Episode 196: Linford Fisher on the Hidden History of Indigenous Slavery in America

What if American slavery didn’t begin in 1619?

In this episode, historian Linford Fisher joins me to discuss Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in US History and the overlooked history of Indigenous enslavement.

We explore how Native slavery shaped early America—from the Pequot War and Yamasee War to land theft, westward expansion, and boarding schools—and why this history still matters today.

A powerful rethink of American origins—and the stories we’ve been missing.

Linford Fisher is Associate Professor of History and the Faculty Director of the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University. He grew up in the rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania among the Amish and Mennonites. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2008 and joined the Department of History at Brown in the summer of 2009. His research and teaching relate primarily to the cultural and religious history of colonial America and the Atlantic world, including Native Americans, religion, material culture, and Indian and African slavery and servitude. He is the author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America, co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island's Founding Father, and co-author of Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America--A Documentary History. His most recent book, a long history of the intertwining of Native American enslavement and dispossession in the English colonies and the United States between Columbus and 1980, titled Stealing America: The Hidden History of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History, is due out with W.W. Norton/Liveright in April 2026. Additionally, he has authored over a dozen articles and book chapters. He is also the founder and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas project, which is a tribal community-centered collaborative project that seeks to create a public, centralized database of Native slavery throughout the Americas and across time.