Pre-Columbian civilizations in the Americas made advances including agriculture, irrigation, metalwork, astronomical calendars, and architecture. Some of their building projects indicate a mastery of geometry.
But there were less appealing aspects to pre-Columbian cultures. They routinely committed human sacrifices; large numbers of healthy young people were killed to satisfy the spirits which these cultures imagined. Women had little to no legal standing; they could be physically captured and forced to marry the men who captured them; they could be bought and sold.
The societies in the Americas prior to 1492 practiced cannibalism. The two ideas — human sacrifice and cannibalism — were sometimes united in a single event. Historian Nathaniel Knowles writes:
Cannibalism apparently invariably accompanied torture among all Iroquois speaking people. It was also most important to eat at solemn feasts the flesh of the woman sacrificed to the war god.
Centuries before any European contact, the natives of South America used cocaine for both medicinal and recreational purposes. While the medicinal applications were beneficial, the recreational usage brought about many of the usual problems of addiction. Some of the communities fell into neglect as their residents made imprudent decisions under the influence of the drug. The warriors of these societies often consumed cocaine prior to battle, which energizes the user even as it impedes rational decision making. The natives obtained cocaine by chewing the leaves of the coca plant, sometimes mixing coca leaves with tobacco leaves.
The Native Americans (“Indians”) also used peyote. While cocaine is a stimulant, peyote contains a psychoactive drug. It alters the user’s perceptions of sights and sounds.
The use of cocaine, peyote, and other drugs slowed the improvement of civilization.
Diplomatic relations between tribes were often uneasy. Warfare between tribes was ubiquitous. Given both constant armed conflict and an inability to unite politically, the isolated tribes devoted large amounts of energy and resources to military activity, with little left for refining civilization. Population levels failed to grow and social structures developed little.
“Slavery between tribes existed before the coming of Europeans,” writes David Treuer in the Los Angeles Times.
Involuntary servitude was deeply ingrained in the pre-Columbian societies of North, Central, and South America. It pervaded cultures from the Arctic Circle to the southern tip of South America.
“Slavery was practiced by the Native Americans before any Europeans arrived in the region. People of one tribe could be taken by another,” agrees historian Joshua Mark.
By the time Columbus set foot on Hispaniola, millennia of bondage had shaped the societies of the Americas.
“Europeans did not introduce slavery to this continent,” writes Rebecca Onion. “The Native groups in the land that later became the United States and Canada practiced slavery before Europeans arrived.”
These many defects of pre-Columbian American cultures were connected. The natives who practiced one of them also practiced others. These social flaws encouraged each other in a vicious circle.
“The pre-Columbian world was a place where slavery, trafficking, sexual exploitation, oppression, and even genocide was commonplace prior to any European contact,” writes David Barton. He gives an example:
Take briefly for instance, the Carib tribes who had widespread institutions of perpetual slavery, captive mutilation, and even villages dedicated to the sexual exploitation of captured Taino women forced to produced children which their masters then ate.
Archeologists and scholars continue to unearth more evidence of social problems which the original Americans inflicted upon each other.
In an NPR radio interview, University of California Professor Andres Resendez said:
What we do know is that there is plenty of archaeological and pictorial evidence, as well as some of the early chronicles of the New World depict the enslavement of natives prior to the arrival of Europeans. In the Eastern Seaboard of the United States, Iroquois peoples waged wars on neighboring groups for the purpose of avenging their dead and replacing them with captives. In the Pacific Northwest, elite marriages were often sealed by providing slaves. So we know that these activities went on.
After thousands of years of slavery, the arrival of Columbus in 1492 and the subsequent European presence in the Americas marked the beginning of change. By November 1542, European governments were beginning to enact laws to eliminate slavery. By 1652, abolishist Roger Williams led the legislature of Rhode Island to illegalize slavery. In 1863 Abraham Lincoln signed the Emancipation Proclamation, and by 1865 slavery had been eliminated in the United States.
Other countries, inspired by the United States, also abolished slavery. By 1888, there was no more slavery in the Americas. The last country to abolish slavery in the Americas was Brazil, 23 years after the U.S. had done so.
After more than 5,000 of institutionalized slavery in the Americas, it took less than 500 years for the effects of European contact to erase slavery from the Western Hemisphere.
