U.S. project aims to shed new light on Indigenous enslavement: Axios

NEW YORK, Oct. 12 (Xinhua) -- A U.S. project is building a massive website, "Native Bound-Unbound: Archive of Indigenous Americans Enslaved," to digitize and piece together stories of the millions of Indigenous people whose lives were shaped by slavery, reported Axios on Monday.

Using documents, baptismal records, letters and oral histories, the site will allow people to search for Native Americans who were enslaved and locate possible descendants, according to the report.

Andrés Reséndez, who wrote "The Other Slavery: The Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America," estimates that between 2.5 million to 5 million Indigenous people were enslaved from the time of Columbus to the end of the nineteenth century.

Apache members were enslaved in the American Southwest and sold to work in mines in Mexico. Latter-day Saints settlers in Utah purchased enslaved Native Americans and converted them, said the report.

The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation announced in February it had awarded Native Bound-Unbound a three-year, 1.5 million U.S. dollars grant to help build the website, which is an open-source database and repository and later digitizing, transcribing and translating documents.