Defining slavery is at the heart of Native Bound Unbound. Our approach resists rigid boundaries, seeking instead to acknowledge the complexity and nuance that emerge in records and in the lives they document. Some readers approach slavery in strictly legal terms—ownership recorded in bills of sale, statutes permitting bondage, or explicit labels in a register. And indeed, NBU includes such records. Yet many Indigenous experiences of captivity and coercion were not captured in these stark forms. Laws banning Indian slavery often created a shadow world of tolerated illegality, where bondage continued under other names. To recover these histories, we define slavery not only as a legal status but as a lived experience and a process that left enduring marks on individuals, families, and communities.
For many in the United States, the very word slavery evokes a particular image—of Africans held in racialized bondage in the plantation South. Yet across the Americas, and even in Europe, Indigenous people also endured enslavement in forms both similar and distinct. These slaveries were codified in law and sustained in practice: captives were branded, traded, baptized, and renamed, sometimes bearing multiple owners’ initials seared into their skin. Such violence was not symbolic but literal—written upon bodies and in the record alike. The forms and justifications of slavery varied across empires and centuries, but its defining elements—coercion, possession, and dehumanization—remained constant.
We draw especially on the work of sociologist Orlando Patterson, who, building on French anthropologist Claude Meillassoux, emphasized that slavery is best understood as a process. Its phases—enslavement, slavery, and manumission—can each reveal its presence, even when the word itself is absent. Central to this framework is natal alienation: the violent severing of people from their parents, kin, homelands, and ancestors. The first phase, enslavement, involved the moment of capture—the raids, kidnappings, sales, or forced “rescues” that tore people from their worlds. The second, slavery, signified the long condition of bondage itself: displacement, forced labor, and confinement within new and often hostile communities. Here, people were made to serve others’ households, fields, and economies while enduring surveillance, abuse, and attempts at cultural erasure. Finally, the third phase, manumission, might offer conditional release, coerced freedom, or, as Patterson reminds us, death itself—the only certain end to enslavement’s control. Seeing slavery as a process allows us to recognize it even in fragments: the capture of a child, the notation of “belonging to” in a baptism, or a will recording manumission late in life.
Indigenous systems of captivity, long predating European colonization, are often described in the scholarship as kinship practices or adoption. Yet it is essential to consider these not only in terms of how captor societies represented them, but also from the perspective of those whose lives were severed from natal communities. For many of the displaced, adoption did not erase the violence of capture, nor did it restore lost traditions or kin ties. While incorporation could carry complex meanings, Native Bound Unbound counts these cases as part of slavery when coercion, loss of autonomy, and alienation from community were present.
Slavery also has a temporal arc that stretches across centuries. In the Spanish empire, Indigenous people were legally enslaved from the moment of conquest in 1492 until the mid-sixteenth century. In 1542, the Crown issued the Nuevas Leyes, declaring that “no Indian can be made into a slave under any circumstance.” On paper, this abolished Indian slavery. In practice, it was replaced by loopholes, tolerated illegality, and the invention of euphemisms. Similar arcs can be traced elsewhere: in the French empire, Indigenous captives were designated as panis, often under the guise of adoption; in Brazil and the Amazon, Portuguese colonists justified raids as “rescue missions”; in British Carolina, the Indian slave trade was openly sanctioned and fed Caribbean markets; in Dutch Suriname and Guiana, treaties permitted the trafficking of Native captives; and in the United States, bondage persisted through debt peonage, guardianship, and wardship well into the nineteenth century. Across empires, shifts in law rarely ended slavery—they simply reshaped how it was named and practiced. Branding, forced conversion, and legal fictions left visible scars, written both upon bodies and in the archives of empire.
One of the most enduring legal doctrines that sustained Indigenous enslavement was bellum justum, the “Just War.” At its core, this doctrine held that the vanquished and their property lay at the mercy of the conqueror. Centuries after its origin, it was applied to Indigenous peoples who resisted conquest: with a stroke of the pen they could be classified as “hostile Indians,” subject to capture. New Spain’s subjects were then encouraged to “redeem” these captives, baptize them into the Catholic faith, and absorb them as detribalized colonial subjects. Far from erasing slavery, the Just War provided a lasting rationale for the capture and enslavement of Indigenous peoples for the next four centuries.
Across the hemisphere, slavery took varied forms. In the Southeast, Native captives were sold into Caribbean markets through the Indian slave trade. In New France, Indigenous captives were adopted, traded, and resold, creating hybrid systems that bound Native and European practices together. In Brazil and the Andes, missionary regimes baptized and resettled whole communities, blurring the line between conversion and coercion. In the nineteenth-century United States, Native children were placed under guardianship or adoption, legal categories that often masked enduring control. Despite these differences, what united these experiences was domination, alienation, and the loss of kin, traditions, and ancestral ties.
Scholars continue to debate how wide the definition of slavery should be. Some insist on a narrow focus, limited to people explicitly labeled as slaves, to preserve precision. Others argue that such rigidity conceals the breadth of coercion. Andrés Reséndez, in The Other Slavery, describes a continuum of bondage—raiding, debt servitude, convict labor, guardianship—that in practice functioned as slavery. Debates also persist about the usefulness of Patterson’s concept of “social death,” which some argue cannot account for contexts where captives were incorporated into new kin networks. Finally, questions of evidence remain: should ambiguous entries, euphemisms, or caste categories be included, and how do we weigh inclusivity against certainty? These disagreements remind us that slavery was not a single institution but a complex and evolving set of practices, and that our definitions must remain transparent and open to scrutiny.
Defining slavery is not just an intellectual exercise for us. It shapes how we build this archive and how we invite readers to engage it. Our standard is to show the evidence itself: the original document alongside its transcription and translation. Readers can see the words used in the past—whether stark or euphemistic—along with our interpretive choices. In uncertain cases, we explain why a record is included and mark it accordingly. In this way, transparency becomes both a methodological principle and an ethical one.
As we uncover and interpret these records, we also interrogate them—learning from their traces, challenging their omissions, and striving to understand the complex histories they conceal as much as those they reveal.
Together, these approaches define how Native Bound Unbound works: not simply to recover information, but to restore the humanity of those once reduced to property and to return their stories to the living world that remembers them.
