An eye-opening look at an aspect of Native American history too little documented.
Wide-ranging study of the enslavement of Indigenous Americans.
Brown University historian Fisher opens at a perhaps unlikely venue, the Bermuda archipelago, where, 400 years ago, New England Puritans exiled thousands of Native peoples. There, they and their descendants were enslaved until Britain emancipated them in 1834, and a descendant community remains today. Their situation was not unusual; Fisher charges that “American forefathers and foremothers enslaved Native Americans in roughly the same numbers as they imported enslaved Africans.” The practice began the moment the Spanish made landfall in 1492, “a devastating precedent for the entire hemisphere.” Yet the fact of Native enslavement has been buried, deliberately, it would seem: Fisher notes that enslaved Indigenous peoples were not counted in U.S. censuses, while the British listed only Blacks in the census of Bermuda. The British took their share of Native captives as well, sending many to England; as Fisher notes, William Shakespeare’s play The Tempest finds the shipwrecked character Trinculo wishing he was back home so that he could exhibit Caliban (“an Indigenous-type character”) to paying customers. Even after the emancipation of enslaved African Americans, the enslavement of Native peoples continued: California was one of many states to engage in convict leasing, with Natives providing an endless supply of criminals, while the state also permitted “peonage”: “Officials there acknowledged in 1864 and 1865 that as many as six thousand Native girls and boys under the age of seventeen lived in non-Native households—with most held as servants, peons, or slaves.” Children who had been forcibly enrolled in the Indian School at a military barracks in Carlisle, Pennsylvania, were similarly rented out to farms and factories. Between the late 1940s and as recently as the 1990s, Fisher writes, as many as 70,000 children were taken from their homes for adoption, particularly in Mormon households, a source of ongoing controversy as demands for restitution mount.
An eye-opening look at an aspect of Native American history too little documented.Pub Date: April 28, 2026
ISBN: 9781324094951
Page Count: 544
Publisher: Liveright/Norton
Review Posted Online: Feb. 16, 2026
Kirkus Reviews Issue: March 15, 2026
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.
Greed, depravity, and serial murder in 1920s Oklahoma.
During that time, enrolled members of the Osage Indian nation were among the wealthiest people per capita in the world. The rich oil fields beneath their reservation brought millions of dollars into the tribe annually, distributed to tribal members holding "headrights" that could not be bought or sold but only inherited. This vast wealth attracted the attention of unscrupulous whites who found ways to divert it to themselves by marrying Osage women or by having Osage declared legally incompetent so the whites could fleece them through the administration of their estates. For some, however, these deceptive tactics were not enough, and a plague of violent death—by shooting, poison, orchestrated automobile accident, and bombing—began to decimate the Osage in what they came to call the "Reign of Terror." Corrupt and incompetent law enforcement and judicial systems ensured that the perpetrators were never found or punished until the young J. Edgar Hoover saw cracking these cases as a means of burnishing the reputation of the newly professionalized FBI. Bestselling New Yorkerstaff writer Grann (The Devil and Sherlock Holmes: Tales of Murder, Madness, and Obsession, 2010, etc.) follows Special Agent Tom White and his assistants as they track the killers of one extended Osage family through a closed local culture of greed, bigotry, and lies in pursuit of protection for the survivors and justice for the dead. But he doesn't stop there; relying almost entirely on primary and unpublished sources, the author goes on to expose a web of conspiracy and corruption that extended far wider than even the FBI ever suspected. This page-turner surges forward with the pacing of a true-crime thriller, elevated by Grann's crisp and evocative prose and enhanced by dozens of period photographs.
Dogged original research and superb narrative skills come together in this gripping account of pitiless evil.Pub Date: April 18, 2017
ISBN: 978-0-385-53424-6
Page Count: 352
Publisher: Doubleday
Review Posted Online: Feb. 1, 2017
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Feb. 15, 2017
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
BOOK TO SCREEN
The author's youthfulness helps to assure the inevitable comparison with the Anne Frank diary although over and above the...
Elie Wiesel spent his early years in a small Transylvanian town as one of four children.
He was the only one of the family to survive what Francois Maurois, in his introduction, calls the "human holocaust" of the persecution of the Jews, which began with the restrictions, the singularization of the yellow star, the enclosure within the ghetto, and went on to the mass deportations to the ovens of Auschwitz and Buchenwald. There are unforgettable and horrifying scenes here in this spare and sombre memoir of this experience of the hanging of a child, of his first farewell with his father who leaves him an inheritance of a knife and a spoon, and of his last goodbye at Buchenwald his father's corpse is already cold let alone the long months of survival under unconscionable conditions.
Pub Date: Jan. 16, 2006
ISBN: 0374500010
Page Count: 120
Publisher: Hill & Wang
Review Posted Online: Oct. 7, 2011
Kirkus Reviews Issue: Jan. 15, 2006
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