Note 48 — Chapter II · GEOGRAPHICAL DISTRIBUTION OF SLAVERY.

The Ojibways or Chippeways, according to Keating, killed the captive warriors and old women; the marriageable women became slaves and were very cruelly treated by the women of the victorious tribe; the children were adopted and treated fairly well48. Jones’s account is somewhat different. Most often all enemies were killed. Sometimes they made a few prisoners, who were adopted by those who had lost a relative; then the adopted prisoner became a relative or slave; if not adopted he was burned alive. The relatives of a murderer sometimes paid large indemnities to those of the victim; the murderer had then to work for them in order to pay off the debt; he was reduced to a kind of servitude49. In these accounts slaves and servitude are mentioned. The servitude of the murderer very probably was not slavery. He had to work: but it is not stated that he was made a slave, i.e. the property of an individual person. The prisoners who became “relatives or slaves” were adopted; therefore they were not slaves in the proper sense of the word. And as for the female slaves Keating speaks of, we know that a slave system without male slaves is not slavery proper. We may suppose, that these female captives became an inferior kind of wives, to whom the women of the tribe were unkind through a very natural jealousy. Kohl, in his elaborate description of the Ojibways, makes no mention of slavery. Their wars, he states, did not bring them any profit50. According to Carver, “all that are captivated by both parties, are either put to death, adopted, or made slaves of.” “That part of the prisoners, which are considered as slaves, are generally distributed among the chiefs, who frequently make presents of some of them to the European governors of the out-posts, or to the superintendents or commissaries of Indian affairs. I have been informed that it was the Jesuits and French missionaries that first occasioned the introduction of these unhappy captives into the settlements and who by so doing taught the Indians that they were valuable”51. From all the foregoing we may infer that slavery was not an indigenous institution among the Ojibways.