449 Stealing America: Indigenous Slavery and the American Revolution

More than half a million Indigenous people were enslaved within the present-day borders of the United States.

Historian Linford Fisher spent fifteen years in archives across North America, the Caribbean, and Britain to investigate this forgotten history. What he found was not a second story running alongside African slavery. It was something different in kind. Europeans and early Americans enslaved people who lived on land they intended to possess. This practice made slavery a tool of dispossession.

The American Revolution is where this process accelerated. Lin and Lorén Spears, a Narragansett tribal citizen and the executive director of the Tomaquag Museum, trace how the Revolution opened space for captive raiding on the western frontier, how Native nations weighed which side to take during the war, and how their Stolen Relations digital project is recovering the names of the Natives early Americans enslaved.

Lin’s Website | Book |

Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/449

EPISODE OUTLINE

00:00:00 Introduction

00:01:23 The Declaration's Overlooked Grievance Against Indigenous People

00:02:29 The Other Revolutionary War

00:03:20 Investigating the Hidden History of Indigenous Enslavement

00:07:07 Uncovering the Scale of Indigenous Enslavement

00:13:43 Building Stolen Relations Through Archival and Tribal Collaboration

00:20:51 Decolonizing Archival Records

00:30:40 Connection Between Indigenous Enslavement & Land Dispossession

00:33:53 How Native Nations Navigated the American Revolution

00:37:16 From Colonial Experimentation to Revolutionary Expansion

00:41:15 How the American Revolution Expanded Indigenous Slavery

00:45:20 How Indigenous Nations Weighed Neutrality, Alliance, & Survival

00:52:51 The Declaration of Independence's Impact on Indigenous Communities

01:01:10 The Treaty of Paris, 1783 and the Continuation of Indigenous Dispossession

01:03:51 The Uncertain End of Indigenous Enslavement

01:11:59 Commemorating the American Revolution Through Indigenous History

01:24:36 Revolution to Freedom Through Indigenous Sovereignty

RECOMMENDED NEXT EPISODES

🎧 Episode 163: The American Revolution in North America

🎧 Episode 264: The Treaty of Canadaigua

🎧 Episode 323: American Expansion & the Political Economy of Plunder

🎧 Episode 367: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 1

🎧 Episode 368: The Brafferton Indian School, Part 2

🎧 Episode 406: Threads of Power

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