N.M. historian’s effort to document Native slavery in Americas now live

Native Bound Unbound, a first-of-its-kind interactive website, aims to deepen and expand collective understanding of slavery

As he was growing up in a small Northern New Mexico farming village, Estevan Rael-Gálvez was absorbing his family’s stories.

The storytellers included his paternal great-grandmother who lived in Pueblo, Colo. Every year, when they visited her, “she would tell the same story ... and that story was about a Pawnee woman who was my great-grandmother’s ancestor.”

Later, he heard a new version of the story: The Pawnee woman had been captured and enslaved.

Her story is now one of thousands preserved by a first-of-its-kind project called Native Bound Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Slavery, which is working to collect and preserve every instance of Indigenous slavery across the Americas and then share those stories through an interactive website.

Rael-Gálvez, an anthropologist, historian and ethnographer with a doctorate from the University of Michigan (his dissertation was on Indigenous slavery in colonial New Mexico), founded the project in 2021 with support from the Mellon Foundation.

“Particularly now in this political moment when the histories of marginalized people are being erased from museums, from curriculum, from historical sites, it’s all the more important ... to actually recognize the facts that are embedded in these documents and these artifacts and this art — and it’s there,” Rael-Gálvez said. “It’s all the more important to recover those histories because they are absent, and they have been.”

On the website, users can explore the history of Indigenous slavery through four pathways — people, places, archives and stories — each with corresponding records. The archives feature primary source documents including legal cases, censuses, marriage certificates, newspapers and church records.

A map marks places across the Americas, Spain and Portugal that are connected to the history of Indigenous slavery. There are dozens of spots in New Mexico; at least 17 people were enslaved in Peñasco, south of Taos, as of the 1870 census, according to the map. The group included both male and female Indigenous people, and a range of ages. María Durán was born May 1, 1869. Juan de Jesús Jaramillo was born in 1825, the records said.

“Indigenous slavery is foundational to New Mexico history,” Rael-Gálvez said. “In other words, you cannot talk about New Mexico history without acknowledging ... even before European colonization, slavery of Indigenous people was happening.”

Between 1492 and 1880, between 2 million and 5.5 million Native Americans were enslaved in the Americas by European settlers, according to 2017 Brown University study, though this part of the history of slavery is often glossed over.

It’s also often missing from school curricula.

Camila Carreon, a Native Bound Unbound research intern who is a senior at Santa Fe Preparatory School, said she does not remember Indigenous slavery ever being mentioned in her study of history.

“At least for me, in my history classes, Indigenous history is one of these things that’s sort of abandoned at the beginning of history class, like right after we talk about it in the beginning of the year,” Carreon said. “But then for the rest of the year, we don’t track the narrative of the Native Americans, of what happened to Indigenous people.”

Native Bound Unbound aims to deepen and expand the collective understanding of slavery, according to Rael-Gálvez. He said he wants the project to change the narrative.

“I often refer to this work based on what I refer to as my three C’s,” Rael-Gálvez said. “I want it to raise consciousness, I want it to foster a sense of community and I want it to inspire creativity.”

Similar projects exist that document the forced voyages of enslaved Africans across the Atlantic Ocean. Emory University’s Slave Voyages, for instance, lets site visitors search for information by vessels, places, periods and people.

Native Bound Unbound is the product of years of work by a worldwide team of researchers, data experts, translators and others. It is also far from over: There are about 1,000 more documents in process, Rael-Gálvez said, and the site will be continually updated.

Genealogist and researcher Daria Celeste Landress, who is a descendant of Indigenous enslaved people, has been involved with the project since its first year. She goes through microfilms and databases and traces the relatives of the people she identifies.

“Helping descendants understand their roots, introducing them to their ancestors for the first time, especially an Indigenous slave ancestor — it’s compelling and meaningful,” Landress said. “So this work isn’t really work. This is a labor of love.”

The site currently lists the names of 3,078 Indigenous enslaved people, plus birthdates, identity labels — like Navajo, mestiza, white or Indian — and family and life event information. It also lists the names and data of 1,743 enslavers, and draws connections to whom they enslaved.

The results of the relative-tracing work are published in the “stories” pathway of the site. Some of these stories are interviews or videos with descendants who talk about their ancestry, noted Native Bound Unbound Deputy Director Aaron Taylor, which folds into the group’s mission to bring history into the present.

“Sometimes, it’s like me talking with my dad or a cousin of ours about Rosa, our Indigenous ancestor,” Taylor said. “Or it could be descendants that are just meeting for the first time.”

Taylor learned about his Indigenous ancestor who was enslaved through his work on the project, he said. This knowledge ended up flipping the narrative he had heard about the surname “Gurule” — that its origins were French, 1600s — on its head, as he found he actually descended from one of the slaves of the first Gurule family, he said.

“That just changed my perspective, not just globally and in the Americas, but personally in my own family history of the stories we told from generation to generation,” Taylor said. “Because this whole idea of being French from the Gurules, I heard from my great aunt, my dad, my grandparents, my great uncles, and then come to find out that’s not the case.”

A personal connection to the work is not unique to Taylor and Rael-Gálvez.

Carreon’s family is Peruvian, and while recently reading about the 1879-1930 Putumayo genocide in Colombia and Peru, she said she reflected on how Native Bound Unbound is just in its beginning stages.

“We’re really only scratching the surface of all the history, all the narratives that could be uncovered of Indigenous slavery,” Carreon said. “I’m only starting to understand how my narrative fits into this larger global conversation.”

And, as the project continues to unfold, more and more people will be able to pinpoint their own connections to the history, Landress said. Eventually, she predicted, it will touch everybody — whether directly or through a place-based connection.

“We just want people to be aware of Indigenous slavery, its effect on the present day, on people that we see walking around here in New Mexico, especially,” Taylor said. “It’s part of our history.”