The stolen Native Americans who shaped US history

Indigenous slavery in American history

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0:30Welcome to the History Extra podcast. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking to historian and author Linford D. Fisher, whose book, Stealing America, The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in US History, documents the sustained and systematic way in which Native American people were taken from their homes and families across centuries of history. From the Spanish invasion of 1492 to the late 1970s and beyond, this is a story that Linford argues is both tragically overlooked and central to our understanding of the United States.

1:04Linford's book is among those shortlisted for the 2026 Cundall History Prize, and we'll have more details of that at the end of the interview. But for now, it's over to my conversation with Linford.

Unpacking the book title

1:14I wanted to kick off with an exploration of the title, because it's something that you consider a bit in the beginning of your book. What histories are you talking about when you talk about stealing America, and why is the use of that verb particularly important in your retelling of this story? Yeah, thanks, Matt. It's great to be here and to be in conversation with you. So titles are difficult. We went round and round to decide if we wanted to use something as bold as stealing. But in the end, that was the central kind of thread through the entire book, and I think helps to reframe how we think about slavery and land loss and Indigenous perspectives on these histories, too.

1:53So I guess I could take it in two parts. First of all, stealing America in a way, for me, was inspired by these early modern maps that's in the bottom corner somewhere is often a cartouche, like this sort of image, often with sort of flowers and an Indigenous person. And to me, that person embodied America, both the people and the land. And so stealing America sort of represents that co-join process. But I think to your point and to your question, there's a broader history being referenced here that's not just the United States.

2:25And I think that even though I'm mostly focusing on English language context, like the English colonies for the first half of the book, basically, and then the United States after that, there's a broader process that you could look at in French and Dutch and Spanish and other contexts as well in the Western Hemisphere in the Americas. But the idea of stealing is really something I'm trying to intervene in terms of the field and scholarship, but also is reflected from conversations that I've had with Indigenous collaborators who really try to highlight a broader set of harms that comes out of settler colonialism regarding the losses that Native communities feel.

3:04When children are stolen or abducted or forced into indentured situations or when adults are placed into servitude or slavery for labor or when Native individuals or women and children or men are swept up or caught up in slave trading and trafficking processes during colonial wars as well. So that full range of losses that Native communities feel is what I'm trying to gesture to with this broader framework of stealing that includes chattel slavery that was in sort of British colonies and also the United States, but is much broader than that as well.

3:44There's a really beautiful and really moving line in your book where you say the stealing of Native Americans and their homelands is not just a side story in the grand drama of American history. It is the central river that connects all other streams. Were you surprised when you were writing and researching this book, the extent of this stealing and the ways in which it just ripples throughout the whole of American history? Absolutely. I was born and raised in southeastern Pennsylvania. I'm on the Amish and Mennonites and actually went to a school called Conestoga School, which is the name of a Native nation.

4:18We never talked about the Conestoga Natives while I attended there or any time afterwards to my recollection anyway. So within our national narratives and history telling, we afford very little space for indigenous people more generally. And when they do appear, it's in sort of these either villains or heroes like Pocahontas or Sitting Bull or something like that. And so understanding, I think, first of all, just the consistency and the centrality of Native peoples, not just throughout American history, but playing a central role in sort of what the United States became.

4:56And also, I think, before that, what the English colonies became and understanding from indigenous perspectives through collaborators that this came at enormous cost, not just initially, not just at one point, but throughout the entire history of both the British colonies in the United States and into the present. And I think that's sort of the key here, that it's not just back there somewhere, but this sort of great sort of river that runs through American history is still one that we are benefiting from and in a way living off of today.

5:29So these are kind of hard truths, obviously, but just restoring the centrality of Native people to American history, also to British colonial history, and then understanding that the U.S. was built directly in the backs of not just African enslaved labor, but Native enslaved labor, and then interrelatedly the land that allowed for westward expansion and colonization, allowed for the financial centers and the cultural centers to be built, and allowed for just enormous amounts of money through not just plantations, but later sort of capitalist ventures and so forth.

6:02So none of these are possible without Native land and Native labor. So it is central, and it does ripple out, and it's still being felt by Native people today.

Spanish invasion and early colonization

6:12So to rewind us back to the very early days of this really complicated, really long story, can you talk about the way in which the Spanish invasion of the continents that were to become the United States in part kick-started this story and the form in which this original enslavement took? Yeah, so one thing that I think is becoming more well-known through recent books like Andres Resendez's book, The Other Slavery, and Other Forms of Scholarship, is just this idea that from the very moment of Spanish colonization, Columbus and other conquistadors

6:49saw Native peoples as a target of enslavement and coerced labor. And Columbus, I think, leads the way in this. I mean, he shows up in what's now the Bahamas and Guanahani Islands and immediately in his diary reports that they will probably be, they meaning the Natives, would be both good Christians and good servants, right, which is sort of this ridiculous kind of combination. And he takes, you know, a handful of indigenous people back to Spain and proposes a regularized slave trade out of the region,

7:22in part because he had already seen the effects of the West African slave trade that was already in nascent form. So that particular slave trade back to Europe of indigenous people does not pan out, but the Spanish, guided by Columbus initially, but then it takes off from there too, continue to see indigenous people as a primary source of labor for the next 50, 60, 70 years. There's a few attempts to really curb this practice in terms of both the slave raiding, the slave trading in the Caribbean,

7:53and then Central and South America. So the Spanish crown gets involved. A series of laws are passed in 1542 called the new laws that curb some of the worst excesses of this. But it continues on in Spanish territories for the next, you know, century plus. And what I think was surprising to me is that the English show up and they are very aware of what the Spanish have done. And they say, we want to do things different, right?

8:23And so they come in belatedly in the 1570s, 1580s, not until 1607 really established the first colony in North America. And within a couple of years are turning on native populations. And after the sort of first really big conflict in 1622, basically start sounding like the Spanish and start sort of saying, yeah, the best way to sort of have successful colonies is just to kind of eliminate native presence. And if enslavement is part of that, then so be it.

8:54So were the kind of justifications that were used by the English similar to those used by the Spanish? Or did they differ in some ways? Yeah, it's a good question. There's both a shared and then a different set of kind of legal conceptions that might have authorized this in a way. I mean, there's an emerging sense of the law of nations that comes out of a lot of Spanish juridical debates in the 1530s and 1540s. The English are attuned to this, especially at a certain sort of educational and moral, religious, political level,

9:29because there's sort of a shared academic conversation in a way about these things. But the English are operating in a different context in the sense that there's a strong tradition of English common law, which has particular ideas about servitude and rights and so forth. And there's also a deeper tradition that is shared, of course, with the Spanish that comes out of sort of a early Roman Empire or late Christian conception through the sort of Catholic theologian and thinker, philosopher Augustine from the 4th century about just war.

10:04And so this idea that if a war is just, then the victors kind of have full rights to the conquered is a really powerful idea that most of Catholic Europe have been operating under. And, you know, honestly, the English continue this tradition in a way as well. So there are points of sharedness. And then I think in other ways, there's a much more particular sensibility about how the English handle this within the colonies that looks and sounds different from the Spanish, but maybe doesn't differ so much in the outcome.

10:38And the enslavement of Native American people explodes in English settlements between 1650 and 1750.

English expansion and the slave trade

10:46Yeah, it really starts with the first wars between Native people and English colonists. And these are not wars that are just kind of willy-nilly started by Native people, despite our stereotypes about Native people being sort of inherently violent or something like that, all of which is untrue fundamentally. They are triggered by colonial invasions and expansions at every single turn. So whether you think about very early what people, scholars call the first Anglo-Powhatan War in 1609, 1610, 1611,

11:22triggered by basically poor preparation, the part of the English colonists in Jamestown. And I don't think anyone would like their food stores raided during a time of scarcity. So when the English do this to the Powhatans, of course, there's a pushback and a resistance to that. But in 1622, again, we could just go down through the line. Basically, these early wars set the stage for a much larger sort of slave rating that you referenced. But I just want to set that early foundation of by the time you reach some of the later periods

11:52where English traders are involved in a larger scale slave trade, there's been decades of practice and acceptance fundamentally of sort of taking Native people, especially during warfare, of enslaving them, of also of shipping them out of these colonies into other regions, especially the men who are seen as rather dangerous. So whether it's these early wars in Virginia or in New England, you have the Pequot War in 1636, 1637, which is truly a war to exterminate the Pequots on the part of the English colonists,

12:25leads to the enslavement of several hundred Pequots in the Boston area, also Rhode Island, Connecticut, other places as well. So that lays a foundation. And really what you see then in King Philip's War and what we often call Bacon's Rebellion in Virginia, these are sort of extensions of those early wars. But maybe what you're referencing is actually something slightly different that starts in the 1680s in the Carolinas, which is a different process. It's not just sort of colonial expansion that triggers pushback from Natives

13:00then leads to a war and then Natives are enslaved, which is what had happened up to that point. Starting in the 1680s and really going up through the 17-teens, there's a process whereby English traders in the Carolinas, they weren't north and south at first, which is Carolina, begin to arm coastal Native nations who then slave raid to the interior or down the coast into what is now Florida, into Spanish settlements and mission towns, bring back captives, English traders who then purchase them or trade for them

13:31and either sell them locally into slavery or else ship them out into the wider Atlantic world. And that process is more like the African slave trade where you have this intentional kind of targeting of captives that you then sell into slavery and you have sort of middlemen who were there on the ground. In West Africa, you have African kingdoms on the coast and merchants who are functioning that way. In the Carolinas, it's these coastal Native nations. And the English churn through allies over the course of 40 years, basically.

14:04Partner with a group and then turn on them and enslave them, you know, when they're done with them, essentially. They no longer fulfill that rule. So that process is part of the larger 17th century process of enslavement, but there are distinct phases and differences as well. And you have touched on this, but it's obviously a really important part of your book. Can you talk a little bit more about the huge impact that this enslavement had on indigenous communities in the United States? Yes, one of the things that I think has helped me understand

14:36how to distinguish African slavery from Native slavery, which is to say that with the West African slave trade, you're bringing people over from a foreign continent to your locale and forcing them into labor for life, right? And that is more labor-focused, more about economics, more about sort of what you want out of this. It's tied into settler cloning list in a way too, but it's not as on the nose as when you enslave Native people. And the reason why that's different is because when you enslave Native people,

15:06you are targeting people who live on the lands that you want. And so enslaving Native people destabilizes local populations. When you target women and children, which is what happened a lot, you actually are really getting at the heart of a community's ability to remain and grow and thrive and survive because women are not just reproducers of the next generation, which they are that as well, but they're also in matrilineal societies, they're leaders as well.

15:37So targeting Native women is a huge blow to the community. You target children, that's the next generation of leaders, right? And then you execute men because you don't trust them to serve in slavery because they might revolt against you. So all of these wars, you can track this in real time because let's say just King Philip's War, for example, it's basically a war for the region, put it positively, by Native people who are trying to protect their homelands. In the end, what happens is most Native people

16:07who are seen as defeated by the English get pushed back into different corners. And here's the point, massive amounts of land are claimed after this process as a result of the war, as a result of enslaving people in that war, in King Philip's War, for example, the focus on just removing people through enslavement becomes very evident because even Native people who surrendered to local authorities were also sold into slavery, either locally or abroad. So enslavement is a mechanism of settler colonialism,

16:41whereby you are literally trying to clear the land and replace the indigenous population with this new foreign English one. And you touched there on the African slave trade.

African slavery and archival erasure

16:53In what ways are these two histories in dialogue? And is there a sense that the history of African slavery has obscured the history of indigenous enslavement? Yeah, African slavery and the West African slave trade, I should say, up front, remains a critical part of British history. I mean, I'm thinking of my friend's recent book, The Crown in Silence, which I think is so powerful. Brooke Newman did an amazing job with that book and has triggered these conversations. My point in the book is not to displace the importance of African slavery.

17:23So that's really central. It will remain central. We need to keep talking about it. I'm trying to expand, and other scholars who work on Native slavery are trying to expand the conversation to say that the harms were even greater than we thought initially, particularly regarding slavery. And in U.S. history, I'm not sure how much this is sort of widely known to broader audiences, but there's like this saying that the two original sins of the United States was enslavement of Africans and the stealing of Native land. But actually, it's more than that.

17:55It's the stealing of Native people as well. So the focus on the African slave trade, I think, has obscured a lot of this history. But I would say it's not just because we've looked at the wrong thing or something. This history itself is kind of hidden and obscured in the archives through shifting the race of Native people once they enter plantations or by official colonial censuses that fail to sort of take into account Native people serving on plantations.

18:25Or even just like this race-making ideology that is present in the U.S. and I think really was rooted in the English colonial period too, which sees sort of blackness and African blood as something that colors everything that we see, right? So this one-drop rule, the idea that if you have one drop of black blood, that makes you black, right? But the opposite's been true for Native people in that within the U.S. anyway, Native people have had to be 100% Native to be seen as authentically Native. And that's a really big differential

18:57in terms of the race-making fiction that we operate within the United States and I think also globally as well. So what it meant for me to work on this book is to try to recover not just the documents that were hidden and obscured and piece things together because it's not like some sort of obvious archive in a singular sense to go find, but also to recover identities of people in the archives, which is almost a second step to understand that there are Native people who have simply been ignored

19:27or erased or invisibilized in certain ways. And you mentioned at the start the importance of working with Indigenous collaborators to do this kind of work. Can you speak a little bit about how important that process is and the specific things you need to bear in mind when you are researching these sorts of histories?

Working with indigenous collaborators

19:43So the process of working with Native communities, I think, I wish I would have started earlier, honestly, but the book began the research in around 2011. And as I began to follow the research leads, not just in New England, but out into the Atlantic world, the Caribbean, and go to places like Jamaica and Barbados and Bermuda, and then also to the UK to kind of look at the colonial archives, I was amassing a trove of documents, some of which had pretty intimate details

20:15about people and their names and tribal affiliations. That's not the norm in a way. A lot of these slavery records strip Native people of their identities, of their names and tribal affiliations and kinships. But I had enough that felt really important that I wanted to create some sort of repository that would be of use for the wider public and also for tribal nations. So out of that, in 2015, started the Stolden Relations Project, which just went live in May of 2025.

20:46You can check it out at stolenrelations.org. But as we began to build a publicly accessible database, we realized very quickly that we needed the direct input of tribal advisors and folks just to help us make sure that we're not adding to the harm by simply dumping documents online or by replicating the damaging language of the archive. So through that process, you know, the book was separate but deeply influenced by these conversations. And I think the sort of framework of stealing

21:16and a focus on Native communities and community loss is directly related. So it was directly related to these conversations. And I think a lot of what came out of that was just, which I had already, but was deepened and really made more meaningful through these conversations, is a deep suspicion of the archive and sort of what it tells us and what it can't tell us. And so just being aware that the archive in a way wasn't enough. And so trying to do more with tribal histories and oral histories and just talking through kind of present day perspectives,

21:50which I know historians don't always do or want to do, that felt really important to me. And so throughout the book, understanding that this is not just the past and that this is something that is really heavy on Native people today and actually it should be heavy on all of us. This is a shared history that we all need to think through more carefully and then think about what should be done in light of it, I think is really the end goal. But understanding that I couldn't just write a book

22:20that was about the past and that what it meant to adopt in part or at least reflect Native sensibilities about this history was to make connections across time and space that weren't often being connected. So the book ends with boarding schools and adoptions as a part of this larger stealing of both Native people and Native lands. And that's not a connection, you know, the way back from that to chattel slavery in the 17th century, that's not a connection that's often made in the literature, but one that Native people

22:51immediately make all the time. And so just reflecting how they see these histories as connected fundamentally shapes how I told the story in the book.

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Counting the numbers of enslaved people

24:00Given this enormous sweep of history, can you give listeners a sense of how many people are being affected by this enslavement across these vast centuries of time? The numbers are really challenging to work with. And so I, at first, resisted even attempting this in writing the book and speaking with people because I know how hidden these histories are in the archives and how much people's identities have been obscured.

24:31But I wanted to at least, by the end, make some gesture in that direction. So I was building upon some really good estimates by Andres Resendez, who spoke about the other slavery. He's thinking hemispherically about indigenous slavery and estimates that between 2.5 and 5 million Native people were enslaved in the entire hemisphere between 1492 and roughly the 1880s or 1900. And I thought that was a really good starting point. But given what I was finding in the North American context

25:02and given that, especially in some of my later chapters on the antebellum period, I really tried to suggest that we've missed hundreds of thousands of enslaved people on the southern plantations because they were just coded as black when actually they're multiracial indigenous. And so adding in sort of that kind of erasure over time, I increased those numbers just a little bit. I think there is probably as many as 6 million in the hemisphere as a whole. That might be an undercount. I don't really know.

25:33And within North America, as many as 600,000 were enslaved between 1492 and roughly the 19th century beyond. That number is significant because if you tally up all of the enslaved Africans that were imported initially into North America between the start of the transatlantic African slave trade and the ending of the legal slave trade in 1807 in the United States, you have about 530,000 people.

26:07Those aren't like total numbers over time, but those are raw numbers of initial enslavement and initial importation into North America. And that's a much greater parity, much more sort of equal number than I expected. And I think that the average reader will expect as well. So then within that, we could zero in to different moments, I guess, to think about how many people are being enslaved or are enslaved in different areas. So for example, on the eve of the American Revolution,

26:39I'm estimating that as many as 25,000 Natives were enslaved, which is just 5% of the total enslaved population in the British colonies. But even that is way more Native people who are in servitude and slavery than we have really accounted for. And then if you shift up to the boarding schools in the 20th century, there's this incredible moment in the 1960s, early 1970s, when Native leaders line up before Congress and give testimony about the number of children who've been stolen from their communities,

27:10either into adoptive situations or placement situations outside of the reservation, outside of Native homes, or through boarding schools. And they estimate that around one-third of their children were swept up in these processes off the reservation in white homes and boarding schools. So again, how does that number factor into sort of the total number? It's really, really hard. So it's a combination in the book of what I try to do is this bigger suggestive number and then moments where I can sort of

27:42have an estimated guess or rely upon Native communities themselves to sort of narrate that loss. You talked earlier about the importance of wars, of conflict as a mechanism by which to enslave Native people. Did the ways in which this process happened change over time? Did it shift away from conflict to another form of enslavement? There's several phases, I guess, but they're not linear and they're not like teleological in the sense that there's an obvious outcome. What you find is that there's almost a cyclical process

28:16whereby as sort of we move from the English colonial period into the American colonial period and the westward colonization of the United States, it sort of brings back these earlier processes that we saw in Massachusetts or Virginia in the 17th century. And so it's not a straightforward sort of progression from war to sort of legal means to assimilation or something like that because it just starts all over again

28:46when you have the United States kind of bursting into a new territory and conducting warfare and the whole thing starts again. But I will say that one of the ways that we have sort of maybe missed Native slavery is that we haven't understood some of the everyday mechanisms that filled in the cracks between wars and between other kinds of larger scale processes. So things that were leveraged very locally on the ground

29:17against Native communities like indentures and forced indentures, whereby in some regions like, you know, the majority of Native children were eventually sort of serving in white communities and white homes, which is really, really damaging to Native communities, obviously. Or through debt servitude and slavery, which is something that starts, you know, in the 17th century and you see this resurfacing in California in the mid to late 19th century as well. So a really strong through line. Or other kinds of mechanisms as well.

29:49There's these really stunning descriptions in the archives sometimes of family separation. So just one example, there's enslaved women in Amelia County in Virginia in the 1740s who has four children and those four children are just taken away by the county and put out into white homes functionally as lifelong slaves. There's no time of service given, right? And some of them are old enough to work for sure. So how do we wrap those kinds of stories into a larger story

30:22of stealing and servitude and enslavement? And as I've presented a lot on this book and this material and talked to people and been in different locations, every single Native community and Native person I've talked to has a story of a family history of someone who was taken or like some sort of documentation they've come across like 100 years earlier or 200 years earlier where local authorities enforced different kinds of stealings or removals in certain ways. And so what I think this book does is provide this bigger picture.

30:56But what I'm really convinced of is that much, much more work needs to be done at the local level to really understand these dynamics as they emerge over time. So yeah, not a progression, but sort of this cyclical resurfacing mechanisms ranging from large-scale slave trades to more local kinds of processes. And during the course of researching and writing and then presenting this book, are there other stories that you've encountered that you think are particularly moving or revealing of this wider story? Well, something that is not directly related to the actions of colonists,

31:31but I really want to highlight here that I found sustained my research in a way is understanding the incredible agency and activity of Native people throughout this whole history. And honestly, it starts right away, right? That even if Europeans aren't protesting Native slavery during the time of Columbus, like Native people are protesting, right? They're fighting back. And whether it's an individual who gets kidnapped off of a coast and they're kicking and screaming, or whether it's petitions officially, you know, from tribal leaders to local

32:03and then eventually sort of higher up to crown and royal governments, from the very moment this starts, Native people, of course, are resisting this. And so that continues on up into the 20th century in different kinds of ways. Native people run away, parents petition, individuals sort of like sue for their freedom in the courts, on and on and on. It gets less clear, I guess, in some areas because some Native people made different decisions based upon their own fight for survival in terms of joining wars against other Native groups

32:35or joining in a slave trade against other groups too. So there's different forms of agency, I guess, that you could see throughout this period that's not only resisting colonization, but all of these decisions are made in an attempt to find a way forward through this sort of large-scale invasion by Europeans. So that's kind of how I try to read the involvement and activity of other Native nations that feel confusing from a distance perhaps. A Pan-Indian identity was not really understood or known in this, you know,

33:07the early colonial period is because Native nations saw themselves as unique and different and not part of this wider-imposed Indian identity that happens later on. Those are the stories that I tried to highlight and that I really think are life-giving and important alongside of what I think is also a very real and necessary story to tell of long-term colonial oppression and enslavement and dispossession. You referred earlier to boarding schools.

Boarding schools and later assimilation

33:40Can you please talk about the way in which this enslavement changed as we went through the 19th century and into the 20th century and the forms that it took? Just to step back a bit, essentially things begin to sort of happen simultaneously in the 19th century. So 1801, when the first federally funded boarding school begins to emerge and then quickly after that several more, it's happening at the same time but in different regions. Well, in some cases, the same region as other processes that begin to lean towards removal

34:13of Native people from the Southeast, right? So what we call Indian removal, this large-scale dispossessing of Native people at gunpoint to move them west of the Mississippi, is something that doesn't just happen initially with the so-called five civilized tribes but actually happens repeatedly in different parts of the Midwest and the plains and the west of North America. So while those removals are taking place, while the U.S. military is becoming the strong arm of American colonialism

34:43in the upper Midwest and the plains and eventually California, while the civil war is raging where you have the Union Army both liberating slaves and enslaved people in the south but also contributing to the enslavement of Native people in the west, which is very contradictory and confusing, but I try to highlight that in one chapter. While all this is happening, these boarding schools slowly begin to rise as sort of a side way of assimilating Natives,

35:14sometimes from within sort of states that are well-established, sometimes in Indian countries, so-called, and then sometimes in the newer territories out west. So it's not like a clear transition between sort of state-sponsored warfare against Native people and then a shift to assimilation. They kind of are overlapping and together. But there is a moment in the late 19th century when essentially the last of the so-called Indian wars are sort of ended and fought,

35:46and there's a sense that then assimilation becomes the primary mechanism whereby the United States deals with what they call the Indian problem. And again, not completely sequential, but the boarding schools themselves play a key role in that assimilation even before sort of the Civil War and the last of the Indian wars in that they are large-scale educational processes sponsored by the federal government, often in conjunction with religious entities,

36:18that are attempting to get Natives sometimes off the reservation, sometimes it's on the reservation, but after the Civil War, the push becomes more to get them completely off the reservation for this education. The reason why it shows up in my book is because half of the day in these off-reservation boarding schools, actually on reservation too often as well, half the day is spent in the classroom, half the day is spent laboring in different kinds of ways. And, you know, I've had people come up to me and say,

36:49well, wasn't labor always a part of education back then? And I'm like, no. You had industrial schools that maybe were advertising that, and that was what you did, but like your average, you know, the high schooler in Boston was not like creating wagon wheels for half the day or something, that then they got sold for profit, right? So there's this idea that these boarding schools become sort of almost a modern sweatshop for these Native kids. And then the Carlisle Indian Industrial School,

37:20when it was found in 1879, begins to pioneer additional layers of that labor. But again, that sort of strongly assimilationist impulse and strongly labor focus led to a lot of abuses. I mean, the Canadian Truth and Reconciliation process that was started in 2008 was immensely revelatory in terms of the depth of physical, sexual, cultural abuse that was taking place in the Canadian residential schools. And that parallel is 100% the case here in the United States.

37:52We just haven't had a parallel commission to really fully understand that. But again, back to sort of that process that starts in the 19th century and then becomes the primary means of assimilation, which has at its labor is central because it's tied to reducing Native populations on land for the purposes of then taking more of that land. And so it's no surprise that the Dahls Act, which is the Allotment Act in the United States in the late 19th century,

38:24occurs at the peak of the early boarding school process, whereby Native populations are being drained from reservations, even as the federal government steps in and says, you don't need all this land. So those two are connected. And you've stressed the importance of not seeing this history as linear or as always moving in one direction. But as we head through the 20th century and into the 21st, are there any meaningful changes in the way in which Native communities push back or which we can tell these stories as having, I suppose,

38:54something of a more positive edge to them? Yeah, I'm really grateful in a way that the 20th century does provide this break or like this space or these moments of triumph, I think, for Native people, because otherwise it's hard. It's a hard history to sort of take on and to think about centuries of this dispossession and stealing without something that feels a little more resolving at the end, even though it's not resolved. It's just sort of a little bit of a breakthrough. And the 20th century in the United States, in terms of way Native peoples

39:24are sort of understood, I think the narrative is, which is generally right, is that there is an increasing clawback, clawing back by Native communities of rights, of sovereignty, of self-determination. And it's never complete. And it really is experienced differently. You know, the Navajo experienced it very differently than the Narragansetts on the East Coast. But bit by bit, in different kinds of ways, Native people are able to not only recover

39:56cultural traditions and language acquisition and rituals and practices that I think have been sort of suppressed or even outlawed in some cases, but just in terms of sovereignty and self-determination, the courts increasingly support these kinds of ventures. And even though federal policy ebbs and flows in the 20th century in terms of supporting this, there are some key moments that give sort of ground back in a way to Native people. But at the same time, the federal government is trying desperately to relieve itself

40:26of a responsibility for Native people that it had taken on over the past 200 years, right? And so there's this contradictory sense of like the federal government trying desperately to not be in the Indian business, so-called, and Native people saying, you put us in these positions and you owe us ongoing support, ongoing sort of frameworks of justice. So in the book, this really manifests in terms of how Native people advocate for their communities in the 1960s, 1970s especially.

40:58And there's a series of acts that are passed by Congress that really are intended to return sovereignty back to Native nations. One of them, which I focus on in the book, is the Indian Child Welfare Act because this returns the right of Native communities to determine where children who are considered to be orphans or not in great family situations where they get placed. And so before that point, tens of thousands of Native children have been placed in adoptive situations or foster homes.

41:28And after 1978, first preference has to go to Native communities where those children are placed. So it's not perfect, but it's just one example of a broader array of acts that are passed based upon the advocacy of Native communities and really forcing the issue and demanding sovereignty

Actionable steps and advocacy today

41:49and rights. Finally, you mention gathering together a group of your neighbours to read a draft of the book and to invite their comments. And I think one of the things that really struck me was them asking, what do you want people to do after reading this book? And I suppose the same question applies to listeners to this episode. What would you like them to do having heard these stories and having heard this history? Yeah, it's a really good question that I appreciated my neighbours asking me because I also wrestle

42:20with this too. It's not always obvious what one should do with information, especially if you feel paralyzed by that information. So the three suggestions I make at the end of the book, which, you know, could be expanded into more, is basically self-educate, to listen, and to advocate. And each one of those, I think, is important. Self-educate might seem self-evident, but actually a lot of people in the U.S. today really don't know much about Native history.

42:52And this is something that I specialized in for a number of years now. And I still don't know much about Native history because it's such a rich topic. It's such an incredibly complicated and diverse history. And honestly, there's so many Native nations and tribes and clans and groups so that the regionality of this story is so context-specific. And so as a starting place, I think people who are in particular places should self-educate

43:22about the history of that land and the history of the people who initially occupied that land. And I also just think the second one is listen. Too quickly, people I talk to who are not Native, like, read a, or like, watched a movie, you know, back in the 80s or saw Pocahontas, the Disney movie, or they think they know, right? And so instead of just jumping in to, like, find a way to read works by Native authors or just listen in some form,

43:52give support Native art, try to understand perspectives. And I think that is a huge thing. And then the final thing is advocate, which is a little bit harder, I guess. But I've been asked multiple times if I think that reparations are in order based upon this history of Native slavery. And I think absolutely they should be reparations for Native people based on enslavement to be part of the wider reparations process. But for Native people, the question of lands and treaty obligations and restoring treaty rights is an essential first step. And that can be done

44:22by everyday Americans in terms of the local level and state elections and even national elections and whom we vote for and thinking about prioritizing those kinds of investments to advocate for Native people. So, it's not a perfect set of possibilities or suggestions, but hopefully, at least for some people, it's a starting place to think about how to make this a little more tangible and a little more possible.

44:49That was Linford D. Fisher, Professor of History at Brown University. His book, Stealing America, The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History, is among those shortlisted for the 2026 Kundal History Prize. For more details, visit kundalprize.com. And you can also visit the website that Linford mentions in the interview at stolenrelations.org.

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