Scholars briefly refer to the practice of slavery by Indigenous peoples in the antebellum American South. Donald B. Smith finds Native Americans in the South fought with the Confederacy in the American Civil War, and he briefly tells this story in his book Chief Buffalo Child Long Lance: The Glorious Imposter. Smith’s brief reference led me to conclude British, French, and Spanish colonizers introduced Indigenous peoples to the practice for economic purposes. African and Caribbean slaves were treated by colonizers as goods to be traded with Indigenous peoples. That was what I knew and concluded prior to my read of Black Slaves, Indian Masters: Slavery, Emancipation, and Citizenship in the Native American South by Barbara Krauthamer.

Krauthamer’s book is a case study of African American slavery in the southern Chickasaw and Choctaw nations, from their origins in Mississippi to their removal by the American government to Indian Territory to the post-emancipation and Reconstruction eras that followed the American Civil War. Krauthamer intends to share the 19^th century from the viewpoint of African Americans and Indigenous peoples. African American slaves worked “for their [Indigenous] masters’ benefit” (2) while Indigenous peoples dealt with Protestant missionaries and the American government’s attempts to civilize them through removal, conversion to Christianity, termination of communal landholding patterns, and dismantlement of tribal governance structures. Krauthamer sets up in the introduction the context to explain why Indigenous peoples’ practices of slavery changed in the 19^th century. Pressure mounted on Chickasaw and Choctaw to assimilate. Whereas the two Indigenous nations took slaves after war as captives and used these individuals to replace casualties, slaves were now considered goods and not prospective citizens. Slaves were no longer captives from another Indigenous nation, but African Americans acquired as commodities alongside other technologies from newcomers. Slaves apparently did not cement kinship ties with settlers, they were just entities bought and sold as a result of “Indians’ heightened individualistic engagement in market-oriented activities” (3). Krauthamer’s thesis is significant in that it explains why Chickasaw and Choctaw, when faced with the end of slavery as a legally sanctioned business transaction after the Civil War, resisted, and continue to resist, inclusion of African American slaves and their descendants as citizens of their nations.

Krauthamer wants to know the Chickasaw and Choctaw worldviews and matrices that guided their practices of slavery and their subsequent responses to the American government’s directives that the tribal governments discontinue slavery, emancipate slaves, and bestow citizenship rights upon them, all after the Civil War. She also seeks to document African Americans’ responses to changes in the political and racial climate of 19^th-century America. We learn in the introduction that Chickasaw and Choctaw began to practice chattel slavery in the late-18^th century when the nations lived in Mississippi.

In chapter one, Krauthamer argues Chickasaw and Choctaw began to practice chattel slavery because slaves were one of many consumer goods available for purchase from colonizers. However, she suggests Chickasaw and Choctaw practices of slavery reflected their own concepts of economic, property, gender and racial relations, and politics. She also outlines traditional Chickasaw and Choctaw practices of slavery that were usually tied to conflicts with other Indigenous nations. As Chickasaw and Choctaw participated in the colonizers’ slave economy, they looked at slaves in racial terms (i.e., blackness) and not as casualties in conflict, which would have been the case in past centuries. Chickasaw and Choctaw racialized slavery and slaves and accepted colonizers’ impressions on them that to be African American was to be inferior to the Indigenous peoples who now held slaves as property. Slavery for Chickasaws and Choctaws helped naturalize “race and racial difference in the Americas in the 18^th and 19^th centuries” (160).

Krauthamer goes on to focus on the missions among Chickasaw and Choctaw in chapter two. The story is of Christianity among slaves and Indigenous peoples amid pressure by the American government to remove Chickasaw and Choctaw from Mississippi. There is a side story that concerned whether or not Protestant missionaries could admit slaveholder Chickasaw and Choctaw to their churches when it seemed the consensus among the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions was toward support for abolition of slavery. However, mission stations in the South required financial support from Chickasaw and Choctaw benefactors, many of whom held slaves. The diverse Protestant churches in the South also became a sanctuary for enslaved African Americans—held by Indigenous and non-Indigenous peoples—to learn to read and write and to escape the exploitation they faced at home. Faith created “momentary but meaningful experiences of autonomy and authority” (58). However, these moments were fleeting because Krauthamer also notes “enslaved workers bore the responsibility for a number of jobs and much of the labour critical to the missions’ smooth and continuous operations” (67). Nevertheless, work at a mission station was a chance to contemplate what freedom could look like and mean.

Conflicts within Protestant congregations over tolerance of parishioners’ practice of slavery turn up in chapter three. Krauthamer shifts to examine how Chickasaw and Choctaw slaves resisted their masters. Whether planned or spontaneous acts, she concludes such events occurred among individuals or small groups of slaves but were not a coordinated offensive in the years that led up to the Civil War. After a short depiction of the war, chapter four moves to the period that immediately followed. The federal government discussed how to free slaves, but Chickasaw and Choctaw governments disputed whether the end of slavery, and the freedom of some 5,000 slaves in their nations, applied to their territories. From the late 1860s to the 1870s, newcomer and Indigenous governments came to a consensus that slavery in Indian country was over, and lawmakers discussed whether or not freed slaves could become citizens upon their emancipation, the topic of chapter five. The relevance of the 1866 treaty concluded between the American government and the Chickasaw and Choctaw nations continued to be unclear for the now emancipated slaves. Were they to become citizens of these Indigenous nations or “had they become citizens of the United States by default?” (122). Regardless of the citizenship question, Krauthamer finds freed people wished to remain residents among the Chickasaw and Choctaw as they also sought American citizenship. African Americans wrinkled Indigenous concepts of sovereignty in the late 1860s.

The citizenship question rages in chapter six, only Krauthamer now introduces the American government’s late-19^th century Native American assimilation campaign to the story. As this happened, emancipated slaves in Indian country began to identify with the freed people throughout the United States. Collectively, they shared a “history of slavery and emancipation” (134).

Although Krauthamer aligns herself with historians and anthropologists who ask us to consider slavery from the perspective of Indigenous peoples, her story of African American slaves prior to and after emancipation is incomplete. She relies heavily on media published by Indigenous and non-Indigenous outlets, missionary and tribal government records, documents from Chickasaw and Choctaw families’ private archives, and the occasional story from an oral history project conducted in the 1930s with emancipated African American slaves. What she misses is a substantive discussion of the merits and demerits of such sources. Although such sources capture Indigenous voices, one must be attentive to their format and purposes. One must question who gets to speak in these venues. The story could benefit from oral interviews with descendants of Chickasaw and Choctaw slaveholders who could share with readers more about the practice’s legacy for contemporary Indigenous nations. Krauthamer’s objective to learn why Chickasaw and Choctaw held African Americans as slaves is not completely achieved and could have been had she spoken with contemporary Chickasaw and Choctaw or at least accounted for why their voices were absent in her book. Although we know more about African Americans in Chickasaw and Choctaw territory, I think Krauthamer assumes we think the story she tells conveys “a more nuanced understanding of the antebellum South” (8) just because she tells it.

Black Slaves, Indian Masters is a study where participants could have framed the reference points for the story. Krauthamer focuses on gender, race, and class in slavery but neglects to ask the following: Were these aspects most significant among 19^th-century Chickasaw and Choctaw? Her two-page conclusion fails to take into consideration these issues and provide a nuanced discussion of them.

In sum, Krauthamer tells more than she shows. I am not entirely convinced Chickasaw and Choctaw held slaves merely as goods and made a complete break from their past, when slaves were war captives who later became citizens. It is also a well-known argument in the history of Indigenous-newcomer relations in North America that trade was not a mere exchange of goods. It cemented relationships. Thus, while I don’t dispute Krauthamer’s argument that Native Americans participated more frequently in the marketplace in the 19^th century, which led them to chattel slavery, I just think this argument is incomplete because it lacks verification against Indigenous oral tradition and knowledge. Perhaps the term chattel slavery is elastic, and we lack an Indigenized understanding of its meaning in the antebellum, emancipation, and Reconstruction eras of American history.