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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.
[7] 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.
[1] Whether strategically or racially motivated the slave trade promoted interactions between the Five Civilized Tribes and African Slaves 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.
[8]
The writer
William Loren Katz suggests that Native Americans treated their slaves better than European Americans in the Southeast.
[9] Federal Agent Hawkins considered the form of slavery the tribes were practicing to be inefficient because the majority didn't practice chattel slavery.
[10] Travelers reported enslaved Africans "in as good circumstances as their masters."
[9] A white Indian Agent, Douglas Cooper, upset by the Native Americans failure to practice a harsher form of bondage, insisted that Native Americans invite white men to live in their villages and "control matters."
[9] One observer in the early 1840s wrote, "The full-blood Indian rarely works himself and but few of them make their slaves work. A slave among wild Indians is almost as free as his owner."
[11] Frederick Douglass stated in 1850,
The slave finds more of the milk of human kindness in the bosom of the savage Indian, than in the heart of his Christian master.
[5]
...and it was mixed blood w/white, mestizos who were the enforcers-owners, not full blown indians
Holmes Colbert, a prominent leader in the Chickasaw Nation and the owner of several enslaved African-Americans (Wikimedia Commons)
Peter Pitchlynn, or “Hat-choo-tuck-nee,” a Choctaw chief and later tribal delegate to Washington (LC-USZ62-58502, Library of Congress Prints and Photographs Division, Washington, D.C.)
Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South, by Barbara Krauthamer (2013)