Before contact with Europeans, most North American indigenous communities were familiar with captives taken in intergroup fighting as a potential source of additional community members. Such captives were the proximate or ultimate source of most of those in statuses of servitude, including slavery, in the majority of Native American communities in early historic times.

Statuses of servitude, especially slavery, within Native American communities have not attracted a great deal of scholarly scrutiny, partly because the positive pole of the idea of the “noble savage” continues to color both the popular and scholarly image of Native Americans sufficiently to often cause surprise and even resistance to the suggestion that not all precontact and early contact indigenous communities were egalitarian. That various forms of bondage, including slavery, did occur in some indigenous communities is also frequently dismissed, or their importance in some aboriginal communities minimized.

Careful scrutiny of the earliest available sources on indigenous North American societies, however, reveals that statuses of servitude were of considerable significance in some, although certainly not all, such societies. Two major questions are pursued here. First, as best we can tell, what happened to captives prior to European impact on indigenous societies? How were the fates of captives likely altered as a result of significant European influence?

I emphasize similarities and broad, widespread patterns, but considerable variation existed within this framework of similarities that cannot be considered here. Because of major variations across the continent, a regional approach is adopted.