Indigenous Mississippian chiefdoms already practiced their own form of slavery

Evidence

Slavery was not unknown to Native Southerners when they met with the American commissioners at Hopewell. Before the formation of the modern Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, and Creek Nations in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, ancient Indigenous civilizations had organized life around hierarchical governing structures now called Mississippian chiefdoms. A man or woman with inherited rank, the town chief or paramount chief with influence over multiple towns, customarily enjoyed privileged status and decision-making authority. Chiefdoms practiced a form of slavery in which people of a lower caste (seized from other Native societies) were forced to labor for the chiefs they served and were sometimes ritually killed and buried with them. With the arrival of European explorers and conquistadors in the 1500s, chiefdoms encountered deadly foreign diseases as well as another threat: European slavery. They would certainly have noticed that conquistadors often arrived with captive people of darker-hued skin. — Nikole Hannah-Jones et al., The 1619 Project, 468

Categorization

• XREF: Directly relevant to the reader’s task of separating the reframing argument from contested claims — this pre-contact Indigenous slavery is exactly the kind of nuance historians raise against a single narrative.
• QUESTION: Whether ‘slavery’ properly describes Mississippian caste labor (ritual killing and burial with chiefs justapses it with chattel slavery) is itself a contested empirical/historiographical point worth chasing.