Linford D. Fisher – Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History, in conversation with Zahir Janmohamed

Historian Linford D. Fisher reads from and discusses his new book Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History, in conversation with Zahir Janmohamed.

“An indispensable book, as intellectually provocative as it is emotionally wrenching.” – Greg Grandin¸ author of the Pulitzer Prize–winning The End of the Myth

Although the first enslaved Africans arrived in Jamestown in 1619, European slavery in America began more than a century before. In a work distinguished not only by its original research but by its “passionate prose” (James F. Brooks), 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. 

From Virginia to California, from New England to Barbados, Stealing America traces the history of Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession, detailing how colonizers captured Natives and often deliberately mislabeled them as Black slaves to avoid detection. While the American Revolution pealed the bells of freedom for colonists, it paved a larcenous trail of westward expansion that subsequently plundered Indigenous land and stole the labor of Natives from nations like the Cherokee, Navajo, Nisean, and many others. “This double theft,” Fisher writes, “was central to the origins, growth, and eventual success of the English colonies and the United States—not just initially but throughout all of American history.” 

In this expansive narrative, Fisher 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 loss. Fisher 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. 

Nearly fifteen years in the making, this magisterial volume not only uncovers a five-century genocidal history but also illuminates the myriad ways Native Americans have fought for their sovereignty and maintained community. The most comprehensive work of its kind, Stealing America emerges as a saga of both persistent colonialism and Indigenous resilience, one that reframes American history at its core.

Linford D. Fisher is an associate professor of history at Brown University. The author of The Indian Great Awakening and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations project, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Zahir Janmohamed received his MFA in fiction at the University of Michigan where he received awards in fiction, nonfiction, poetry, and playwriting. In 2019, the podcast he co-founded about food, race, gender, and class called Racist Sandwich was nominated for a James Beard Award. 

He has received fellowships from MacDowell, where he was the inaugural recipient of the Anne Cox Chambers fellowship for long-form journalism, as well as from Tin House, the Arab American National Museum, The Mesa Refuge, the Djerassi Resident Arts Program, the Norman Mailer Center, and the San Francisco Writers’ Grotto. He is a three-time alumnus of the VONA workshop for writers of color, a 2017 fiction fellow at Kundiman, a 2017 New Voices Scholar, and the recipient of the inaugural Katherine Bakeless Fiction Scholarship at Bread Loaf.

His articles have appeared in The New York Times, Foreign Policy, Guernica, The Washington Post, The San Francisco Chronicle, Newsweek, CNN, NPR, The Boston Review, The Guardian, McSweeney’s, Scroll, The Wire, The Hindu, The Economic Times and many other publications.

Prior to beginning his writing career, he worked at Amnesty International, where he directed the organization’s advocacy work on the Middle East and North Africa, and in the US Congress, where he served as a senior foreign policy aide. 

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