Slaves on the Northwest Coast were hewers of wood and drawers of water, but they were especially involved in the mass harvesting, cleaning and processing of salmon and other anadromous fish. There’s no consensus, however, on how far back the indigenous practice of slavery actually went there. The first European accounts of the region in the late eighteenth century speak of slaves, and express mild surprise in doing so, since full-fledged chattel slavery was quite unusual in other parts of aboriginal North America. These accounts suggest that perhaps a quarter of the indigenous Northwest Coast
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