European enslavement of Indigenous Americans

Painting by Jean-Baptiste Debret depicting bandeiras enslaving Guaraní people in the Brazilian interior

During and after the European colonization of the Americas, European settlers practiced widespread enslavement of Indigenous peoples. In the 15th century, the Spanish introduced chattel slavery through warfare and the cooption of existing systems.[1][2] A number of other European powers followed suit, and from the 15th through the 19th centuries, between two and five million Indigenous people were enslaved,[a][3][4] which had a devastating impact on many Indigenous societies, contributing to the overwhelming population decline of Indigenous peoples in the Americas.[5]

After the decolonization of the Americas, the enslavement of Indigenous peoples continued into the 19th century in frontier regions of some countries, notably parts of Brazil, Peru[6] Northern Mexico, and the Southwestern United States. Some Indigenous groups adopted European-style chattel slavery during the colonial period, most notably the "Five Civilized Tribes" in the United States, however far more Indigenous groups were involved in the selling of Indigenous slaves to Europeans.[7]

  1. ^ Lauber 1913, pp. 25–47.
  2. ^ Gallay 2009.
  3. ^ Rushforth 2014, pp. 9.
  4. ^ Reséndez 2016.
  5. ^ Moses, A. Dirk (April 2010). Bloxham, Donald; Moses, A. Dirk (eds.). "Raphael Lemkin, Culture, and the Concept Of Genocide" (PDF). The Oxford Handbook of Genocide Studies. doi:10.1093/oxfordhb/9780199232116.013.0002. Retrieved 16 August 2021.
  6. ^ Casement 1997, p. 110,171,176,243.
  7. ^ Roberts, Alaina. "How Native Americans adopted slavery from white settlers". Al Jazeera. Retrieved 30 July 2021.


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