Linford D. Fisher – Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slaver

Historian Linford D. Fisher reads from and discusses his new book, Stealing America..., with Maine writer Mira Ptacin.

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Historian Linford D. Fisher reads from and discusses his new book Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History, in discussion with Maine writer Mira Ptacin.

“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.

Mira Ptacin is a literary journalist, memoirist, New York Times–bestselling ghostwriter, editor, and professor of creative writing. She is the author of the award-winning memoir Poor Your Soul (Soho Press, 2016), named a Best Memoir of the Year by Kirkus Reviews as well as the Junior Library Guild Selection of the Year; and The In-Betweens: The Spiritualists, Mediums, and Legends of Camp Etna (Liveright–W. W. Norton & Company, 2019), a genre-blending work of feminist history, memoir, and ethnography, which the New York Times praised as ideal pandemic reading and is currently optioned to be adapted as a scripted television series. Mira earned her MFA from Sarah Lawrence College, where she served as editor-at-large of the literary magazine LUMINA. For nearly two decades, she has taught memoir and nonfiction writing in both traditional and nontraditional spaces, including inside prisons, where she leads long-running writing programs for incarcerated women.

A first-generation, proudly Polish-American daughter of an immigrant, Mira writes at the intersection of the intimate and the systemic. Her work is driven by a devotion to telling deeply human stories that challenge prevailing ideas about equity, compassion, responsibility, and the systems that govern lives our locally and nationally. With an unwavering commitment to activism and organizing, Mira uncovers the complexities behind headlines and amplifies voices often overlooked by mainstream narratives, always in pursuit of justice and transcendence. Her reporting ranges from the lives of incarcerated women to rural Maine feminist mystics to neo-Nazis and the townspeople who drove them out. Mira serves on the board of Reentry Sisters, a Maine-based nonprofit supporting women transitioning from incarceration back into society. She is the 2025–2026 inaugural writer-in-residence at Mechanics’ Hall, the 2026 Maine Arts Commission Fellow in Literary Arts, a fellow of the Virginia Center for the Creative Arts. Mira lives on Peaks Island, Maine, with h