In many cases, Indigenous enslavement adds new dimensions to familiar histories of the Americas—and to some of their most famous actors. Christopher Columbus sold hundreds of Indians into slavery in Europe. Hernán Cortés owned hundreds of enslaved Indigenous people, more than anyone else in Mexico. The Pueblo Revolt, in 1680, during which Indians destroyed missions and churches and renounced their baptisms and Christian marriages, was a rebellion against the widespread enslavement of Pueblo Indians as much as it was a rejection of the Catholic Church. Tituba, one of the first women accused of being a witch in Salem, Massachusetts, was described by nineteenth-century chroniclers as a Black woman. Historians today, based on their readings of seventeenth-century documents, believe that she was an enslaved Indigenous woman from the Caribbean or South America. For Rael-Gálvez and other scholars, Indigenous slavery expands our understanding of the history of human bondage—who its victims were, where it took place, what it looked like, and when it ended.

Native Bound Unbound grew out of more than three decades of research by Rael-Gálvez into the history of Indigenous slavery. As a Ph.D. student at the University of Michigan, he created a database of thousands of Indigenous slaves held in Colorado and New Mexico. By the time he graduated, in 2002, he had begun a job as the state historian of New Mexico. Then, in 2009, he became the executive director of the National Hispanic Cultural Center, in Albuquerque. In 2022, he began the Native Bound Unbound project, with a grant from the Mellon Foundation that allowed him to hire a team of students, professors, genealogists, and archivists to search for records of enslavement across the Americas. Researchers have since collected an abundance of materials which have revealed traces of the lives of enslaved Indians. They’ve dug deeply in some places, but not at all in others. “We have only just begun work that will extend across generations,” Rael-Gálvez told me.

The establishment of Native Bound Unbound coincided with a boom in scholarship on Indigenous slavery, much of which has focussed on specific regions in Latin America and the United States. An exception was Reséndez’s 2016 book, “The Other Slavery,” which took a more panoramic view of Indigenous slavery, from before the Spanish conquest up to the early twentieth century. “The Other Slavery” aimed to increase awareness of Native American slavery in the same way that Native Bound Unbound aspires to do. And yet, as Philip Deloria, a historian at Harvard, recently said on the podcast “Native America Calling,” “It’s been very hard to think about the ways that we can expand the narrative of Indigenous enslavement. . . . I can list off four or five or six really good books—academic books—on Indigenous enslavement that don’t seem to have made any difference in terms of the way that we think about the narrative.”

Deloria explained, “When we talk about slavery, we think about white columns, plantations in the Southeast, and African American slavery.” In fact, when African and Indigenous slavery are viewed together, it is easy to see how intertwined they are. The researchers at Native Bound Unbound have uncovered instances of African and Indigenous slaves in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries working side by side in Latin American mines. Micaela Wiehe, a Native Bound Unbound researcher and Ph.D. student at Penn State, found marriage records from the sixteenth century, in and around Mexico City, which show unions between enslaved Indians and enslaved Africans. Boston newspapers in the early nineteenth century announced the escape of Indigenous slaves alongside African slaves. The Native Bound Unbound research team learned of a Black-presenting Choctaw man named Spence Johnson, who was captured in Oklahoma and taken to Shreveport, Louisiana, where he was sold into slavery. He was freed after the Civil War, and spent the rest of his life in Waco, Texas. Julio Rojas Rodríguez, a doctoral candidate at El Colegio de México, who works for Native Bound Unbound and teaches history at the Cambridge School in Dallas, told me about a Cuban slave trader named Francisco Martí y Torrens who led expeditions to Africa and Mexico, where he purchased slaves and abducted previously free people to work on Cuba’s sugar plantations. To Rojas Rodríguez, figures such as Martí demonstrate how African and Indigenous enslavement “are part of the same big story—the story of slavery, the slave trade, and the replacement of slavery by new forms of coercive labor.”

N Scott Momaday, Pulitzer-winning Native American novelist, dies aged 89

Jan 29 2024

N Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer prize-winning storyteller, poet, educator and folklorist whose debut novel House Made of Dawn is widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American literature, has died. He was 89.

Momaday died on Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health.

“Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with him,” Momaday’s editor, Jennifer Civiletto, said in a statement. “His Kiowa heritage was deeply meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition.”

More News Stories

N Scott Momaday, a Pulitzer prize-winning storyteller, poet, educator and folklorist whose debut novel House Made of Dawn is widely credited as the starting point for contemporary Native American literature, has died. He was 89.

Momaday died on Wednesday at his home in Santa Fe, New Mexico, publisher HarperCollins announced. He had been in failing health.

“Scott was an extraordinary person and an extraordinary poet and writer. He was a singular voice in American literature, and it was an honor and a privilege to work with him,” Momaday’s editor, Jennifer Civiletto, said in a statement. “His Kiowa heritage was deeply meaningful to him and he devoted much of his life to celebrating and preserving Native American culture, especially the oral tradition.”

House Made of Dawn, published in 1968, tells of a second world war soldier who returns home and struggles to fit back in, a story as old as war itself: in this case, home is a Native community in rural New Mexico. Much of the book was based on Momaday’s childhood in Jemez Pueblo, New Mexico, and on his conflicts between the ways of his ancestors and the risks and possibilities of the outside world.

“I grew up in both worlds and straddle those worlds even now,” Momaday said in a 2019 PBS documentary. “It has made for confusion and a richness in my life.”

Like Joseph Heller’s Catch-22, Momaday’s novel was a second world war story that resonated with a generation protesting the Vietnam war. In 1969, Momaday became the first Native American to win the fiction Pulitzer, and his novel helped launch a generation of authors, including Leslie Marmon Silko, James Welch and Louise Erdrich. His other admirers would range from the poet Joy Harjo, the country’s first Native American to be named poet laureate, to the film stars Robert Redford and Jeff Bridges.

“He was a kind of literary father for a lot of us,” Harjo told the Associated Press during a telephone interview on Monday. “He showed how potent and powerful language and words were in shaping our very existence.”

Over the following decades, he taught at Stanford, Princeton and Columbia universities, among other top-ranking schools, was a commentator for NPR, and lectured worldwide. He published more than a dozen books, from Angle of Geese and Other Poems to the novels The Way to Rainy Mountain and The Ancient Child, and became a leading advocate for the beauty and vitality of traditional Native life.

Addressing a gathering of Native American scholars in 1970, Momaday said: “Our very existence consists in our imagination of ourselves.” He championed Natives’ reverence for nature, writing: “the American Indian has a unique investment in the American landscape.” He shared stories told to him by his parents and grandparents. He regarded oral culture as the wellspring of language and storytelling, and dated American culture back not to the early English settlers, but to ancient times, noting the procession of gods depicted in the rock art at Utah’s Barrier Canyon.

“We do not know what they mean, but we know we are involved in their meaning,” he wrote in the essay The Native Voice in American Literature.

In 2007, then president George W Bush presented Momaday with a National Medal of Arts “for his writings and his work that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition”. Besides his Pulitzer, his honors included an Academy of American Poets prize and, in 2019, the Dayton literary peace prize.

Momaday was married three times, most recently to Barbara Glenn, who died in 2008. He had four daughters, one of whom, Cael, died in 2017.

He was born Navarre Scott Mammedaty, in Lawton, Oklahoma, and was a member of the Kiowa Tribe. His mother was a writer, and his father an artist who once told his son: “I have never known an Indian child who couldn’t draw,” a talent Momaday demonstrably shared. His artwork, from charcoal sketches to oil paintings, were included in his books and exhibited in museums in Arizona, New Mexico and North Dakota. Audio guides to tours of the Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of the American Indian featured Momaday’s avuncular baritone.

After spending his teens in New Mexico, he studied political science at the University of Mexico and received a master’s and PhD in English from Stanford. Momaday began as a poet, his favorite art form, and the publication of House Made of Dawn was an unintentional result of his early reputation.

Much of his writing was set in the American west and south-west, whether tributes to bears – the animals he most identified with – or a cycle of poems about the life of Billy the Kid, a childhood obsession. He saw writing as a way of bridging the present with the ancient past and summed up his quest in the poem If I Could Ascend:

Something like a leaf lies here within me; / it wavers almost not at all, / and there is no light to see it by / that it withers upon a black field. / If it could ascend the thousand years into my mouth, / I would make a word of it at last, / and I would speak it into the silence of the sun.

In 2019, he was the subject of a PBS American Masters documentary in which he discussed his belief he was a reincarnation of a bear connected to the Native American origin story around Devils Tower in Wyoming. He told the Associated Press in a rare interview that the documentary allowed him to reflect on his life, saying he was humbled that writers continued to say his work has influenced them.

“I’m greatly appreciative of that, but it comes a little bit of a surprise every time I hear it,” Momaday said. “I think I have been an influence. It’s not something I take a lot of credit for.”