The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in US History

Join us for a hybrid lecture as Linford Fisher traces the long and surprising history of Native American enslavement and land theft―from the earliest English colonies through the end of the US Civil War and beyond. Drawing on his new book, Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History (2026), Fisher shows how colonizers captured Natives and often deliberately mislabeled them as Black slaves to avoid detection. He weaves together accounts of major episodes in American history including early colonization, the American Revolution, and the Civil War with lesser-known stories of Native enslavement and land dispossession. 

Stealing America upends conventional histories about the nature of American slavery, revealing enslaved Natives in places we have overlooked, including southern antebellum plantations and the nineteenth-century American West. After Congress outlawed Native slavery in 1867, Americans forced Indigenous children into boarding schools and white homes, where they labored under forced assimilation. This practice was not reformed until the latter twentieth century, when Native nations finally secured increasing rights and self-determination.