Why Did Native Americans Practice Slavery?

GuerrillaLorax · Aug 23, 2018

hotwater said: ↑

There were plenty of Native Americans throughout the United States who welcomed escaped African slaves into their tribes including the Seminoles in Florida, and the
Wampanoags in Massachusetts (who greeted the Pilgrims in 1620) and even today it’s tribal council and leaders are a blend, a racial mix of the two cultures.

Chairman of the Mashpee Wampanoag tribe

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Yes! There is a bunch of amazing information coming out about Blacks and even poor whites defecting to Indigenous tribes or autonomous zones such as the Dismal Swamp. The most comprehensive study so far is compiled in the book Dixie be Damned:

These maroons, who were of Native, European, and West African descent, built and held long-term communities in various parts of the swamp roughly from the end of the Tuscarora Wars in 1714 to the end of the Civil War in 1865. For 150 years these multi-ethnic rebels mixed and shared the diverse cultural and religious forms of the Tuscarora, Irish, English, and West Africans. Forced to flee above-ground life as debt fugitives, runaway slaves, or refugees from the brutal wars waged on Indians, the maroons established a permanent life in the swamp while waging a long-term, unceasing guerilla war against plantation society in the form of arson, cattle rustling, crop theft, encouraging slave escapes, and coordinating insurrections throughout the area. At times, the maroons and related slaves allied themselves with larger political forces—affiliating themselves, for example, with the British to attack American slave-owners during the Revolutionary War, and forming autonomous forces to fight the Confederacy ninety years later.
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There's also the book Gone to Croatan:

America was founded as a land of drop-outs, and almost immediately it began to produce its own crop of dissidents - visionaries, utopians, Maroons (escaped slaves), white and black Indians, sailors and buccaneers, tax rebels, angry women, crank reformers, tri-racial isolate communities - all on the lam from Babylon, from control. In this book they return, speaking for a romantic becoming - for an insurrectionary moment - for a restoration of the unknown.
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From a Green Anarchy article:

They ran into the open arms of their Indian brothers and sisters: the natives. Fugitives and Savages. And it was here, among the howling wilderness out of civilization’s reach, that they formed their alliances. Alliances that welcomed all who fought against the colonial megamachine. New tribes were founded. (In America alone, over 200 tri-racial isolate communities existed). New cultures were created. Cultures of resistence.
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This phenomina was also well analyzed in the podcast White Supremacy and Capitalism, From 1492 to Ferguson, discussing why poor whites would live under brutal conditions created by their colonial masters and not defect to live in freedom with the Indigenous, as many other whites and escaped slaves have done.

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Why Did Native Americans Practice Slavery?

GuerrillaLorax along the peripheries of civilization

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Why Did Native Americans Practice Slavery?

GuerrillaLorax along the peripheries of civilization

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