Fort Towson

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Picking up on @Carwil's comment above, I make the following concrete proposals to improve this article:

1) Restricting this article to cover only enslavement of Native Americans by Europeans.

This article currently covers slavery both of and by indigenous peoples. There is very little logical nexus between them, as the 'of' section heavily (and quite appropriately) covers the chattel enslavement of indigenous peoples by Europeans, whereas the 'by' section devotes significant space to the anthropologically distinct practice of slavery by Native Americans.

2) Migrate content relating to the practice of slavery by Native Americans to the page Native American slave ownership.

Currently that page deals exclusively with Native American ownership of African chattel slaves. I don't believe that was necessarily the intention of the article's creator, nor do I believe it to be entirely logical.

This would mean that the slave ownership article will expand significantly to include pre-Columbian (and some non-African post-Columbian) slavery practices. If this moves forward, it will probably be necessary to tweak the name of the target article.

I will link to this discussion on the target article's talk page.

Note 1) As pointed out in Carwil's comment, there are also several regionally specific articles which cover this topic. Under my proposal, it might be appropriate to assess the suitability of rearranging this articles to accord with this proposed structure.

Note 2) Obviously, pre-Columbian instances of slavery by Native Americans necessarily means enslavement of Native Americans. However, I nevertheless believe it is appropriate to distinguish between NA practices of slavery and the enslavement of NAs cognate to European colonisation. I would be open to splitting pre-Columbian NA practices off from their later practice of European-style chattel slavery, however, to my reading there doesn't yet seem to be sufficient content on exactly how these institutions differed as practiced by NAs to do so immediately.

Please let me know if you have any thoughts. I will wait a week before moving forward with this. Riposte97 (talk) 00:11, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@Riposte97: you make some great points. Here's my two cents: I agree that the pre-Columbian stuff doesn't belong in this article. However, for the reasons you mentioned, I'm not sure whether it makes any more sense to pair it with the article about Native Americans participating in the enslavement of black Americans. I think we should follow your other idea of splitting off the pre-Columbian stuff entirely, and make a list article of pre-Columbian societies that practiced slavery. That would be the best way to deal with such a diverse topic without making unnecessary generalizations. For cultural regions where generalizations are possible, such as for slavery among the peoples of the Pacific Northwest, I think it would be great to start articles on those topics specifically.

I support renaming this article something to better reflect its focus on the European-ran chattel slavery of indigenous peoples during the colonial and post-colonial periods, although I'm not sure was a succinct title would be. That said, I think we should keep the sections about indigenous participation in that system of enslavement in this article. It would be impossible to give full treatment to either aspect of the topic (indigenous slaves/indigenous enslavers) without discussing the other.

I look forward to hearing more of your thoughts, SilverStar54 (talk) 03:25, 20 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

@SilverStar54 - very sensible. I will go with what you've said, and try to drag this corner of Wikipedia into the light! Riposte97 (talk) 09:07, 21 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Okay, I've started this process, and created the stub Slavery in Pre-Columbian America. I started it as a list, bit it seemed a little odd to structure it that way with so little content. I'm happy to work towards transforming it back into a list, depending on attitudes to amalgamating other slavery pages (see below). I've moved a small amount of content from this page across to the stub.

There's still a lot I intend to do, starting with the proposed merger of pre-Columbian-society-specific slavery articles into the new article. I've still got to have a proper read over those. Some are quite extensive. Riposte97 (talk) 06:03, 30 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

This article was the subject of a Wiki Education Foundation-supported course assignment, between 21 August 2023 and 14 December 2023. Further details are available on the course page. Student editor(s): AJF1403 (article contribs).

— Assignment last updated by AJF1403 (talk) 05:19, 23 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]