this post was submitted on 16 Mar 2024
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Indentured servitude is NOT chattel slavery. That's also not what pre-colonial Cherokee practiced, but it's a closer concept. It's a much longer oral explanation that I doubt you'd accept anyway.
I suggest you look up the definitions of both before equating the two. I'm partially Cherokee, and another part was a white man who was shipped to the American colonies as an indentured servant, under penalty of death. After 14 years he was free, purchased land, chose a wife, and had a family. That family wasn't born into slavery, the children weren't sold and shipped off as soon as they could be weaned from their mother's breast, and he was given all the rights that a white landowner could have in the 1700s. Someone sold into, or born into, chattel slavery could not do this. They were born, lived, and died at the mercy of their master.
There is a reason historians make a distinction. No, neither is acceptable. But chattel slavery was not practiced by native tribes prior to colonization.
You're Cherokee? Nice to meet you my very, very distant cousin. My white ancestors came in two waves, in the first most died during witch trials. The second wave (the relevant one) was a few Indentured servants, all but one died of bring overworked. That's a distressing common patttern of indentured servitude, there was an end date but you were unlikely to survive your master trying to get the best out of his investment. To call I Indentured Servitude less than slavery is degrading to every one of those people. For a more modern analogy, if Indentured Servitude isn't a form of slave labor, then prison labor, which is even listed in the Constitution as a form of slave labor is not in fact slavery.
Well I never said indentured servitude wasn't a form of slavery, but I wanted to make it clear that it wasn't chattel slavery like was mentioned earlier. I don't want the two equated, because while some people don't like the thought of "degrees of slavery", I think it's absolutely warranted as human beings in indentured servitude were thought of as human, but chattel slaves were not.