The Uncomfortable Truth: Ownership of Enslaved Peoples by Native Peoples
As we honor the rich, diverse history of Our Peoples, and in celebration of the newly recognized holiday of Juneteenth, it is also important to confront some uncomfortable truths about the past. One such truth is that some Tribal Nations owned slaves, a fact that often goes unacknowledged in discussions about American history.
The Five Civilized Tribes, including the Cherokee, Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole, owned many enslaved Africans before the American Civil War. Enslaved people were introduced while these tribes maintained their homelands east of the Mississippi River. After removal to the Indian Territory, enslaved Africans formed an isolated labor pool for the money-making element of the tribes. It’s important to note that slave-holding among the Indians maintained a form quite similar to that in the Old South, as the idea of slaving Africans was transferred almost intact to the Tribal Nations from the Southerners.
In the far north, the history of slavery in Alaska presents a different picture. The Haida and Tlingit tribes, among others, enslaved Indigenous people from other tribes. This form of slavery was influenced by Indigenous traditions and the practices of Russian colonists, who had their traditions of slavery and serfdom. Even after the formal abolition of slavery with the Thirteenth Amendment to the United States Constitution in 1865 and the purchase of Alaska by the United States in 1867, there were documented cases of slavery in Alaska Native Communities as late as 1903, with wealthy families purchasing Aleutian girls to do housework.
The equally uncomfortable truth is that Sacagawea, the Lemhi Shoshone woman who accompanied the Lewis and Clark expedition, was herself enslaved. Captured by raiding Hidatsas at about 12, she was later purchased by the French Canadian trader Toussaint Charbonneau and remained in bondage throughout her time with the expedition. The violence and coercion that reduced Sacagawea to the status of an enslaved person among Euro-Americans have often been glossed over, with popular narratives preferring to cast her as Charbonneau’s ‘wife’ and a celebrated mediator of Indian-European diplomacy.
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________Other Complexities
Further, it is a complex and uncomfortable truth that some freed African Americans in the United States became slave owners themselves, a practice that began as early as 1654 and continued through the Civil War. The reasons for this were multifaceted: while many black slave owners purchased family members or others to protect them from harsher conditions, a significant number also owned slaves as an act of exploitation, using their labor for profit in an effort to improve their own economic status.
Why Are We Sharing This?
Confronting these aspects of our history is not about assigning blame or tarnishing the legacy of our cultures. Instead, it is about acknowledging the past’s complex realities, which defy simplistic narratives and challenge us to broaden our understanding. The full history of America, and all its peoples, is multifaceted and nuanced, containing both moments of heroism and instances of complicity in practices that we recognize as profoundly unjust today. As we acknowledge the new federal holiday of Juneteenth, we commit to a more honest and complete portrayal of history by facing this uncomfortable truth.
