Were there any instances of slaves joining or being helped by Native Americans or vice versa? Was there any sense of mutual understanding of being oppressed groups or did members of each group not know much (or care much) of the existence of the other? Thanks!
These discussions may be of some use:
What did the Native Americans think of African slaves?
What were the Native Americans' attitude towards African slaves like?
Your username is incredible. I'll write primarily on the Cherokee relationship with African slavery (and slavery in general), since that has been my primary area of research on this subject.
By the mid-eighteenth century, some Cherokees had begun to demonstrate some of the same racial attitudes toward slavery that had previously been utilized by the whites that shared their continent. Not only the acceptance of slavery, but also structured Christianity, functional capitalism, general government, and other methods of living such as dress, diet, and agriculture, began to seep into the Cherokee Nation. Not all Cherokees, however, embraced white acculturation. These ways of white men were much more readily accepted by the leaders of the Cherokee and especially those Cherokee men with even small amounts of white blood in them. These Cherokee leaders that acknowledged and incorporated assimilation into white culture were not a large fraction of the total Cherokee population, barely the top few percent, but they held enough power over policymaking that their influence and ultimate decision to try to acculturate caused major problems within the Nation. The internal rife triggered by the existential problems produced by attempted white assimilation of Cherokee leaders led to the necessary conditions for conquest by the United States.
Many members of the Chickasaw, Choctaw, Creek, and Seminole were active participants in the institution of black slavery, in addition to the Cherokee. Historians have estimated that thousands of black slaves were owned by these five southern, “civilized” tribes. General slavery predates black slavery among the Cherokee. Prior to the Cherokee being very active in the black slave trade, many Cherokee warriors had carried on the practice of enslaving prisoners of war and selling them to other tribes or European traders for manufactured goods. When the British began to seek out free, non-indentured labor, the demand for Cherokee captives became quite high. The act of gaining a lot of material goods through human trafficking began the process of the changing attitude toward race and slavery among the Cherokee.
"Slavery" was also quite different in Cherokee society, as slaves of all color were oftentimes able to become accepted into the Cherokee family and abandon their "slave" status. I cannot stress enough, however, that the split between traditional, full blooded Cherokee (and their rejection of African slavery) and "progressive", mixed blooded Cherokee (and their insistence upon African slavery as a means of white acculturation) was a major cause of the demise of the Cherokee Nation.
I'd be glad to write you more on the institution of Cherokee slavery, in general, if you'd like. The southern tribes had an interesting way of dealing with slavery among each other prior to European contact.
Sources (and a hell of a reading list, if you want WAY more information): Christina Snyder, Slavery in Indian Country: The Changing Face of Captivity in Early America; Theda Perdue, Slavery and the Evolution of Cherokee Society, 1540-1866; R. Halliburton, Jr., Red over Black: Black Slavery among the Cherokee Indians; Fay A. Yarbrough, Race and the Cherokee Nation: Sovereignty in the Nineteenth Century; Patrick Minges, Slavery in the Cherokee Nation: The Keetoowah Society and the Defining of a People: 1855-1867.