African-American slavery looms large in American history and in American culture and political battles. It looms so large that the conversation often doesn’t include any mention of the Native Americans and what happened to them. Their story is sometimes called the Other Slavery.

The Beginning of Indian Slavery

The first thing you need to know about the Other Slavery is that it was illegal. Totally illegal, almost from the word go. And that illegality was almost universally ignored. By everyone from the Spanish to the Portuguese to the Anglos to many, many Indian tribes themselves. That slavery existed in the Americas prior to European conquest is perfectly clear. The first European to get involved was Senor Columbus himself. His first voyage brought back a couple dozen Indians his men had captured (Resendez, 22).

Subsequent trips brought back more. Slaving had not been the original aim of the exploration, but when it became clear that the silks and spices Columbus had promised were not to be found in the Caribbean, slaves were the only way to make the thing commercially viable. Columbus himself inaugurated the Middle Passage, which meant the slaving ships that would later cross from Africa to the Americas, complete with overcrowding, inadequate food, inadequate medical care, and a very high mortality rate. In Columbus’s version, the ships sailed east, not west, and the holds were full of Indians, rather than Africans. The Spanish version also favored women and children over men, since they were intended for domestic service, rather than plantation or mine labor. But in all other respects it was the same horrific story. In the first half of the 1500s, some 2500 slaves were sent to Spain from the Caribbean and the coasts of Venezuela, Mexico, and Florida (Resendez, 25).  

What was different was their legal status when they got there. Ferdinand and Isabella opposed native enslavement, and they made it illegal to sell the Indians in Spain four days after the first ship’s arrival. This was not because they were opposed to slavery in general. Spain was well acquainted with slavery, but they followed a protocol about who could be enslaved. They had to be non-Christian enemies taken in just wars formally declared by popes or kings. Muslim jihadists had just been driven out of Spain after centuries of fighting, so Muslim slaves were A-Okay. But not even the Spanish crown could delude themselves into claiming that Indians of the Caribbean were enemies waging an offensive war against Spain (Resendez, 26). Clearly, they were not. Therefore not enslavable.

The royal decrees did not seem to stop the boats from coming, though, causing Isabella to exclaim waspishly “Who is this Columbus who dares to give out my vassals as slaves?” (Resendez, 28). No doubt the Indians would have objected to being vassals too, but at least she didn’t want them to be slaves. Initially, there were some loopholes: cannibals could be enslaved, for example. But in 1542, the Spanish crown closed those loopholes too. No native slaves, not even cannibals. But where profits are concerned, laws are often ignored. None of these Indians left us a memoir, sadly, but the court records of Seville can tell us the outlines of their stories, because these slaves had access to something that most slaves in history didn’t: a court system that knew their condition was illegal. They could sue.

Béatriz and Catalina

From those court records, we get the story of Béatriz, who so far as I can tell has not been dignified with a last name. She was only 14 years old when she arrived in Spain, which you might think would classify her as one of the children on the ship, but she already had Simón, a baby boy with her. In 1534, she and her son were given to Juan Cansino of the town of Carmona as part of his wife’s dowry.

I have no details about the early years of their enslavement, but one can imagine: endless household chores with only food and clothing as pay. Quite possibly verbal and physical mistreatment. During her court appearance later Béatriz was described as short, thin, and missing an upper tooth. We can only speculate about how she lost the tooth.

The first trouble recorded is that Cansino sold Simón away, claiming that the boy had stolen from him. Béatriz had four more children. No word on who the father or fathers were. All four children were kept as slaves.

One of these 2^nd generation slaves was a girl named Catalina. In 1556, she was 17 years old and not afraid. She repeatedly ran away and tried to convince the others to come with her. Cansino was enraged. He sent her to the butcher’s shop and had her face branded with a red hot iron. This didn’t stop Catalina. She and Béatriz began speaking out. They were indias, they said, and indias had a right to freedom. They heard some Indians in Seville had sued for their freedom and won.

They were right. It was 1556, after all. The New Laws had closed all the loopholes 14 years earlier! And that’s assuming that Béatriz ever fell into the loopholes anyway, which is more than likely not true. She had been a slave for most of her life. The crown had granted her the right to freedom, but much like the slaves of Juneteenth in the United States, nobody had bothered to tell her.

It is possible that mother and daughter did more than just speak out. Cansino later said on the record that Catalina in particular was “always trying to escape, and had stolen a money purse, a silver chain, jewels, cheese, wool, wine, and whatever else she and her mother could get.”

Béatriz is not accused of having run away until 1558. She was 38 years old and had lived as a slave in Cansino’s house for 24 of those years. She left her children behind and went to Seville, where she met Francisco Sarmiento, the designated official to help the Indians. For five months, Béatriz and Sarmiento prepared her case. And then Juan Cansino was summoned to Seville to answer criminal charges.

According to the law, what Béatriz had to do was prove that she was from the Spanish Indies, which meant absolutely all of Spain’s overseas colonies. If she could do that, she was free and so were her children.

The judges immediately admitted that she looked like someone from the Indies. But they also asked her if she could speak Nahuatl, and she said no. Nahuatl is the language of the Aztecs and the Toltecs. Certainly it was the most important language of pre-Conquest Mexico. But it was never at any point the only language of Mexico. Furthermore, it was also true that like many other Indian slaves, she had been taken from her homeland while very young. How much would she remember? The witnesses she presented were all from Cansino’s neighborhood: a widow, a butcher’s wife, a shoemaker. All of them agreed that Béatriz spoke a strange language and said she was an Indian from Mexico. Her most important witness was a blind Indian named Juan Vásquez who said he had known her for 13 years, but they were both from Malacata in Mexico and had spoken the language of Malacata together.

However, there was still the defense to hear, and Cansino took the most common defense available to those accused of illegally holding Indian slaves. He claimed that Béatriz wasn’t Mexican at all. No she was the daughter of a Moor, which meant someone from northern or western Africa, that she had said so many times. It was perfectly legal to hold Moors as slaves, they were infidels and had only recently been driven out of Spain, which made them enemies of a just war.

The judges returned their attention to Béatriz for more questions. They asked her about the fabrics were made in her country? They asked very leading questions like: Were there camels in her country? Or elephants? Tigers? Lions? What about spices? Did she eat ginger, pepper, cinnamon, or cloves? They knew, of course, that such things did not exist in the Spanish Indies. They did exist in Africa. Therefore, if she said yes, then she was obviously a liar and a legal slave. But for someone taken as a child, uneducated, and traumatized. What did she know about her homeland? Very possibly not much.

Cansino also objected to the name Malacata. He said there was no such place. Now I looked up Malacata, and my best guess is that it means Malacatán, which is in present-day Guatemala, but shares a border with modern-day Mexico. The only downside to my theory is that it is on the Pacific coast, not the Caribbean coast, but that’s not proof against it. The Aztec ruler Ahuitzotl had expanded his empire south and down into the western part of present-day Guatemala, right where Malacatán is. She could easily have been a captive shipped north into the empire Cortes had already devastated and the east to the ports. Even today about 30% of the people in the area around Malacatán are Mayan, the most spoken language other than Spanish is Mam, a Mayan language which bears absolutely no relation to Nahuatl.

Cansino’s claim was that Béatriz was really from Malagueta, which was a coast of Africa under Portuguese control and there was no law against holding slaves from Portuguese colonies.

Even some of the witnesses on Béatriz’s side confused the issue, with at least one claim that she was from Puerto Rico and another that she was from Peru. Both would have made her enslavement illegal, but the contradictions certainly looked like an ill-planned lie.

Béatriz lost her case. We have no record of how Cansino treated her on her return to slavery. I seriously doubt that it was pretty. She was to stay a slave for the rest of her life.

But Catalina wasn’t done. In 1572, thirteen years later, she sued Cansino again. Her mother was dead, but now she had a daughter of her own to protect. Catalina began her suit by maligning her mother, explaining to the court that her mother was too uneducated and too drunk to explain herself or present her case clearly.  Béatriz was undoubtedly uneducated which was not her fault. Whether she was also alcoholic, I don’t know, but I wouldn’t blame her. What other escape did she have?

But having explained why the case was not satisfactorily resolved 13 years earlier, Catalina continued her case with a long list of witnesses and she knew in advance that all their stories matched. Every single one of them insisted that Béatriz was from Mexico.

Since Cansino could no longer exploit the inconsistent testimonies, he took a different approach. He attacked the witnesses, accusing them of terrible things, such as not having pure Spanish blood, or having no fixed opinions, or just generally being untrustworthy.

This was obviously racist, but that wasn’t a dirty word then. The fact was that decades had passed since Béatriz arrived in Spain and memories had faded. Absolute, irrefutable proof was impossible. There weren’t any documents. There was only the word of aging, lower class people. Catalina lost her case. The court went so far as to admonish Cansino to treat his slaves well, but no further.

So you might be wondering what Catalina is doing in this series on women who escaped slavery. She is here because two years later, the Spanish Council of the Indies reviewed the case and overturned the ruling, thus ending 40 years and 3 generations of slavery that had never been legal in the first place. Catalina and all her family were free.

I am sorry to say that I have no further information about Catalina and her family. Where they went, what they did, or how they supported themselves in their new freedom. All of that is missing because it wasn’t relevant to the court cases, which are the only records we have.

The End of Indian Slavery

About Indian slavery in general, more is known. Despite the disappointing results for Béatriz, in fact the Spanish courts really were trying to free the Indian slaves. One historical analysis of the court records in the 16^th century found that 95% of the completed cases actually did result in the Indians going free. Now don’t be misled by that: not all Indians were able to bring their cases to court and not all cases in the court were completed. But even so, it shows that it was possible for an Indian to win in court.

With numbers and laws like that, Indian enslavement in Spain was bound to peter out, and it did. Word spread among Indian slaves that the law was on their side. More sued for their freedom, and even if they did not, their owners could not sell them at full value, since everyone knew it was illegal. As a result, the financial incentives were not there. That chapter of the Middle Passage died out and by the early 17^th century, Indian slavery in Spain was gone.

Note that I said, Indian slavery was gone in Spain. African slavery and even enslavement of others from farther afield was a different story altogether. One interesting wrinkle in the story of freeing the Indian slaves in Spain is what it did to the non-Indian slaves. Their freedom was not to be had for a lawsuit. Cansino tried to claim that Béatriz was really from Africa, not the Americas. While it seems that this was a lie in Béatriz’s case, telling the lie the other way around held obvious advantages for slaves who really were of African descent. One slave who tried was named Violante. In 1552, while waiting to be sold, she screamed to the crowd that no one should buy her, she was a thief, and not only that it was illegal to buy her because she was india. The subsequent lawsuit is, if possible, even more heartrending than Béatriz’s. Violante adopted the identity of a dead india woman, and in the process she didn’t just change her name and comb her hair differently. She actually had herself branded under the chin to serve as proof of identity because that type of brand was done only in the New World. Meanwhile the case dragged on as she was held in chains and beaten for months. In the end, the fight was beaten out of her until she admitted she had made the whole thing up. And while in modern times we wouldn’t consider confession under torture to be proof of anything except torture, the fact is the that the testimony of the witnesses who should know is very damning. She wasn’t an india. She was exactly what her master said she was, and the courts held no escape for her (van Deusen).

Indian slavery in the Spanish colonies (as opposed to Spain itself) is also a different story. It was just as illegal to hold Indians in slavery there, but they were a long way away and royalty is more and more ignorable the farther away you get. There is no doubt that the slavery continued on a large scale all the way through the colonies. At best, you got governors who looked the other way. At worst, they were enthusiastic participants. In New Mexico, the collusion was so blatant that in the 1650s and 1660s, slaves were actually transported south to the silver mines in the royal carriages themselves, the ones meant to supply New Mexico with food and manufactured goods (Resendez, 140). While virtually all tribes suffered from slavery, it is also true that many tribes found that their own best means of support was to become slavers themselves. Comanches, Apaches, Navajos, Utes, and many others were regularly both predators and prey. And when Anglo settlers came in, they also participated in a system of enslavement that they found ready-made on their arrival.

The question of hard numbers is a tricky one. We can get good numbers on African slavery in the Americas because it was all legal and above-board. Ships paid taxes on arrival and sales were clearly and shamelessly documented. With Indian slavery it was different. Since it was illegal it went under a variety of guises and euphemisms. The slaves might be listed as “servants” or “debtors” or “criminals” or even “godchildren.” Women and children continued to be in high demand through the period, and declaring yourself as a godparent of a child in need was a kind and Christian way of absolving any qualms of conscience about having purchased said child at an auction in the main square. So adding all of this up is hard, but historian Andrés Résendez has estimated that anywhere between 2.5 million and 5 million Indians lived as slaves between 1492 and 1900 (Resendez, Appendix 1). He also makes a compelling case that although everyone knows that the native populations were devastated by disease, disease alone would not have caused the collapse of so many native cultures. He points to the Black Death in Europe which was also incredibly devastating. But after a few generations, the population bounced back and no one would say that the Black Death had destroyed European civilization. Left to themselves, Resendez argues, the Indians would also have bounced back after a few generations. But they weren’t left to themselves, and it was the combination of disease plus slavery that wiped so many tribes out of existence.

Selected Sources

My major source was The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America by Andrés Reséndez. Translators without Borders had some interesting maps and facts about the languages of the Mexico. This German site on city populations had information on Malacatán. The tragic story of Violante comes from Nancy E. van Deusen’s, 2017 article “Passing in sixteenth-century Castile,” published in the Colonial Latin American Review, 26:1, 85-103.

Unsurprisingly, there are no existing images of Catalina or her mother. The feature image is an unidentified woman from the Aztec Codex Tudela from about this time period. It is likely that Catalina would have worn Spanish clothes, rather than meso-American, but perhaps this would have looked familiar to her mother. Image Source: Wikimedia Commons.