On the Forgotten Enslavement of Native Americans and Its Central Role in US History

On a sunny June day in 2018, a Native American woman, dressed in traditional attire, tossed a wreath of flowers into the Atlantic Ocean near Bermuda. The wreath represented the journey of enslaved Native Americans from New England nearly four centuries ago. The somber ceremony quickly transformed into a lively two-day powwow attended by representatives from various New England tribes and Bermuda's indigenous people.

The powwow included dancing, feasting, and socializing, with men and boys playing drums while dancers moved around them in colorful moccasins, robes, and headpieces. The event honored the largely forgotten history of the forced enslavement and relocation of Native Americans by European settlers.

This episode of American history, often overlooked, served as a central thread connecting various streams of Native American experiences. In the 1630s, New England Puritans hunted down more than a thousand Pequots, Wampanoags, Narragansetts, and other Indigenous peoples and shipped them to Bermuda, Barbados, Spain, and Mexico. This occurred during and after two brutal wars against local Indigenous populations.

The Puritans used enslaved Native Americans to bolster their labor force and clear land for settlement, creating a complex and intertwined history of violence, dispossession, and resilience.

Even after British emancipation in 1834, descendants of these enslaved Native Americans remained on St. David's Island in Bermuda, continuing to work, connect, and intermarry with other communities. The reunification of New England Natives and Bermuda's Indigenous people began in the late 1990s, with powwows serving as a vital means of healing and reconciliation.

These gatherings have allowed both groups to reconnect with their shared history, acknowledging the community losses caused by the theft of both people and land during centuries of colonialism.

While many scholarly works on slavery in the Americas have focused on Black enslavement, Indigenous enslavement was a massive and widespread phenomenon, affecting an estimated 3 million to 6 million Indigenous people between 1492 and 1880. In the United States, as many as 600,000 Native Americans were enslaved during this period, with many more affected through boarding schools, foster care, and adoption programs.

This number is comparable to the 530,000 enslaved Africans forcibly transported to North America before 1865. The transatlantic slave trade and Indigenous enslavement both represented tangible community losses and were part of a larger assault on Indigenous peoples' very existence.

The conventional narrative of American history often downplays the prominence and duration of Native American slavery. However, the estimated half-million Indigenous men, women, and children enslaved within the modern United States' borders is a staggering figure that challenges our understanding of both American history and the institution of slavery.