The sheer variety of terms for enslaved Indians, each of which could imply different circumstances of labor and captivity, has led to debates about whether their various conditions should be called slavery at all. Some scholars of both Indigenous and African American history are more comfortable with different words, such as “captives.” But, as Rael-Gálvez explained to me, even the twenty to thirty enslaved Africans who landed in Virginia in 1619 aboard a vessel named the White Lion weren’t called slaves. “Because Virginia had no law at the time that defined chattel slavery, contemporary records defined them as unfree laborers whose status was akin to indentured servants,” Rael-Gálvez said. Yet that has not prevented us from seeing their arrival in the Americas as a pivotal moment in the history of African slavery. To Rael-Gálvez, the fact that enslaved Africans called laborers or servants are nevertheless regarded today as central to the history of slavery suggests that we can’t dismiss Indians described by the same terms.
In many cases, Indigenous enslavement adds new dimensions to familiar histories of the Americas—and to some of their most famous actors. Christopher Columbus sold hundreds of Indians into slavery in Europe. Hernán Cortés owned hundreds of enslaved Indigenous people, more than anyone else in Mexico. The Pueblo Revolt, in 1680, during which Indians destroyed missions and churches and renounced their baptisms and Christian marriages, was a rebellion against the widespread enslavement of Pueblo Indians as much as it was a rejection of the Catholic Church. Tituba, one of the first women accused of being a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, was described by nineteenth-century chroniclers as a Black woman. Historians today, based on their readings of seventeenth-century documents, believe that she was an enslaved Indigenous woman from the Caribbean or South America. For Rael-Gálvez and other scholars, Indigenous slavery expands our understanding of the history of human bondage—who its victims were, where it took place, what it looked like, and when it ended.
Native Bound Unbound grew out of more than three decades of research by Rael-Gálvez into the history of Indigenous slavery. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, he created a database of thousands of Indigenous slaves held in Colorado and New Mexico. By the time he graduated, in 2002, he had begun a job as the state historian of New Mexico. Then, in 2009, he became the executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, in Albuquerque. In 2022, he began the Native Bound Unbound project, with a grant from the Mellon Foundation that allowed him to hire a team of students, professors, genealogists, and archivists to search for records of enslavement across the Americas. Researchers have since collected an abundance of materials which have revealed traces of the lives of enslaved Indians. They’ve dug deeply in some places, but not at all in others. “We have only just begun work that will extend across generations,” Rael-Gálvez told me.