About this episode

The episode explores the history of Indigenous slavery in the United States and its connection to land dispossession during 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…

People in this episode

Host: Liz Covart

Guests: Linford Fisher, Lorén Spears

Topics covered

• Indigenous slavery
• American Revolution
• historical investigation
• land dispossession
• Native nations
• archival collaboration

Keywords

• Indigenous people
• enslavement
• historian
• decolonization
• captive raiding
• tribal collaboration
• historical archives

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Tomaquag Museum

Books & works: Stolen Relations

Places: United States, North America, Caribbean, Britain

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