Hidden History | The First Slavery In America Was Of Its Aboriginal Population

In many colonies in the Americas such as South Carolina during different time periods indigenous american enslaved surpassed that of the number of Africans enslaved. Aborigines were enslaved and stolen from their ancestral lands and forced into slavery by being shipped off to other colonies into the Caribbean and even Europe and South America. This history is well documented but seldom spoken about. The reclassification of aborigines into negroes to continue the gross inhumanities of slavery is rarely detailed to the general public.

An "open secret": that from the time Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World until the year 1900, there were as many as five million Native people enslaved in America. We'll talk about this history, and the psychological reasons it was left unexamined for so long.

Andrés Reséndez is a historian at the University of California Davis, and the author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America.

"Unlike African slavery, which was legal for centuries and sanctioned by states and empires around the world, Indian slavery was very early on made illegal," Reséndez says. "However, because Native American labor had been essential to all of the economic activities going on during this first generation of colonialism, it was unthinkable for the European colonists to do without native slaves. And so they very quickly devised all kinds of subterfuges and euphemisms in order to continue to profit from the coerced labor of natives by calling it different names."

This video turns to an examination of Indian Slavery under the title “Indian Slavery in the Americas – Its Origins, Impacts and Implications.” The focus of this panel discussion is on the new perspectives on the institution of Indian slavery in the Americas and its relationship to African slavery, as well as modern day ramifications of Indian slavery for Native Americans. Scholars from Brown University, Rhode Island College and Roger Williams University explore this topic.

Source: https://www.npr.org/2017/11/20/565410514/an-american-secret-the-untold-story-of-native-american-enslavement

Video Source: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VZ8A52AC2LI