The earliest record of African and Native American contact occurred in April 1502, when Spanish explorers brought an African slave with them and encountered a Native American band.[53] Thereafter, in the early colonial days, Native Americans interacted with enslaved Africans and African Americans in every way possible; Native Americans were enslaved along with Africans, and both often worked with European indentured laborers. "They worked together, lived together in communal quarters, produced collective recipes for food, shared herbal remedies, myths and legends, and in the end they intermarried."[32][55]
Because both races were non-Christian, and because of their differing skin color and physical features, Europeans considered them other and inferior to Europeans. The Europeans thus worked to make enemies of the two groups. In some areas, Native Americans began to slowly absorb white culture, and in time some Native American tribes came to own African slaves.[3][4]
Native-American slavery in the SoutheastEdit
The Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole made the largest efforts of all the Native American peoples to assimilate into white society by implementing some of the practices which they saw as beneficial; adoption of slavery was one of them.[56][57][58] They were the most receptive to whites' pressures to adopt European cultures. The pressures from European Americans to assimilate, the economic shift of furs and deerskins, and the government's continued attempts to “civilize” native tribes in the south led to them adopting an economy based on agriculture.[59]
Slavery itself was not a new concept to indigenous American peoples as in inter-Native American conflict tribes often kept prisoners of war, but these captures often replaced slain tribe members.[4][60] Native American "versions" of slavery prior to European contact came nowhere close to fitting the European definition of slavery as Native Americans did not originally distinguish between groups of people based on color, but rather traditions.[61] There are conflicting theories as to what caused the shift between traditional Native American servitude to the oppressive racialized enslavement the Five Civilized Tribes adopted. One theory is the ”civilized” tribes adopted slavery as means to defend themselves from federal pressure believing that it would help them maintain their southern lands.[58] Another narrative postulates that Native Americans began to feed into the European belief that Africans were inferior to whites and themselves.[62] Some indigenous nations such as the Chickasaws and the Choctaws began to embrace the concept that African bodies were property, and equated blackness to hereditary inferiority.[63] In either case "The system of racial classification and hierarchy took shape as Europeans and Euro-Americans sought to subordinate and exploit Native Americans' and Africans' land, bodies, and labor.[61] Whether strategically or racially motivated the slave trade promoted African slaves owned by Native Americans which led to new power relations among Native societies, elevating groups such as the Five Civilized Tribes to power and serving, ironically, to preserve native order.
