Epidemics, Slavery, Massacres, and Indigenous Resistance 1492-1599

1500-1501

Inuit of Greenland are kidnapped for the Lisbon slave market

Portuguese invader Gaspar Corte-Real abducts 50 Inuit of the northeast Atlantic Coast and takes them to Lisbon (Nies, 1996). He also captures two shiploads of Haudenosaunee (Iroquois) and other peoples from what is now known as Newfoundland and New England and sells them into slavery. Like Gaspar Corte-Real, many other Spanish, Portuguese, and, later, English slave traders rush to make a profit in the slave market trade network throughout the West Indies, the Caribbean, and, later, the triangular trade routes (Gallay, 2015). “If we were to add up all the Indian slaves taken in the New World from the time of Columbus to the end of the nineteenth century, the figure would run somewhere between 2.5 and 5 million Native slaves” (Resendez, 2016, p. 5).

Traumatic Event