produce a different configuration of slavery. The Miskito Kingdom leveraged British alliances to maintain autonomy and regional dominance, even as those alliances drew the community into slave raiding and captivity networks. Agency is visible here, but it is constrained and costly. Survival did not mean freedom from violence. It often meant participation in systems that reproduced it.

By examining primary sources such as registries and imperial correspondence, students encounter a world where Indigenous and African lives were counted, categorized, and moved across boundaries. These records expose how colonial law repeatedly failed to restrict Indigenous enslavement. Bureaucracy becomes another mechanism of control. Identity, belonging, and futurity are reduced to administrative categories. Students are asked not just to analyze sources but to interrogate the archive itself. What stories are easy to tell? Which ones require reconstruction? Why has plantation slavery has come to stand in for slavery as a whole? This lesson positions students as interpreters of history rather than passive recipients of it.

The culminating formative assessment asks students to synthesize across regions, source types, and silences, compiling what they have learned during the previous lessons. By comparing systems, analyzing language, and naming absences, students demonstrate that Indigenous slavery was not an alternative footnote. It was a central mechanism of colonial expansion. Remembering it requires more than adding information. It requires changing the frame. Unit 3 ultimately asks students to confront an uncomfortable truth: history is not only what happened. It is what was preserved, justified, and forgotten. Indigenous enslavement was erased not because it was insignificant, but because it disrupted the stories colonial societies wanted to tell about themselves. This unit insists that those stories be reconsidered and that what was taken from the past be named.