This has been erased from the public school history curriculum (purposefully) but around 5,500,000 Natives were enslaved up to 1880. Happy 4th of July! brown.edu/news/2017-02-1…
@LucasBrownEyes Yep. Romanus Pontifex gave Portugal the exclusive rights to slave trade over the continent of Africa so the early colonial capitalists needed to look elsewhere for their slaves.
@LucasBrownEyes link from article read.dukeupress.edu/ethnohistory/a…
@LucasBrownEyes I remember one of my history teachers in grade school briefly glossed over it. He was like "They enslaved the Indians and then they eventually brought in the Africans who worked out much better" I was like "...So what happened to the Natives then" and he said they died. Like ???
@LucasBrownEyes Wasn't 1880 the removal of "Indian" as a category in the census too? Like their entire approach was to simply stop admitting that Native people existed. 1880 is also when one of my ancestors was "removed" to "Indian territory".