Since the time of Columbus, Indian slavery was illegal in much of the American continent. Yet, as historian Andres Resendez illuminates in The Other Slavery, it was practiced for centuries as an open secret. There was no abolitionist movement to protect the tens of thousands of natives who were kidnapped and enslaved by the conquistadors and later forced to serve as domestics for Mormons and rich Anglos, or to descend into the "mouth of hell" of eighteenth-century silver mines, where, if they didn't die quickly from cave-ins, they would die slowly from silica in their lungs. Resendez builds the incisive, original case that it was mass slavery, more than epidemics, that decimated Indian populations across North America. New evidence, including testimonies of courageous priests, rapacious merchants, Indian captives, and Anglo colonists, sheds light on Indian enslavement of other lndians. As what started as a European business passed into the hands of indigenous operators and spread like wildfire across vast tracts of the American Southwest. The Other Slavery is nothing less than a key missing piece of American history, one that changes an entire national narrative.
- ISBN13 9780547640983
- Publish Date 12 April 2016
- Publish Status Out of Print
- Out of Print 28 June 2021
- Publish Country US
- Imprint Houghton Mifflin Harcourt Publishing Company
- Format Hardcover
- Pages 544
- Language English