STEALING AMERICA

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.