Inside the Nuwu Art Gallery + Community Center on Maryland Parkway, dozens of Native Americans formed a circle to discuss Indigenous enslavement — some of which happened as recently as the 1950s. They were participating in a memory-gathering workshop.
Carmen Gonzales of Las Vegas sat at the top of the circle. Previously, she had only heard of Indigenous enslavement, but for the first time she saw the images of physical Spanish documents. This was thanks to the work of New Mexico-based Native Bound Unbound: The Archive of Indigenous Slavery.
“It was painful to see that document that he shared,” Gonzales says. “This roll of people listed as being owned. And on that list were Paiute and Navajo. It’s not a shock or surprise to learn of slavery happening; exploitation of all forms has been happening in Indigenous history. But to see it in a document — like logged — like it was normal … I think this project is so important to bring to light the reality of slavery of Indigenous people.”
Estevan Rael-Gálvez, Native Bound Unbound’s president and founder, found that the Spaniards were predominantly enslaving Indigenous people. He documented these peoples’ trade and sale. In the process, Rael-Gálvez has uncovered Indigenous families’ historical details, dating as far back as the late-1400s and as recently as the 1950s. With a team of researchers and experts working for almost four years, the group has uncovered documents once locked away in collections across the world.
The project started five years ago, as Rael-Gálvez went through records in New Mexico while researching his mother’s ancestry. At the top of a Santa Fe census was his mother’s grandmother from five generations ago, named Antonia. She was listed as an Indigenous woman in the record.
Growing up, he would visit his 4-foot-tall great-grandmother, with braided white hair, in Pueblo, Colorado. She’d often tell him the same stories about his ancestors, especially the story of La India Panana. She was a woman who had been captured by a man, who had also been captured. She told her captor that, if he took her with him and married her, she’d show him how to escape. Years later, Rael-Gálvez would find their marriage record.
“These stories [that] were being told to me, was out of orgullo, out of pride, out of a sense of deep connection to that past,” Rael-Gálvez says. “And even though it would take me years to learn what it meant to be connected to the Diné and to the Pawnee, those were the stories that started out this journey for me.”
He has had a lot of help translating old Spanish documents that were recorded throughout the Americas. The group, so far, has found more than 3,000 individuals victimized by slavery.
Sometimes his staff have even found mentions of their own family in the enslavement records.
“I’ve watched people in an archive look down in the same way that I [did when I] first discovered some of these records, and the water just well up in their eyes,” he says. “Seeing an ancestor whose name they never expected to find in an archive. And I’ve seen children, I’ve seen elders just quietly take that in and understand what that means, some with a bit of surprise and others with a sense of, ‘Finally, I know what this means. Finally, a name.’”
In the memory-gathering circle, Gonzales, who is Navajo and the director of Indigenous Water Wisdom, a Native-led nonprofit that consults with tribes and local governments about watershed resolution, listened to others share family stories involving slavery. Some cried, and many were still surprised by Rael-Gálvez’s findings.
Gonzales believes that trauma from generations past can repeat itself in different ways through a family line. She refers to this as “echoes of trauma.” She reflected on her family’s past generations and even her own life, and saw that acts of enslavement were repeated.
When Gonzales’ mother was young, she was picked up and sent to a Federal Indian Boarding School, where kids were stripped of their language, culture, and spirituality. Gonzales has started to help her mother process her boarding school traumas after children’s remains were found at some boarding schools in 2021. Gonzales has family members who died from attempting to escape from campuses.
“‘Well, it wasn’t as bad as the cousin that died, so, like, in comparison, I guess I had it really good,’ she would say,” Gonzales says, describing her mother’s account of her time at boarding school. “But I feel like you got stolen and taken away and relocated and had to learn things to serve a family. And I would be like, ‘That sounds an awful lot like slavery to me.’”
Gonzales can’t imagine why anyone would want to own another human being. “I want to understand that, so I can somehow change it, heal it,” she says.
Gonzales is still making sense of the trauma. “At first, I used to think about it like a curse, like maybe we’re cursed, and we will keep repeating the same thing, but I don’t think it’s like that,” she says. “Through time it seems to unfold, and we take a little piece of the healing from the generation before.”
Gonzales believes that Indigenous communities suppress their pain because they may feel they could be harmed by learning about their trauma. But coming together as a community and understanding, like those in the memory-gathering workshop, can be healing, she says. “It doesn’t infect us; it frees us.”
Users can access the Native Bound Unbound archive to view documents of slavery at www.nativeboundunbound.org.
