"It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages": Indian slavery hidden by "erasure" (Spanish Louisiana, 1769–1803)

SUMMARY"It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages": Indian slavery hidden by "erasure" (Spanish Louisiana, 1769–1803) [Connections: Louisiana (deep), Nov 5, 2026]

RECORDHistorian Leila K. Blackbird, in the William and Mary Quarterly (July 2023), titled her article with a colonial quote in the source's language: "It Has Always Been Customary to Make Slaves of Savages." The abstract says scholars assumed Indian slavery ended when Spain took over in 1769. It says the first case before the Louisiana Supreme Court disproves that. It says Indigenous enslavement continued through a "discursive practice of Indigenous erasure," in which shifting ideas of race and legal personhood hid enslaved Native people, and that Native people were trafficked across the Gulf South into the antebellum period. Her 2019 paper "Entwined Threads of Red & Black: Indigenous Enslavement in Louisiana, 1699–1824" (University of New Orleans, AHA annual meeting) says "the enslavement of Native Americans was not a small and isolated practice" and that "Native Americans and their mixed-race Black-Native descendants continued to be enslaved."

PATTERNA peer-reviewed historian names the mechanism. Native people did not vanish from slavery. They vanished from the labels

LENS (WW9)A peer-reviewed historian calls it "Indigenous erasure." That is the receipt for "we were replaced."

OPENRead the full article for the case named, counts, and examples of the labels used

SOURCESBlackbird, WMQ 80:3 (2023), 525–58 (OIEAHC PDF); Blackbird, "Entwined Threads of Red & Black" (AHA 2019 abstract).