Slavery is the great stain on American’s history – and while African Americans bore the brunt of the practice, they weren’t the only ones. Andrés Reséndez joins us to talk about the tens of thousands of Native Americans who also served as slaves dating back to the times of Columbus. He writes about the topic in “The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America” (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt). He’s in town to participate in the symposium “Indians at the Center: Rethinking U.S. History and Geography,” sponsored by the UTA Center for Greater Southwestern Studies.
Andrés Reséndez on …
… how enslavement led to the deaths of the people indigenous to North America:
“The first island colonized by the Spanish is called the Hispaniola or Espanola, which means the Spanish island because that was the only speck that they controlled. That had the largest gold deposits in the Carribean. As many as 10,000 Indians were made to work in these mines. The conditions were really harsh. So, to pin it all on biological conditions is to really reduce something to one cause, which was significant, but it was hardly the only cause. If you look at the documentation, a lot of the documentation really tells about exploitation, about the lack of food, about clashes with the Indians. That is a very big explanation of that decimation.”
