History · Decolonial Research
Chains of Captivity, Colonial Power, and Archival Erasure
Native American Slavery in Colonial North America
Abstract
This paper explores Native American slavery in colonial North America through a combined analysis of colonial print culture and recent historiography. Utilizing digitized colonial-period newspapers in the Library of Congress, the paper examines the structures of Indigenous enslavement and the epistemological modes that allowed these practices to be common, visible, and then pushed to the margins of historical discourse. The paper argues that Indigenous captivity and enslavement played a structurally significant role in shaping the political economies of Colonial America — and that its historiographical erasure is attributable not to historical absence but to the colonial architecture of Indigenous archives.
Key Argument
Indigenous slavery was not incidental to colonialism but constitutive of the political economy of settler colonialism. The historiographical erasure of Native American slavery is not incidental to historical knowledge — it is the result of epistemological structures inherent within colonial archives themselves.
Decolonial recovery requires engaging with how archives produce knowledge, not just what they contain. To read colonial newspaper advertisements against the grain is to recover the violence that their administrative language concealed.
Methodology
Primary sources from the Library of Congress Chronicling America archive — including the Boston News-Letter (1710s–1720s) and the South Carolina Gazette (1730s–1740s) — analyzed through the decolonial framework of Linda Tuhiwai Smith (1999) and the historiographical work of Gallay and Newell.