On a sun-drenched day in June 2018, a woman in traditional Native regalia dropped a large wreath of flowers into the Atlantic Ocean. The impact jostled loose a few petals before the circle of blossoms slowly drifted away on the luminescent blue Bermudian swells. All of the one hundred or so people gathered were silent, each absorbed by their own thoughts. In its departure, the wreath commemorated the journey of enslaved New England Native Americans to the island nearly four hundred years earlier.
Within an hour, the somber commemoration by the sea turned into a vibrant two-day intertribal powwow. Representatives from the Narragansett, Wampanoag, and other nations in New England mingled with Bermuda Natives on St. David’s Island as they participated in dancing, feasting, and communing. Men and boys fulfilled traditional roles around a large circular drum, beating it rhythmically. Dancers in brightly colored moccasins, robes, and headdresses shifted from one foot to the other in a line around the large grassy space encircled by tents. The smell of fry bread and stew wafted through the air, and for hours the singing and drumming drifted skyward as the flower wreath slowly caught a current and slipped out of sight into the open sea.
Native American powwows are important cultural celebrations, but this one in Bermuda memorializes events often hidden in American history: the large-scale enslavement of Indigenous people and the simultaneous taking of Native land. The ancestors of the Bermuda powwow attendees were part of this buried and intertwined history.
The stealing of Native Americans and their homelands is not just a side story in the grand drama of American history. It is the central river that connects all other streams.
Nearly four hundred years earlier, New England puritans hunted down well over one thousand Pequots, Wampanoags, Narragansetts, Nipmucs, and individuals from other nations and shipped them to Bermuda, Barbados, Spain, Mexico, and other international destinations. This took place during and after two wars between the puritans and local Indigenous populations. The first was the Pequot War in the 1630s, in which puritans tried to completely exterminate the Pequot nation. The second was King Philip’s War in the 1670s, which was a massive uprising in response to the harms of colonialism. During and after both wars, puritans used large-scale enslavement of Native peoples to bolster their labor force and help clear land for colonial settlement.
Native peoples in New England and Bermuda kept alive their family histories and stories throughout the centuries, even when colonial documents suppressed or omitted these connections. In Bermuda, enslaved Native Americans from New England and other regions eventually intermarried with enslaved and free Africans. After British emancipation in 1834, many of their descendants settled on St. David’s Island, in the northern part of the archipelago. There they continued to work, connect, and intermarry into the twenty-first century, and they remain to this day.
When St. David’s Islanders and New England Natives started exploring this shared history in the late 1990s, they realized a vital reunification was taking place. Starting in 2002, the reconnection powwows like the one I attended in June 2018 have served as a meaningful way for Natives in both New England and Bermuda to bring together what the violence of colonialism tore apart. As Nives Filice, whose ancestors were enslaved and sent to Bermuda, told me over lunch in the capital city of Hamilton, “Reconnecting with people in New England plugged a hole that I didn’t even know existed….When I first stepped foot on Mashpee Wampanoag tribal lands [in Massachusetts], I instantly felt a spiritual connection, like I was home.”
This book uses the concept of stealing to understand Native Americans’ experiences of losing kin and land—something I gleaned from many conversations with Native American collaborators and friends. Scholarly writing about slavery in the Americas—which has mostly centered on Black enslavement—has emphasized its economic value in building plantations, wealth, and American capitalism. But Native Americans experienced slavery as stealing of relatives, as a community loss, and it was always intermingled with the stealing of their land and disregard for their sovereignty. From their perspectives, stealing people, whether for enslavement or by forcing children into boarding schools, and seizing land, in wars or through removals, represented tangible community losses as part of a longer-term assault on their very existence.
Although largely erased from public consciousness, Indigenous enslavement was a colossal phenomenon that spanned the entire Americas, ensnaring an estimated 3 million to 6 million Indigenous people between 1492 and 1880 from Canada to Brazil. In the area that later became the United States, as many as 600,000 Native Americans were enslaved during this period, with many more stolen from families into the twentieth century through boarding school, fostering, and adoption programs. In comparison, approximately 530,000 enslaved Africans were forcibly transported to North America (excluding Mexico) through 1865.
These numbers reveal a shocking truth: American forefathers and foremothers enslaved Native Americans in roughly the same numbers as they imported enslaved Africans. Enslaved African-descended people later came to officially outnumber enslaved Natives through reproduction as well as the erasure of Native Americans from the records when individuals from the two groups intermarried. Still, Native slavery was far more prominent and long lasting in American history than we have realized.
The enslavement of more than a half million Indigenous men, women, and children within the boundaries of what is now the United States is almost unthinkable because it defies what we have been taught about both American history and slavery. The conventional narrative of American slavery goes something like this: After Columbus “discovered” the Americas, the Spanish enslaved Native Americans in the Caribbean and South America until 1542, when it was outlawed and they instead started importing enslaved Africans. When the English landed in Jamestown in 1607, colonists first used white indentured servants but soon began importing enslaved Africans in 1619. This inaugurated the transatlantic African slave trade, which lasted until 1808, when it was banned by Congress. Black slavery expanded in the South until the American Civil War, when it was legally terminated by the Thirteenth Amendment in 1865.
But that story is glaringly incomplete. Stealing America dramatically expands this history by tracing Indigenous enslavement and land dispossession throughout the full range of American history. This wider story spans five centuries from the first enslavement of the Caribbean Lucayan and Taíno in 1492 to the Indian Child Welfare Act in 1978, which slowly halted the stealing of tens of thousands of Native children through adoptions. As Alexis Moreis (Chappaquiddick Wampanoag) has noted, “When we are talking about Native American slavery, it always involves dispossession.” There is not a time or place in American history when these intertwined stealings were not viscerally present. And yet this book is not a comprehensive Native American history of the continent, nor is it a detailed history of the United States. Rather, it tugs on the specific threads of Indigenous slavery and land loss, demonstrating their centrality to and ubiquity in every colony and state, in every era of American history.
This centuries-long saga is one of both persistent colonialism and Indigenous resilience. A vast diversity of Indigenous peoples across the continent have found ways to negotiate and survive the waves of invading Europeans and Americans from 1492 to the present. This resilience has manifested in many forms. Powerful Native nations and smaller communities resisted and limited colonial aggression through diplomacy, alliances, petitions and court cases, and wars of resistance. Stolen and enslaved Indigenous people formed new networks of kinship; learned new skills and languages; retained memories of family, kin, and rituals; and, through it all, continually plotted to return home.
Colonization contained twists and turns. Native leaders and nations did not see themselves as universally on the same “side” as other Indigenous peoples and against all Europeans. Faced with foreign invasions, they made choices for survival and sovereignty that seem unexpected from a modern perspective. In some instances, Indigenous nations played surprising roles as collaborators with English merchants to conduct the large-scale slave trade of Native peoples, including in the Carolinas, Utah, and even Central America. As Narragansett scholar Mack Scott has noted, “Native Americans had their own histories, networks, goals, and purposes apart from European invaders.”
This double theft 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.
Although Stealing America focuses on the history of Indigenous slavery and land loss, this history also frequently intermingles with the story of African slavery. These are not competing histories since at times they connect and overlap. Nor does focusing on Native slavery minimize the weighty importance of Black slavery in US history. The damage and dislocation caused by Native enslavement and dispossession are part of a broader, layered, and “multidirectional” trauma in American history that involves Native Americans and African Americans, as well as Asian Americans, Mexican Americans, refugees, immigrants, and other historically marginalized populations. These injustices also coalesce with innumerable historical and contemporary global histories of genocide and displacement. Such stories, along with the incredible resilience of populations harmed by colonialism, need to be told and understood to promote justice and healing. And yet this particular history of Indigenous enslavement and land theft in American history has been so obscured that it merits its own telling.
The stealing of Native Americans and their homelands is not just a side story in the grand drama of American history. It is the central river that connects all other streams, coursing through the landscape of this country’s past like the muddy, serpentine Mississippi, which bisects the continent and allows everything around it to flourish. Native American enslavement was not just the “other” slavery, merely adding to the labor pool of the colonies and eventually the United States. Instead, enslaving Native Americans furthered colonization in a more fundamental, two-pronged way. Stealing and enslaving Native Americans from coveted lands was stunningly effective since it provided colonists with labor and land at the same time. The loss of Native individuals led to the destabilization of Indigenous family units and entire communities. This diminished tribes’ abilities to maintain demographic and vital community presence, making them easier to control, remove, or even legally terminate, or so colonists hoped.
This double theft 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. It is a powerful but overlooked process that has helped the United States become the superpower it is today.
How so? The financial strength and geographical spread of the American colonies and the United States emerged from stolen land and enslaved labor. Native Americans were forced to provide both. Fertile lands afforded the capacity to grow export crops that supported farmers and made plantation owners fabulously wealthy. Forests delivered lumber to build ships and barrels for transporting goods that allowed the United States to become a global trading power. A landscape teeming with deer, beaver, and buffalo provided boatloads of pelts and hides that sold for millions of dollars in Europe. Land itself was a commodity, representing wealth and financial stability; for centuries, owning it allowed white men to vote.
Without stolen Native lands, there would be no American capitalism and no nineteenth-century cotton kingdom; no homesteading rush and push for the individual home ownership so central to the American dream; no majestic national parks, which still are sacred to Native Americans; and no prime waterfront locations for twenty-first-century financial and cultural centers like New York City, Miami, Chicago, and Los Angeles.
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From Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History by Linford D. Fisher. Copyright © 2026. Available from Liveright Publishing Corporation, an imprint of W.W. Norton & Company. Stealing America has been shortlisted for the 2026 Cundill History Prize.
