Hmm...while I'm not an expert on Native American history, a lot of the books I've read deal with the subject extensively. Bluntly put, Native Americans did practice slavery before and after European colonization, but it looked much different from the sort of chattel slavery I've been discussing elsewhere tonight. I don’t know much about slavery before European encroachment, but I do know a bit about how it looked in the post-colonial Southwest.

According to Pekka Hamalainen, the Comanches “built the largest slave economy in the colonial Southwest.” I strongly recommend checking out his book on the Comanches, as he spends a lot of time describing the impact slavery had on their society—and the impact their slaving had upon the surrounding societies, both Native American and European. To very briefly summarize what he said, after allying with the Utes, the Comanches raided many Apache settlements for slaves and sold their human loot to any buyers they found in seventeenth and eighteenth century New Mexico. Hamalainen quotes Spanish sources as saying the Comanches treated their slaves exceptionally brutally, like killing them and raping them, but also notes this may have been a display from the Comanches to encourage the Spanish to buy more slaves (in order to “save” them).

Among the Comanches themselves, Hamalainen claims slaveowning (as opposed to just selling slaves) became prominent after 1800. I ought quote several of his passages here:

”Comanches began to see captives less as instruments of exchange and retribution and more as laborers who could be employed to produce livestock and robes for the market. Under mounting market pressures, then, Comanches gave the indigenous slave systems of the Southwest a new face: they practiced slavery for distinctively economic purposes. The disease epidemics that ravaged Comanchería in the early nineteenth century gave the shift toward economically driven slavery particular urgency by creating an acute need to replace dead members and replenish devastated kinship networks with captured peoples. Comanches put special value on female captives, who could be employed, alongside with the Comanche women of polygynous marriages, in tending horses, tanning hides, curing meat, cooking meals, and packing possessions when moving camp…

”Comanches never drew a hard line between masters and slaves, and they possessed neither the necessary means to enforce unconditional submission nor a racist ideology to mentally suppress the slave population. Yet the Comanche slave system endured and expanded, largely escaping the potential hindrances of growth— social discord, escapes, and the rise of a discontented underclass. Paradoxically, Comanches were able to negotiate the pitfalls of large-scale slavery because they did not relinquish their traditional ideas of the slavery institution itself. Instead of attempting to restrain the alien people with rigid systems of control and punishment, Comanches clung to tradition and kept the slavery institution malleable. Despite its scale, vast economic importance, and emphasis on labor, Comanche slavery remained quite distinct from chattel-oriented slave systems… Comanches stripped new captives off all visible vestiges of their former life by renaming them and dressing them in Comanche clothes. They forced men to follow the Comanche practice of plucking out facial hair and made non-Native boys go naked so that their skin would turn brown. They sometimes tattooed the faces of younger captives. For most captives the first days in Comanchería were filled with horror and humiliation inflicted by beatings, whippings, mutilations, and starvation.”

Despite that, however, if a slave was able to endure the beatings and humiliations, they might eventually gain a measure of acceptance. Hamalainen relates an account where a male slave, after enduring a harsh ritual, was then granted privileges like being considered a member of Comanche society, being exempt from capital punishment, and being attached to the family of a warrior. Thus, Hamalainen states that “Human bondage in Comanchería was not a rigid, nonnegotiable institution, but a fluid, spacious, and inherently ambiguous social continuum that offered captives numerous roles and spaces with different degrees of freedom, privilege, and servitude.” (1)

While this is obviously not to say that Comanche slavery was any more benign or less evil than chattel slavery (it was obviously cruel and brutal in its own ways), it was also obviously different in several important respects, most notably its lack of any sort of racial caste formation.

Again, this is an assessment from one book and concerns one region, but I hope you find it a little useful, and that it might serve as at least a starting point for learning more :) Aside from

1: Pekka Hamalainen (Hämäläinen), The Comanche Empire (New Haven, CT, USA: Yale University Press, 2008), pp. 5, 27, 250-255

I also recommend Ned Blackhawk, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West as another great resource about slavery and the history of the Utes and Comanches in the American West.

You may be interested in this post. In it I briefly described the practice of slavery in the NW Coast region:

Slavery was a common practice from Northern California to the Arctic both before and after contact with Europeans. Slaves were treated as a commodity. They were acquired by raiding and through trading. Or they were born into slavery. They were very valuable. John Jewitt was captured at Nootka Sound on the west coast of Vancouver Island in 1803. He reported that Maquinna, a prominent Nu-cha-nulth chief that captured and destroyed the Trading ship "the Boston", had 50 slaves and they made up half his household. Leland Donald, in his valuable treatise on NW Coast slavery noted that between 15-30% of NW communities were slaves.

Other comment on this post say that indigenous slavery was unlike chattel slavery used by Americans. I don't see a lot of difference when looking at the NW Coast examples. Slaves were property. They were a critical economic resource both in terms of their labor and their value in trade. They had no free will. There appear to be ways that slaves could buy their way out of slavery among some southern NW Coast groups but it was very rare.

Yes, something you might call "slavery" seems to have been widespread, but it was totally unlike the system of slavery for the production of cash crops that developed with the transatlantic slave trade. For example, captives might be taken as symbolic replacements for people who died in war. They would undergo a sort of hazing designed to remove from them their previous social status and be incorporated into the new society, usually at a somewhat subordinate level. Slavery seems to have been more of a tool of warfare and diplomacy rather than of labor, and I don't think that slaves generally performed tasks that were different from those other members of society did. The degradation and danger of indigenous slavery seems to be that you were torn away from your kinship ties in a social context where kinship ties were really important. Captives from group A might be given from group B to group C when groups B and C were coming together to cement an alliance against group A -- I believe this is how the French initially acquired indigenous slaves. Eventually, some groups carved out an economic/political niche for themselves raiding and selling slaves to European settlements.

Most of what I know about the matter of indigenous slavery relates to the Northeast and Southeast, and I'm not an expert either, so if anyone wants to elaborate or correct me, I'd appreciate that.