Anne,

    I'm just back from doing laundry at the Laundromat, which meant sloshing 
through lots of snow.  I am out of breath but warm again.  I see that the 
discussion is still lively.
    The question of Native American slavery is very complicated because 
there were so many independent American Indian polities.  Probably the best 
general survey of slavery worldwide is Orlando Patterson, Slavery and Social 
Death.  Patterson does note differences between slavery as practiced by 
Cherokees in the Southeast as compared to Euro-American enslavement.  For 
one thing, as I remember it, slaves could be integrated into Cherokee (and 
other Native American) societies as free men and even as family members.
    The late A. I. Hallowell, an anthropologist in the American Civilization 
Program at Penn, published an essay fifty or more years ago, arguing that 
Native American societies were more open to absorbing whites and blacks than 
either of those groups were to reciprocate.  Thus, one might enter an Indian 
polity as a slave or a captive but that status was not necessarily 
permanent.
    Most Native American societies in the eastern woodlands of North America 
were slash and burn agriculturalists, who combined migratory farming with 
hunting.  A permanent system of slavery implies (thought it does not always 
achieve) food self-sufficiency.  European settlements in North and South 
America that set up slave plantations--and it is important to remember that 
the Chesapeake colonies commenced plantations with white workers on 
contract--were engaged in an international system that provided food for 
cash or cash-crops when necessary.  The plantations that produced sugar, 
tobacco, rice, indigo, and later cotton and hemp, were engaged in an 
advanced economic system that can fairly be called capitalism:  a stage of 
development not reached even by the immense empires of the Aztecs, Maya, or 
Inca.
    I suspect that Africans in Virginia up to 1680 would not have 
experienced much difference between enslavement by whites or by Indians. 
After 1680, and certainly after about 1730, when Virginia (and Maryland) had 
become vast empires of tobacco production, the difference would have been 
quite noticeable.

Harold

Harold S. Forsythe
----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Anne Pemberton" <[log in to unmask]>
To: <[log in to unmask]>
Sent: Thursday, February 15, 2007 9:37 AM
Subject: Re: SLAVE OWNERSHIP BY NATIVE AMERICANS IN VIRGINIA


> Harold,
>
> Correct me if I am wrong, but I do not believe that the slavery practiced 
> by Native Americans was life-long or continued to subsequent generations 
> of those enslaved. Slave were free to run away, and in fact, were expected 
> to do so.
>
> Anne
>
> Anne Pemberton
> [log in to unmask]
> http://www.erols.com/stevepem
> http://www.erols.com/apembert
> http://www.educationalsynthesis.org
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