Slaveries: global practices, foundational experiences, and outlier forms

I am just now watcing this symposium, organized by the National Museum of the American Indian (Smithsonian) also tackling the difficult histories and meanings of slavery as experienced by Africans and Indians as a way to understand the distintness of them and how they help us understand "humanity writ large" then and as it is playing out right now. The first session is a panel discussion between three scholars. After their presentations, each scholar went straight to the heart of what audience members would find problematic. Of the three, Dr. Tiya Miles, most directly states both the risk for this symposium to cause some people, particularly African Americans to feel that this conversation could marginalize the Black experience and "shut down" emotionally to hearing this history. Patience, she then said, is requested as these conversations and studies take place so we progress. Empathy is required of all of us, especially as we are coming through the realities these historic events created for us in the present to figure out how we will make our futures: that out of the details or specifics and nuances and variations of the horrors of slavery and enslavement as practiced and experienced, we will recognize what exists around us. From that recognition we will know the social structures that must be sustained and confront those that must be altered or dismantled and remade. This symposium offers historical information and ways of understanding it.

The Other Slavery: Histories of Indian Bondage from New Spain to the Southwestern United States 

(October 2021) 12 videos