Adopted Captives And Captivity Narratives

Facing population loss, many Indigenous American tribes used warfare raids not only to take goods but also to capture people who could be adopted into their families to replace lost relatives and maintain their numbers. In this system, a captive’s fate rested with the household that received them, and hundreds of white captives ended up fully adopted into Native communities. Some of those adoptees later wrote first-person “captivity narratives,” which have become important historical sources on Native warfare and cross-cultural life.

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