Of Anthropophagy and Anthropologists; Of Cannibals and Kings

Or, "Mainly Because of the Meat."

Or, "Bite Me!"

Cannibals in the New World. German woodcut of 1509, illustrating a work by Amerigo Vespucci

It seems like piling on to mention that many Canadian Indian groups were cannibals. This is not, after all, like torture and killing of captives, a matter of objective morality. Torturing and killing are certainly not proper. But, once you have done this much, are you adding much of anything more by eating the body rather than letting good meat go to waste?

Indignities to a corpse are, of course, an offense in Canadian law. Do not, I urge you, try this at home. Anyone who “improperly or indecently interferes with or offers any indignity to a dead human body or human remains, whether buried or not, is guilty of an indictable offence and liable to imprisonment for a term not exceeding five years.” But the Canadian law is presumably based largely on the Christian belief in the resurrection—the victim is going to need that body again one day. It should not be expected to be binding on other cultures. As an Algonquin patiently explained to a Jesuit who objected to sharing in the unspeakable feast, "You have French taste, I have Indian. This is good meat for me." (Francis Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. 1, p 497). It does not take a sophomore's expensive college education to hit upon the concept of cultural relativism.

So dwelling on Indian cannibalism looks only like trying to unfairly prejudice the reader against native Canadians, simply because their customs are not ours. Sauce for the goose may not be sauce for the gander.

It becomes a legitimate matter to discuss, however, because the defenders of traditional Indian ways of life have denied it. If they find it important enough to deny, then we must as well—if only to dispell false information. If you want to revive traditional Indian culture, this is one thing you are buying in to.

William Arens famously argued, back in 1979 (The Man-Eating Myth), that there were no first-hand accounts of flesh eating among American Indians, or indeed any other hunter-gatherers worldwide. There was, in other words, no solid proof, just rural legend. Accordingly, it could and should be understood as a slander against the native American “other” by chauvinistic Europeans; a justification for taking native land and pressing them as individuals into slavery. Neil Whitehead calls the cannnibal allegation “imperial propaganda” (Neil Whitehead, “Carib Cannibalism: The Historical Evidence,” Journal de la Societe des Americanistes, 70:1, 1984).

This position became widely popular among academics, and, perhaps even more, in the mainstream media. I know I heard it, stated authoritatively and often, not that long ago.

1592 depiction of New World cannibals.

As anyone who has read up to this point must realize, it was always an odd claim. We have already seen first-hand accounts of cannibalism after torture from the early Jesuit missionaries. Columbus, as soon as he arrived in America, heard of such dining habits among nearby tribes—the very word “cannibal” is a corruption of the term used for themselves by the Carib Indians of the West Indies. Cortes reports similar tales. Bernardo Diaz, who as a footsoldier accompanied Cortes into Mexico, writes of the Aztecs “eating human meat, just like we take cows from the butcher’s shops, and they have in all towns thick wooden jail-houses, like cages, and in them they put many Indian men, women and boys to fatten, and being fattened they sacrificed and ate them” (Díaz del Castillo, The Conquest of New Spain [Historia verdadera de la conquista de Nueva España ] [c.1568] 1992 edition, p.579). This assertion is corroborated by other chroniclers, including Diego Munoz Carmago, who describes in Mexico “public butcher's shops of human flesh, as if it were of cow or sheep.” (Excerpt translated from Muñoz Camargo, Historia de Tlaxcala [c.1585] 1947 edition, p.153, Wikipedia translation).

These certainly claim to be first-hand accounts. Are all Europeans liars?

Arens and others retort that in 1503, Queen Isabella of Spain declared that slavery could only be practiced on peoples who were arguably better off as slaves—for example, those who practiced cannibalism among themselves. Spain, after all, was a Christian country; it otherwise respected the Christian prohibition on slavery. The main emphasis of Isabella's proclamation, therefore, was to prohibit enslavement of native Americans as a general principle.

This, however, unfortunately gave European newcomers arriving in Spanish-dominated lands a vested interest in uncovering cannibalism everywhere. As a result, Arens feels justified in ignoring such accounts.

However, he seems to ignore that similar accounts are given by French sources, although the French at this time had no notable involvement in any slave trade. Etienne Brulé, the first European to view Lake Ontario, Lake Huron, and Lake Superior, was dissected and devoured by Huron colleagues in 1632, according to the Indians themselves (Consul Willshire Butterfield, History of Brule's Discoveries and Explorations, Cleveland, 1898, p. 120. Original source Recollet Friar Gabriel Sagard, Histoire du Canada, 1636). In 1528, his crew watched helplessly just beyond gunshot range as Giovanni Verrazzano, celebrated discoverer of most of the East Coast of America, was offed and eaten on Guadalupe, during what, for obvious reasons, became his last voyage.

There are many more first-hand accounts in the Jesuit Relations. Among our witnesses is Saint Isaac Jogues, who reports, of a time when his Iroquois captors were about to kill him in revenge for one of their warriors who had gone missing, “Happily ... a messenger arrived, who brought news that that warrior and his comrades about whom they were anxious were returning victorious, bringing twenty Abnaquiois prisoners, ... Behold them all joyful; they leave the poor Father; they burn, they flay, they roast, they eat those poor victims, with public rejoicings” (Jesuit Relations 31, p. 83). Later during his captivity, “A Huron, desiring to reconnoitre them [the Iroquois], was killed by an arquebus shot, and eaten by those Cannibals” (Jesuit Relations 31, p. 173).

If the word of a saint were not enough, Francis Parkman notes that Jogues's account of Mohawk practices is corroborated in detail by the Dutch Reformed minister, Johannes Megapolensis, who lived in Fort Orange on the border of Mohawk territory at the time. He is, Parkman notes, “very explicit as to cannibalism.” Everyone in the village, Megopolensis explains, eats the arms, buttocks, and trunk of the victim, but the head and heart, as special delicacies, are reserved for chiefs (Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, p. 199; his source is Megapolensis, A Short Account of the Mohawk Indians, 1644). To Megapolensis, note, the Mohawks were allies; Jogues was the nominal enemy. The Protestant minister had no motive to condemn the Indians, or to make Jogues's sufferings look worse than they were.

Carib Indians dining. "Barbecue" is an Indian term

Jesuit Father Francesco-Giuseppe Bressani was also later captured and tortured by the Iroquois, and reports the same practices Father Jogues saw. He describes a night of agony inflicted on a captive Algonquin. “The following morning they roasted him alive. Then, because I had baptized him, they brought all his members, one by one, into the cabin where I was. Before my eyes they skinned and ate the feet and hands. The husband of the mistress of the lodge threw at my feet the dead man's head, and left it there a long while” (Father Bressani, second letter, August 31, 1644; in Horace Kephart, Captives Among the Indians, New York, 1915).

An Algonquin woman, taken by the Iroquois with her children in 1641, gives an especially wrenching account: “They took our little children, placed them on spits, held them to a fire, and roasted them before our eyes. .... They looked at us, and cried with all their might. Our hearts were broken when we saw them roasting, all naked, before a slow fire. .. After they had put the poor little babes to death by fire, they drew them off the spit to which they were fastened, threw them into their kettles, boiled them, and ate them in our presence” (Fr. Vimont, Relations 22, p. 253).

Nor was cannibalism a practice only of the Iroquois. It seems to have been indulged in by any given Indian group. When Father Jean de Brebeuf and associates visited Neutral territory to scout the evangelical possibilities, they were welcomed by one Indian with the observation "I’ve had enough of the dark-colored flesh of our enemies…I wish to know the taste of white meat, and I will eat yours" (Parkman, The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century, p. 147). Champlain reported the practice among the Algonquins: returning from a raid on the Iroquois, he says, “They attached to sticks in the prows of their canoes ... a dead body cut into quarters, to eat in revenge, as they said” (Champlain, Voyages, p. 184).

Of the Hurons, their special charges, the Jesuit priests who knew them best wrote “ere the faith had given them more light than they possessed in infidelity, [they] would not have considered that they committed any sin in eating their enemies, any more than in killing them” (Jesuit Relations 35, p. 87). Father Brebeuf and his colleague Lalemant report the painfully protracted torture of an Iroquois prisoner in their village. In the final denoument, “one cut off a foot, another a hand, and almost at the same time a third severed the head from the shoulders, throwing it into the crowd, where some one caught it to carry it to the Captain Ondessone, for whom it had been reserved, in order to make a feast therewith. As for the trunk, it remained at Arontaen, where a feast was made of it the same day” (Jesuit Relations 13, pp. 43-77).

Francis Parkman notes similar culinary customs among the Ottawa at the siege of Fort William Henry during the Seven Years War. “... [T]he missionary met troops of Indians conducting several bands of English prisoners along the road that led through the forest from the camp of Levis. Each of the captives was held by a cord made fast about the neck; and the sweat was starting from their brows in the extremity of their horror and distress. … He presently saw a large number of them [the Ottawa] squatted about a fire, before which meat was roasting on sticks stuck in the ground; and, approaching, he saw that it was the flesh of an Englishman, other parts of which were boiling in a kettle, while near by sat eight or ten of the prisoners, forced to see their comrade devoured” (Parkman, Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. 1, p. 482-3). Parkman gives his own source as Bougainville, Journal de l'Expedition contre le Fort George. Since this is a French author of some authority, and the incident reflects badly on the French and their allies, indeed on the correspondent who is unable to stop it, it is worthy of credence.

Aztecs dining.

In a later incident during the same action, English prisoners are taken from a boat. “Three of the bodies were eaten on the spot” (Montcalm and Wolfe, vol. 1, p. 484).

At the seige of Fort Detroit, during Pontiac's rebellion, according to Parkman, the Ottawas tortured and killed forty-six British soldiers, after which they “fell upon their bodies, cut them in pieces, cooked, and ate them” (Parkman, The Conspiracy of Pontiac, p. 202, note).

LaSalle, exploring the West, returned with similar tales of man-eating. He describes a case in which the Cenis Indians had taken a captive, a woman from a neighbouring tribe. After elaborate torture, “At last, one of them gave her a stroke with a heavy club on the head, and another ran her stake several times into her body, with which she fell down dead on the spot. Then they cut that miserable victim into morsels, and obliged some slaves of that nation they had been long possessed of, to eat them” (French, B. F., Historical Collections of Louisiana, NY: Wiley and Putnam, 1846. p. 160). Wasn't that a dainty dish to set before a king?

The “Nez Percé” (not the Pacific Northwest tribe commonly identified by this name, but the Amikwa, of Lake Nipissing, later wiped out by the Iroquois) reported similar practices. “On the eighth of June, the Captain of the Naiz percez, or Nation of the Beaver, which is three days journey from us, came to request one of our Frenchmen to spend the Summer with them, in a fort they had made from fear of the Aweatsiwaenrrhonon, or stinking tribe [the Winnebago—this is a typical example of an unflattering name used for a nearby tribe], who have broken the treaty of peace, and have killed two of their men, of whom they made a feast“ (Father Brebeuf, Jesuit Relations 10, p. 81).

Among the Kwakiutl of the Pacific Northwest, there was a secret society known as the “Hamatsa”-- a word that literally means “cannibals.”

Did they use it literally?

According to early missionaries, they did. Garry Hogg, who collects a variety of such missionary reports in his 1958 book Cannibalism and Human Sacrifice, includes two accounts. One was near Fort Rupert, a Hudson's Bay Company post on the northern tip of Vancouver Island. Two missionary witnesses report. “A Kwakiutl shot and wounded a slave,” they relate, “who ran away and collapsed on the beach at the water’s edge. He was pursued by the tribesmen, including a group of the ‘Bear Dancers’ and Hamatsas. The slave’s body was cut to pieces with knives while the Hamatsas squatted in a circle round them crying out their terrible cry: ‘Hap! Hap! Hap! Hap!’” The two Europeans then “watched the Bear Dancers snatch up the flesh, warm and quivering, and growling like the Grizzly they represented, offer it to the Hamatsas in order of seniority” (Hogg, pp. 70-2). On another occasion, “A Hamatsa demanded that [a] ... slave – this time a female – should dance for him. She stood a moment looking at him in terror, and said: ‘I will dance. But do not get hungry. Do not eat me!’ She had hardly finished speaking when her master, a fellow member of the tribe, split her skull open with an axe, and the Hamatsa thereupon began to eat her flesh”(Hogg, pp. 70-72).

Caribs, the original cannibals

Some Inuit also practiced people cooking. Akpatok Island in Ungava Bay was notorious for the practice, until its inhabitants vacated the site and melded into the mainland population in 1900. Rather like Hannibal Lecter.

Note that most of our eyewitness reports are from missionaries. Besides those being in closest contact with the Indians in their home territory, I submit that this is a source presumably of good moral character, and therefore worthy of belief.

James White, in his Handbook of Indians of Canada (1913), writing before the days of political correctness, gives some idea of how widespread the practice was. “Among the tribes which practised [cannibalism], in one or another of these forms, may be mentioned the Montagnais, and some of the tribes of Maine; the Algonkin, Armouchiquois, Micmac, and Iroquois; farther west the Assiniboine, Cree, Foxes, Miami, Ottawa, Chippewa, Illinois, Kickapoo, Sioux, and Winnebago; in the south the people who built the mounds in Florida, and the Tonkawa, Attacapa, Karankawa, Kiowa, Caddo, and Comanche (?); in the northwest and west portions of the continent, the Thlingchadinneh and other Athapascan tribes, the Tlingit, Heiltsuk, Kwakiutl, Tsimshian, Nootka, Siksika, some of the Californian tribes, and the Ute. There is also a tradition of the practice among the Hopi, and allusions to the custom among other tribes of Arizona and New Mexico. The Mohawk, and the Attacapa, Tonkawa, and other Texas tribes were known to their neighbours as 'man-eaters.' “ (James White, ed., Handbook of Indians of Canada, published as an appendix to the Tenth Report of the Geographic Board of Canada, Ottawa, 1913, 632p., pp. 77-78).

Quite the guest list. Is anyone left?

Given the weight of evidence, denial of the practice is remarkable evidence of how powerful the appeal of the Noble Savage archetype is: mighty enough to make grown anthropologists wilfully ignore the record.

Granted, written texts are not often the stuff of anthropology; it generally depends either on interviews with living people, or the archeological record. Which is to say, digging through other people's garbage. Living Indians are adamant that none of their ancestors was ever a cannibal. And, as we all know, Indian accounts of Indian tradition never lie.

It was, however, the archeological record that eventually did this academic orthodoxy in. In September 2000, Nature published a new study which had done a chemical analysis on human feces found in an Anasazi Indian site from around 1250 AD. Feces--the sort of thing serious anthropologists could really sink their teeth into. This was real, physical, scientific stuff.

The analysis turned up myoglobin, a human protein which apparently could only come to be there from eating human meat.

The test, mind, was done in the first place because archeological sites across the American Southwest featured human bones from which the flesh seemed to have been cut off.

This is not a cannibal. This is a cannon ball.

No doubt some kind of ritual funerary practice?

What is demonstrably true of the one site is probably, as per Occam's razor, true of the others generally.

It appears this was not some religious ritual for interring the dead. It was food preparation.

How common, then, was cannibalism? Rare, or well done? The Noble Savage lobby now resorts to claiming it was an uncommon practice with religious significance. God made them do it.

Uncommon, no doubt; human flesh is usually dearly bought. Moose are not nearly so good at fighting back. But just how uncommon?

Common enough that the Jesuit Father Ragueneau estimated offhand of the prominent Algonquin convert Le Berger that “he had eaten his share of more than fifty men” (Jesuit Relations 1650, pp. 43-48, quoted by Parkman, The Jesuits in North America, p. 244).

His first confession must have been interesting.

Father Lalemant observes of the Hurons, “they eat human flesh with as much appetite and more relish than hunters eat the meat of deer” (Jesuit Relations, p. 166). Father Vimont makes an almost identical comment: “When the supper was cooked, these wolves devoured their prey; one seized a thigh, another a breast; some sucked the marrow from the bones; others broke open the skulls, to extract the brains. In a word, they ate the flesh of men with as much appetite as, and with more pleasure than, hunters eat that of a Boar or of a Stag” (Jesuit Relations 22, p. 251-3).

Not exactly a steady diet; but not a religious ritual in which the act of eating is itself minimal, like swallowing the host at Mass. Something for special occassions.

Like turkey.

Want Slaves?

Arab slave merchants with Zanzibar slaves.

It is no particular knock against Indian culture to note that they practiced slavery. After all, until recently, everyone did. A few years ago I lived in Al Ain, an oasis in the Arabian desert. It has a large livestock market, probably serving most of the United Arab Emirates and the southern part of Saudi Arabia. This is the last water source inland from the Indian Ocean coast before the barren desert begins. At that coast, dhows used to arrive from Oman's African possessions, once stretching south to Zanzibar.

Up into the 1950s, this livestock market was also the slave market. Slavery was officially outlawed in Saudi Arabia only in 1962 (Guy Nixon, Slavery in the West, Bloomington, IN: Xlibris, 2011, p. 13).

Slave market, Khartoum

Slavery has been routine in China, India, Africa, and the Muslim world throughout recorded history. It is enshrined in the Code of Hammurabi, the world's first recorded set of laws. It is now considered an unspeakable evil, but almost all past societies have found it not just useful, but necessary. After all, before our current bankruptcy laws, what were you going to do if someone got himself into more debt than he could possibly repay? What were you going to do if you took prisoners of war, in a time when social organization was too weak to sustain prisons? Indeed, what were you going to do with ordinary criminals? You could cut off their heads. You could cut off their hands. Or you could take it out in labour.

However, it is worth mentioning that slavery was the common practice among Canadian Indians too, because enslavement is too often represented as a peculiarly European, and even English, vice, replacing in Canada a native society that was all unicorns and rainbows. This is squishy-headed romanticism, “noble savage” stuff. Of course Indians kept slaves; like everyone else. Captain John Smith, of Pocahontas fame, speaking of Powhatan's tribe, observes that they made war, "not for lands and goods, but for women and children, whom they put not to death, but kept as captives, in which captivity they were made to do service" (Samuel Purchas, Purchas His Pilgrimes, 1625, edition of 1908, Volume 4, pp. 1699-1700). 

Captain John Smith and Pocahontas

The group we obediently politically correct sorts recently started calling “Dene” were formerly called, from the Cree, the Slaves or Slavey. That was their chief significance, to the Cree, who regularly raided and enslaved them. The Jesuit Relations have many stories of the Eastern Woodlands Indians holding slaves. Among others, Father, now Saint, Isaac Jogues was captured by the Iroquois, and enslaved for about a year, until he was ransomed by the Dutch (Jesuit Relations 31, p. 91). The system among the Iroquois was to give a captive to any family who had lost a relative in war. The family—generally the wife or mother--could choose to have the captive tortured to death, or make use of the slave's labour for as long as they saw fit. Father Joseph Poncet writes, of his own captivity: “I was given to a good old woman in place of a brother of hers, who had been captured or killed by those on our side. Nevertheless, my life was not yet safe; for that woman could have made me die in all the torments that could have been suggested by revenge” (Jesuit Relations 40, p. 135). The Jesuit records explain, of the Iroquois, "When a barbarian has split the head of his slave with a hatchet, he says, 'It is a dead dog—there is nothing to be done but to cast it upon the dung hill'" (43, p. 295). Iroquois slaving raids could produce three or four hundred captives at a time (Almon Lauber, "Indian Slavery in Colonial Times," Columbia University Ph.D. Thesis, 1913, p. 29). Jesuit Father Fremin mentions an Iroquois woman who owned twenty slaves (Jesuit Relations 54, p. 93). French sources attest that the Huron and Ottawa also kept slaves; Ojibwe slaves came from as far away as Eskimo country (Jesuit Relations 30, p.133).

You can certainly find sources which will deny that tribes did not practice slavery, or claim that slavery was rare outside the Pacific Northwest. This is sheer political correctness. As the Jesuit records show, slavery and some sort of slave trade was widespread and followed a familiar pattern: it was an established cultural practice, with set laws to govern it. The slavery deniers rely on making a slippery distinction between “captive” and “slave.” But even this does not hold up. The early French sources make it clear that being captured in war was not the only way one could become a slave. There were deliberate slaving raids. Beyond that, debt was another route to enslavement (Jesuit Relations 16, p. 199). Just as with slavery elsewhere.

Treaty requiring return of escaped slaves, 1480 BC.

UNESCO defines slavery as “an element of ownership or control over another's life, coercion and the restriction of movement and by the fact that someone is not free to leave or to change an employer." (http://www.unesco.org/new/en/social-and-human-sciences/themes/international-migration/glossary/slavery/). By that definition, there can be no question: slavery among North American tribes was practically universal. It is also the common condition of expat employees everywhere; but never mind. Like any bureaucracy, UNESCO needs to artificially create problems as an excuse for more funding. If you want a problem never to be solved, set up a government bureaucracy to solve it. 

Let's stick with the dictionary. Oxford defines slavery as “A condition of having to work very hard without proper remuneration or appreciation.” That proves conclusively, among other things, that I am currently a slave. Merriam-Webster defines slavery as “the state of a person who is a chattel of another.” By that definition, the American Indian practice was surely slavery—besides being able to buy or sell a slave, an owner could kill without penalty. What else could more clearly define ownership?

The Indians of the Canadian Northwest were especially energetic slavers. An estimated one quarter of the resident population among Pacific Northwest tribes were slaves; a proportion similar to the US South before the Civil War. When being taken over by the U.S. After the Alaska purchase meant freedom for their slaves, the Tlingit of Alaska crafted a totem pole with the figure of Abraham Lincoln at the top, to shame the government and demand compensation.

Abtraham Lincoln figure from original Tlingit totem pole.

Among the Tlingit, the practice was to pull out one eye to identify a slave as property. The Indians of the US Southwest would instead cut the tendons of the ankle, or cut off part of a foot. This made escape difficult. Slaves might be ritually killed at a potlatch, usually by being brained before the guests with an axe, or at the death of their master, to provide services in the next life. Or, of course, if they grew old or got sick. A prominent Tlingit or Haida citizen might own as many as fifty slaves.

Slavery among Alaskan Indians was only outlawed by court decision in 1886, two decades after the Thirteenth Amendment to the US Constitution prohibited it for whites. Instances of enslavement are still reported as late as 1903. The Queen Charlotte Islands, now renamed, with proper respect to the local Indian culture, Haida Gwaii (“Islands of the Haida People”), have been described as “the great slave mart of the northwest coast” (Bancroft, History of the Northwest Coast, ii, pp. 647-649).

Until 1850, the Thompson Indians of British Columbia kept slaves (Teit, "The Thompson Indians of British Columbia," in Memoirs of the American Museum of Natural History, pp. 269, 290). In 1836, the Chinook Indians of the BC interior still kept slaves (Thomas, Indians of North America in Historic Times, p. 369). Lauber concludes, “among the North American tribes, the custom of slave-holding was practically universal” (Indian Slavery in Colonial Times, p. 45).

Oddly enough, as is so often the case, what is commonly believed about slavery is the exact opposite of the truth. Those who profit from deceit usually, instinctively, feel safest as far away from truth as possible. The peculiar institution was hardly a uniquely European or even English vice. In fact, in all the world, in pre-modern times, there was only one notable, though only partial, exception to the general practice of slavery: Christian Europe. Moreover, it was primarily Christian reformers who had the institution ended, world-wide, over the last two or three centuries.

The ancient Romans had slaves. The ancient Greeks had slaves before them, and the ancient Egyptians and Mesopotamians. But almost as soon as Christianity became the established church of the Roman Empire, the practice fell into radical disuse. While usually not prohibited outright, it did not fit with the Christian belief in the equality of man. Usury was by Christianity banned, preventing people from falling into insurmountable debt. Prisoners of war came to commonly be ransomed, or simply “paroled,” released on giving their word that they would not again take up arms. Where the practice persisted, Christianity assigned the enslaved person significant rights. According to the church, no person, on principle, could ever be owned by another person; the master could, at most, have rights to their labour. In other words, the Christian practice was servitude, but not slavery, according to Merriam-Webster's strict definition. John Chrysostom, church father, described slavery as “the fruit of covetousness, of degradation, of savagery ... the fruit of sin, [and] of [human] rebellion against ... our true Father.”

Ancient Greek slaves working in a mine.

So why did slavery, and extreme chattel slavery, revive among Europeans in the New World? Two clues: note that it reappeared very soon after Columbus landed, and it appeared only in the Americas. It was not generally accepted, even then, in Europe. Ownership of people had to be expressly permitted by statute in the English American colonies; it had no status in English law. It was legalized in Massachusetts in 1641, in Connecticut in 1650, in Virginia in 1661. It was, to our everlasting credit, banned in Ontario (then Upper Canada) in 1793. Upper Canada was the first British colony to abolish slavery. It was not a major local issue at the time, but Governor Simcoe wanted to prevent United Empire Loyalists from bringing in slaves as they immigrated from the new US. Simcoe considered slavery “an offense against Christianity.”

Massachusetts governor's warrant allowing the sale of native Indians as slaves.

The obvious conclusion is that Europeans were re-exposed to the idea by their travels, by contact with the Muslim world, with Africa, and with the American aborigines, among all of whom it was established and common practice. “The finding of the same custom among the Indians themselves, make their carrying on of the practice quite natural” (Lauber, p. 46). Columbus encountered slaving almost immediately on landing: the local Indians of San Salvador made him understand that “people from other adjacent islands came with the intention of seizing them, and ... they defended themselves” (Columbus, Journal of the First Voyage, 12th of October).

The first slaves held by Europeans in America were certainly native Indians. One can imagine how it came about. Indians, wishing to make a bargain, would have presented slaves as trade goods as a matter of course. When in Rome... Later, they discovered a European interest in furs, but at first, the native interest in European goods far exceeded their capacity, in their extreme poverty, to trade anything of comparable value in return. Columbus attests to an extreme thirst to trade in the Indians he first encounters: “for the longing to possess our things, and not having anything to give in return, they take what they can get” (Journal of the First Voyage, 13th of October). On his Western travels, De Boucherville was offered many slaves as a means of establishing good will (Lauber, p. 32). “In 1684, the Indians offered Du Luth slaves to take the place of some assassinated Frenchmen. In 1724, the Indians at Detroit offered the French commander, by way of truce, two slaves for the same purpose.” (Lauber, p. 38). At the same time, Europeans were certainly taken by Indians in slavery, from very early colonial days; turnabout probably seemed fair play. “Strachey, in The Historie of Travaile into Virginia, speaks of a story that he had heard from the Indians, concerning an Indian chief, Eyanoco by name, liv'ng somewhere to the south of Virginia, who had seven white slaves who had escaped from the massacre at Roanoke. These slaves the Indians employed in beating copper.” (Lauber, p. 46, note; Hakluyt Society Publications, 6, p. 26). “Captain Hendrickson, in 1616, found three persons belonging to the Dutch West India Company, who were slaves of the Mohawk and Minquae, and who were traded to him for merchandise” (Hazard, Annals of Pennsylvania, p. 7). Lauber cites more cases from early records. The taste acquired, the number of available natives become too few, the Irish, conquered and sold into service by the English, often took their place. Then Africans were imported. Offered, in turn, by Africans eager to trade for European manufactures.

African slaves

The Portuguese had explored the coast of Africa down to the Cape of Good Hope by the time Columbus reached Hispaniola. The local inhabitants of their colonies along the African coast, which they had established for ship resupply, all offered slaves. But at first the Portuguese had no use for them. Then Spanish and Portuguese Catholic missionaries began advocating accepting them, as the alternative was generally to see them put to death by the tribes who had captured them as spoils of war (Nixon, p. 11). The same may often have been true of Indian slaves. If the Iroquois had no use for a captive as a slave, they were slowly tortured to death.

In sum, slavery was nearly universal outside of traditional Christian lands. Indian slavery is no special knock against Indian culture. Still, we do not want slavery, do we? We do now believe in the equality of mankind? We don't think only Haida are human? So recall, when you hear demands for a return to traditional Indian culture, and the claim that it was corrupted by European influence, that some of those rainbow unicorns were not there of their own free will. Traditional Indian culture often involved, and economically relied upon, slavery. It is hard to see the good in reviving that culture in too much detail.

Want slaves? Ask an Indian.