Group Clash - The Enslavement of Native Americans

Before the time of the large African American section in the Unites States’ history, a very overlooked but very important part of the slavery revolved around the Native American Indians that lived in the Americas during the time of the English coming to the Americas. Though there isn’t much documentation on the subject, it is well known that every European nation that colonized North America utilized Indian Slaves for construction, plantations and mining on the North American continent (Gilio-Whitaker, D, 2015).

Native American Indians were unique when it came to the enslavement on Indians and Africans in the 1600-1700’s because as Africans were more expensive to get on the boat and get to North America, the Native Americans could easily be captured and acquired immediately and put into slavery. This meant less money being spent on slaves so more could be used for tobacco and rice field on plantations, among other work. This ended around 1720 when the Native American slave trade ended and African slaves were the primary slaves.

Historians of the Native American history note that nowhere is there more documentation of Native American slavery than that of South Carolina (Gilio-Whitaker, D, 2015). During the times of 1670 to about 1717, there were many Indians that were exported than there were Africans coming in as slaves to America. The slave trade extended as far west as today’s New Mexico, which was Spanish territory at that point, and reached all the way up to where the Great Lakes are today. This large amount of slavery was also a way to depopulate the America’s as more Europeans came to populate the land. The Native