W19 – Indigenous slavery

Although the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, European slavery in America began more than a century before. In his book, Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Enslavement in US History (Liveright, 2026), historian Linford Fisher demonstrates how the enslavement of Indigenous people began in the years just after 1492, ensnaring an estimated three to six million Natives throughout the Americas. Although largely erased from the public consciousness, Native enslavement continued for centuries to become a colossal phenomenon that affected nearly 600,000 Native Americans in North America alone, revealing the shocking truth that American colonizers enslaved Natives in roughly the same numbers as they imported enslaved Africans.Scholarship on antebellum US History has tended to focus on two different sets of experiences for Native and Black people: the first were removed while the second were enslaved. In this chapter presentation, Linford D. Fisher explores the invisibilizing of Native presence on southern plantations and the way that they were wrapped into the world of southern slavery before the Civil War.
 

Linford D. Fisher is Associate Professor of History at Brown University. His work focuses on the cultural and religious history of colonial America and the Atlantic world, with particular attention to Native Americans, religion, material culture, and Indigenous and African slavery and servitude. He is also the founder and principal investigator of Stolen Relations, a collaborative project documenting Indigenous enslavement across the Americas.