New Project to Interrogate Indigenous Enslavement in Americas

A new project is building a massive website uncovering the enslavement of Native Americans.

Why it matters: The death of George Floyd two years ago drew attention to systemic racism and the legacy of slavery, but the general public knows very little of Indigenous enslavement in the U.S. and Latin America.

Details: "Native Bound-Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Americans Enslaved" promises to digitize and piece together stories of the millions of Indigenous people whose lives were shaped by slavery.

• Using documents, baptismal records, letters and oral histories, the site will allow people to search for Native Americans who were enslaved and locate possible descendants.
• It will be similar to Enslaved.org — a database that gathers records about the lives of enslaved Africans and their descendants.
• Users can look up relatives and trace their histories.

Zoom out: Indigenous slavery co-existed with African slavery from the sixteenth up to the late nineteenth century, Andrés Reséndez wrote in "The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America."

• He estimates that between 2.5 million to 5 million Indigenous people were enslaved from the time of Columbus to the end of the nineteenth century.
• Apache members were enslaved in the American Southwest and sold to work in mines in Mexico. Latter-day Saints settlers in Utah purchased enslaved Native Americans and converted them.
• Reche-Mapuche people were enslaved in Chile and sold to work in Peru.