North American Indians were enslaved for centuries by Europeans and later European-Americans. In some instances they were forced to worked in mines.

For example, two American ranchers and miners, Charles Stone and Andrew Kelsey, enslaved over a hundred Clear Lake Pomo in the 1840s. They forced the Pomo to work on the ranch, perform sexual acts, and work in the mines. About 100–150 enslaved Pomo were sent to work in Stone and Kelsey's gold mine and all but two died of disease and/or malnutrition (Lawrence and Lawrence 100, Welch 38).

Well the British did try to enslave and make the Amerindians in their colonies peons like the Amerindians in the Latin American colonies and there actually was an extensive Amerindian slave trade. However, the reason why the Spanish were so effective at organizing Amerindian labor was because they borrowed from preexisting systems of labor from the Incan empire. They borrowed the mita system in which Amerindians were originally supposed to provide x number of days to the Incan state for public works as a sort of tax and transformed it into mine labor.

In Bolivia and Peru, the former location of the Inca Empire, there were far more people there in general. Before European contact, there were far fewer people in what is now the United States compared to the Inca Empire, and therefore far fewer people to enslave.