Englishman John R. Jewitt's Enslavement Among the Nuu-chah-nulth

Abstract:The story of Nuu-chah-nulth enslavement of an Englishman and an American in the early nineteenth century illustrates how First Nations people of the Pacific Northwest Coast (PNW) treated their slaves, who constituted about ten percent of the population. Placing their story into the larger context of observations by visitors to the region, and to PNW First Nation's own stories about slaves, we can see that the predominant notion of the people towards their slaves was that the latter lacked kinship with other people, including their natal community. This singular category of isolation marked the enslaved as having no spiritual meaning, which could only be overcome by ritual transformation into free people.