The chapter rejects claims that Indigenous Peoples disappeared from plantation labour and labour history because enslaved and indentured labour replaced them, arguing that Indigenous, post-contact labour vanishes from labour history because it is delinked from just, unfree (or justly bound) labour, and sutured permanently with Conversion. It theorizes Conversion both as a religious-ontological, economic function of Columbian-era discoveries and as the conversion of black and native bodies to their accumulative forms for proto-capital accumulation that divides productive work and unproductive labour. This labour-work dialectic positions black and Indigenous bodily actions in a dialectic of scarcity and abundance necessary for racial capitalism. The chapter uses Afropessimist and black optimist thought to read this break not as Marxian error but as of central importance to capital formation and left studies. It explains Indigenous Elimination and black Death in terms of exchange and continuity between initiative and punitive Death/death sustaining anti-indigeneity and anti-blackness, elaborating the labour-work divide.
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