"These projects are familiar in the sense that they are set in the past and often across the Americas but are also deeply unfamiliar in their suggestions and outcomes. Indian slavery is one of these fields that has now grown into a particularly advanced area of study, and it doesn’t look anything like more conventional understandings of American slavery.
"Indian slavery is not, for example, only a story of the American South. It isn’t a 19th-century story exclusively, and it usually involves a multiplicity of imperial perspectives rather than occurring exclusively within an Anglophone colonial or national sphere. The Spanish conquest of the Caribbean, Mexico and subsequent explorations into the Southeast and Southwest now form essential beginnings for understanding the cataclysmic ruptures brought by European colonialism, in which Indigenous slavery became one of the driving motivations for conquest as well as one of the most profitable forms of colonization."
Comments