Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History

by Linford D. Fisher

Indigenous enslavement was a colossal phenomenon of almost unimaginable consequences that ensnared nearly 600,000 Native Americans in North America. In a saga that predates 1619, this double-stealing of Indigenous people and their lands upends virtually every known narrative of American history.

Captured Natives, often deliberately misidentified as Black slaves, were used not only on southern plantations, but on small northern farms, and were routinely shipped overseas. While the American Revolution pealed the bells of freedom for colonists, it paved a larcenous trail of westward expansion that decimated tribes and plundered Indigenous lands. Even 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 outlawed until the latter twentieth century, when Indian nations finally secured increasing rights and self-determination. The most comprehensive work of its kind, Stealing America presents a five-century genocidal history, more commonly known as the "American dream."

Genres: History, Nonfiction

560 pages, Hardcover

Expected publication April 28, 2026

About the author

Professor Fisher grew up in the rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2008 and joined the Department of History at Brown in the summer of 2009. Professor Fisher's 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 and co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island's Founding Father. Additionally, he has authored over a dozen articles and book chapters. He is currently finishing a history of Native American enslavement in the English colonies and the United States between Columbus and the American Civil War, tentatively titled America Enslaved: The Rise and Fall of Indian Slavery in the English Atlantic and the United States. He is also the principal investigator of the Database of Indigenous Slavery in the Americas project, which seeks to create a public, centralized database of Native slavery throughout the Americas and across time.