Indigenous people served as disposable labor before African slavery began

Evidence

And indigenous populations too had been decimated early in the historical experience of European colonization, by a mix of literally being worked to death and succumbing to the introduction of foreign illness for which they had built up little or no physical resistance. Before the introduction of African slavery, the indigenous served as disposable manual labor, to use Anibal Quijano’s accurate characterization, suffering as much from debilitating labor demands early on while slaves and then indentured serfs as from conquistador invasion and invasive disease. — David Theo Goldberg, The Threat of Race, 1075

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Anibal Quijano’s coloniality-of-power framework and to the general pattern of settler-colonial labor substitution. — connects to: American settlement was a history of dispossessing native peoples — Lawrence M. Friedman, A History of American Law, 273