Peoples has precluded formal discussion of black native status, except where the intersections of black and Indigenous lives during and after slavery force the issue (Miles, 2015; Miles and Holland, 2006). Moreover, it has inhibited emergent discussions of Indigenous slavery and consideration of the myriad forms of unfreedom First Peoples endured as kinds of slavery (Reséndez, 2016; Warren, 2016). Commencing with the justifications of the Dominican Friar Bartolomé de Las Casas in the sixteenth century, narratives of native death and disappearance haunt the presence of blacks in the Americas, who embrace the social histories of labour to counter legacies of racialized non/being, achieve a new and enacted native status or Indigeneity, and link true belonging, political and material rights to performing modern work upon the land.