Anglo colonists enslaved at least thirty to fifty thousand Indigenous Southerners before 1715

Evidence

Europeans in the Southeast established towns that thrived, in large part, on a virulent slave trade. These colonists, who possessed deadly weapons, traded manufactured English goods to Native hunters for deerskins. They also demanded to enslave Indigenous people in exchange for goods and as payment for debts that Native hunters had accrued in past transactions. As they sought to survive in a maelstrom of change set in motion by modern European capitalism, colonialism, and racial slavery, Native Americans began actively raiding and seizing people from other tribes in order to establish strong trade relations with the English, to service debts, and to avoid being hunted themselves. … As the historian Alan Gallay has documented, at least thirty to fifty thousand Indigenous Southerners were enslaved by Anglo colonists before the year 1715. Many of these Native people were traded to enslavers in the Caribbean and Europe; a large number were transported to New England; and some were sold to operations in the Upper South, particularly Virginia. Even as an African diaspora was taking shape, as Africans were tracked down in their own regions and brought to others through the Middle Passage, an “American diaspora,” writes the anthropologist Jack Forbes, was developing as Indigenous Americans were also violently relocated. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 471

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s case study: this parallels the reframing claim that slavery is foundational — here applied to Indigenous enslavement that precedes and rivals the African diaspora.
• SEED: Article angle: the ‘American diaspora’ of enslaved Indigenous people as a near-forgotten mirror of the Middle Passage, and what historical amnesia does when a nation’s origin story centers one slavery and not another.
• QUESTION: Wonder whether the 30,000-50,000 figure from Gallay and the ‘shatter zone’ literature would be contested by historians in the same way the 1619 claims were, and how this reframing would interact with the Wilentz objections.