Replies

--American Indian thought, culture, technology.”

For starters, no wheels, no music, war, torture and slavery.

Many Native American tribes practiced some form of slavery before the European introduction of African slavery into North America; but none exploited slave labor on a large scale.[2]

Native American groups often enslaved war captives whom they primarily used for small-scale labor.[2] Some, however, were used in ritual sacrifice.[2] While little is known, there is little evidence that the slaveholders considered the slaves as racially inferior; they came from other Native American tribes and were casualties of war.[2] Native Americans did not buy and sell captives in the pre-colonial era, although they sometimes exchanged enslaved individuals with other tribes in peace gestures or in exchange for redeeming their own members.[2] The word "slave" may not accurately apply to such captive people.[2] Most of these so-called Native American slaves tended to live on the fringes of Native American society and were slowly integrated into the tribe.[2]

In many cases, new tribes adopted captives to replace warriors killed during a raid.[2] Warrior captives were sometimes made to undergo ritual mutilation or torture that could end in death as part of a grief ritual for relatives slain in battle.[2] Some Native Americans would cut off one foot of captives to keep them from running away. Others allowed enslaved male captives to marry the widows of slain husbands.[2] The Creek, who engaged in this practice and had a matrilineal system, treated children born of slaves and Creek women as full members of their mothers' clans and of the tribe, as property and hereditary leadership passed through the maternal line. The children did not have slave status.[2] More typically, tribes took women and children for captives for adoption, as they tended to adapt more easily into new ways.

Several tribes held captives as hostages for payment.[2] Various tribes also practiced debt slavery or imposed slavery on tribal members who had committed crimes; full tribal status would be restored as the enslaved worked off their obligations to the tribal society.[2] Other slave-owning tribes of North America included Comanche of Texas, the Creek of Georgia; the fishing societies, such as the Yurok, who lived in Northern California; the Pawnee, and the Klamath.[6]

When the Europeans made contact with the Native Americans, they began to participate in the slave trade.[7] Native Americans, in their initial encounters with the Europeans, attempted to use their captives from enemy tribes as a “method of playing one tribe against another” in an unsuccessful game of divide and conquer.[7]

The Haida and Tlingit who lived along southeast Alaska's coast were traditionally known as fierce warriors and slave-traders, raiding as far as California.[8][9] In their society, slavery was hereditary after slaves were taken as prisoners of war.[8][9] Among some Pacific Northwest tribes, as many as one-fourth of the population were slaves.[8][9]