Millions of Native people were enslaved in the Americas. Their story waits to be told.

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In family lore, the story told about Yolanda Leyva’s Indigenous great-grandmother Canuta depicted a tale of young romance: Sometime during the 1850s, the Rarámuri girl had been taken in as an infant by a wealthy European couple who’d supposedly found the child abandoned near their hacienda in Chihuahua, Mexico, ultimately growing up to marry the couple’s son.

It was a tale Leyva’s father had only hinted at over the years. “She was pure Indian,” he would say fondly in Spanish, recalling the small, dark-skinned abuelita of his youth.

For Leyva, a professor of history at the University of Texas-El Paso, it all seemed too cryptic. Driven to do her own genealogical research, she gradually pieced together what was likely a more tragic tale – that Canuta had been kidnapped from her Rarámuri people to be groomed into servitude on the Chihuahua estate.

“There’s a long history in Mexico of people taking poor children and raising them, and they become servants,” Leyva said. “Our family wanted to make it a pretty love story, but it was a classic story of a poor girl either voluntarily or involuntarily having children with the son – including my grandfather.”

The story offers a glimpse into a widespread but largely overlooked phenomenon – the enslavement of millions of Indigenous peoples throughout the Western Hemisphere, including North America. The practice preceded and then coincided with the enslavement of more than 12 million Africans in the Americas, though its methods and visibility differed.

Now, two projects are underway in the U.S. to chronicle this neglected chapter in American history through digital repositories that will offer not only opportunity for scholarship but healing for those whose ancestors were enslaved. Together, they represent parallel efforts aiming to document and make public what historian Andrés Reséndez calls “a very important but sad episode of our shared history in the American continent.”

Reséndez, a professor of history at the University of California-Davis, estimates between 2.5 million and 5 million Indigenous people were enslaved from 1491 to 1900.

While Indigenous slaves were put to work in a variety of activities such as ranching and construction, “they were especially prevalent in the mining economy, the backbone of colonial Latin America,” Reséndez said. Mexico’s mining economy alone, he noted, comprised the equivalent of 12 California Gold Rushes between the 16th and 18th centuries.

Some individuals have earned places in history, such as La Malinche, a Nahua girl from Mexico’s Gulf Coast sold into slavery in the early 1500s who eventually served as Cortes’ interpreter. In the late 1600s, Tituba, an enslaved Indigenous woman of probable Central American background purchased by Puritan minister Samuel Parris in Barbados, became the first woman accused of witchcraft in Salem, Massachusetts.

Most, however, labored in obscurity. As with Leyva's great-grandmother, many were enslaved not as able-bodied adults but as children. In 1865, for instance, a state-ordered tally of enslaved Indigenous people in Southern Colorado counted 149 people, with 100 of them listed as age 12 or under "at time of purchase."

In fact, Reséndez notes in his book about the subject, “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America," most Indian slaves were women and children, in contrast to the adult males associated with the African slave trade. While sexual exploitation and child-bearing capabilities partly explain why, he said, women were seen as more docile and had skills more useful to European colonists such as weaving and food gathering than the hunting and fishing abilities of Indian men.

Likewise, children were adaptable and absorbed European language more easily, even identifying with their enslavers, he said.

But with Indigenous slavery largely illegal in much of the New World, many, like Leyva’s great-grandmother, toiled behind closed doors, lacking the resources or any significant network to aid escape.

Leyva is among those who’ve contributed oral histories to Native Bound Unbound, a Santa Fe, New Mexico-based digital repository project led by anthropologist and historian Estevan Rael-Gálvez. Levya's research led her to discover that while the region where her great-grandmother grew up wasn’t traditional Rarámuri land, it was an area where they harvested peyote.

Leyva could find no record of Canuta’s marriage but did unearth records indicating she had borne several children, the first when she was just 12 years old. One record, she said, described Canuta as a peóna, or criada – a servant, not part of the family – and the picture began to become clearer.

The birth records listed no father. Other records also described Levya’s grandfather as a servant on the hacienda, and she wondered whether he had known the likely truth.

When Rael-Gálvez visited her campus to talk about the Native Bound Unbound project, it gave Leyva chills to know that her family story, and those she’d heard from friends, held wider significance.

“Indigenous slavery has been invisible,” she said. “It’s not talked about except in these family stories that change to make them sound prettier than they are. And it lasted for centuries.”

Chronicling Indigenous slavery 'a hemispheric effort'
Rael-Gálvez, too, had been inspired by personal history. Growing up, he said, he’d heard stories involving two enslaved Indigenous ancestors, one of them Pawnee, the other Navajo. He wrote his doctoral dissertation on the subject, knowing his story couldn’t be unique.

For the next 20 years, even while serving as New Mexico state historian and a National Trust for Historic Preservation executive, Rael-Gálvez gathered information on the subject. As he pored through New Mexico baptism and census records, he realized the information held wider value.

“Every once in a while, people who knew I had this would come to me and say something like, ‘Hey, I have a Comanche ancestor – are they in your database?’” he said.

For the next 20 years, even while serving as New Mexico state historian and a National Trust for Historic Preservation executive, Rael-Gálvez gathered information on the subject. As he pored through New Mexico baptism and census records, he realized the information held wider value.

“Every once in a while, people who knew I had this would come to me and say something like, ‘Hey, I have a Comanche ancestor – are they in your database?’” he said.

The archive will also include artifacts, a chronology of Indigenous enslavement and oral histories collected from descendants like Leyva.

Meanwhile, at Brown University's Center for Digital Scholarship in Providence, Rhode Island, associate history professor Linford Fisher leads a separate but similar effort called Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas.

The university-funded project, bolstered by a 2022 grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities, originated with Fisher’s research for a book about Indigenous enslavement in the English colonies, particularly New England and the Atlantic seaboard.

“The enslavement of Native Americans was a hemispheric phenomenon, perpetrated by every European colonial power in their invasion of the Americas,” the project website reads. (https://indigenousslavery.org/)

Stolen Relations is being conducted in collaboration with regional tribal nations and institutions such as the Tomaquag Museum, an Indigenous museum in Exeter, Rhode Island. Their involvement, Fisher said, has helped shape not only project terminology but its overall perspective.

“If slavery studies typically looks at it from the enslavers’ side, they’ve pushed us to think about it in terms of what was lost,” he said. “To me that was a powerful reorientation.”

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