ABSTRACT
Examples of testimony from enslaved Indians are even rarer than first-person accounts by enslaved Africans in early America. Margaret Newell argues that in order to recover their stories we need to think broadly about what constitutes a slave narrative. As it turns out, accounts by enslaved Indians and Africans in New England have been hiding in plain sight, embedded in crime tales, conversion narratives, and court records, in first-person and third-person narratives. Newell shows how each genre offers distinct insights into the lives of the enslaved, who shared their emotions, their predicaments, their suffering, and their resistance. Together, these personal testimonies help elucidate larger processes of enslavement and racialization that affected Native Americans and Africans over the colonial period.
