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An American Secret: The Untold Story Of Native American Enslavement

By 1495, Christopher Columbus was in trouble. The riches he had imagined finding in Asia were not materializing in the New World, and the costs of his voyages were mounting. Sending indigenous people back to Europe as slaves became his solution.
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By 1495, Christopher Columbus was in trouble. The riches he had imagined finding in Asia were not materializing in the New World, and the costs of his voyages were mounting. Sending indigenous people back to Europe as slaves became his solution.

All countries have national myths. The story of the first Thanksgiving, for example, evokes the warm glow of intercultural contact: European settlers, struggling to survive in the New World, and Native American tribes eager to help. But as many of us learned in history class, this story leaves a lot out.

This week on Hidden Brain, we explore an "open secret": that from the time Christopher Columbus arrived in the New World until the year 1900, there were as many as five million Native people enslaved in America. We'll talk about this history, and the psychological reasons it was left unexamined for so long.

Andrés Reséndez is a historian at the University of California Davis, and the author of The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America.

"Unlike African slavery, which was legal for centuries and sanctioned by states and empires around the world, Indian slavery was very early on made illegal," Reséndez says. "However, because Native American labor had been essential to all of the economic activities going on during this first generation of colonialism, it was unthinkable for the European colonists to do without native slaves. And so they very quickly devised all kinds of subterfuges and euphemisms in order to continue to profit from the coerced labor of natives by calling it different names."

Hidden Brain is hosted by Shankar Vedantam and produced by Maggie Penman, Jennifer Schmidt, Rhaina Cohen, Parth Shah, and Renee Klahr. Our supervising producer is Tara Boyle. You can also follow us on Twitter @hiddenbrain, and listen for Hidden Brain stories each week on your local public radio station.

Copyright 2021 NPR. To see more, visit https://www.npr.org.

Rhaina Cohen is a producer and editor for NPR's Enterprise Storytelling unit, working across Embedded, Invisibilia, and Rough Translation.
Tara Boyle is the supervising producer of NPR's Hidden Brain. In this role, Boyle oversees the production of both the Hidden Brain radio show and podcast, providing editorial guidance and support to host Shankar Vedantam and the shows' producers. Boyle also coordinates Shankar's Hidden Brain segments on Morning Edition and other NPR shows, and oversees collaborations with partners both internal and external to NPR. Previously, Boyle spent a decade at WAMU, the NPR station in Washington, D.C. She has reported for The Boston Globe, and began her career in public radio at WBUR in Boston.
Shankar Vedantam is the host and creator of Hidden Brain. The Hidden Brain podcast receives more than three million downloads per week. The Hidden Brain radio show is distributed by NPR and featured on nearly 400 public radio stations around the United States.