The stolen Native Americans who shaped US history

Welcome to the History Extra podcast. In today's episode, I'm going to be talking to historian and author Linford D. Fisher, whose book, Stealing America, The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in US history, documents the sustained and systematic way in which Native American people were taken from their homes and families across centuries of history. From the Spanish invasion of fourteen ninety two to the late nineteen seventies and beyond, this is a story that Linford argues is both tragically overlooked and central to our understanding of the United States. Linford's book is among those shortlisted for the twenty twenty six Clundel History Prize, and we'll have more details of that. at the end of the interview. But for now it's over to my conversation with Limford. I wanted to kick off with an exploration of the title,'cause it's something you consider a bit in the beginning of your book. What histories are you talking about when you talk about stealing America and why is the use of that verb particularly important in your retelling of this of this story?

Yeah, thanks, Matt. It's great to be here and to be in conversation with you. So titles are difficult. We went round and rounds to decide if we wanted to use something as bold as stealing, but in the end, that was the central kind of thread through the entire book and I think helps to reframe how we think about slavery land loss and indigenous perspectives on these histories, too. So I guess I could take it in two parts. First of all, Stealing America in a way for me was inspired by these early modern maps that's in the bottom corner somewhere is off In our cartouche, like this sort of image, often with sort of flowers and an indigenous person. And to me, that person embodied America, both the people and the land. And so stealing America sort of represents that co-join process. But I think to your point and to your question, there's a broader history being referenced here that's not just the United States. And I think that even though I'm mostly focusing on English language context like the English colonies for the first half of the book, basically, and then the the United States after that. There's a broader Process that you could look at in French and Dutch and Spanish and other context as well in the Western hemisphere in the Americas. But the idea of stealing is really something I'm trying to intervene in terms of the field and scholarship. It also is reflected from conversations that I've had with indigenous collaborators who.

Really try to highlight a broader set of harms that comes out of settler colonialism regarding the losses that native communities feel when. Children are are stolen or abducted or forced into indentured situations, or when adults are placed into servitude or slavery for labor, or when native individuals or women and children or men are swept up or caught up in in slave trading and trafficking processes during colonial wars as well. So that full range of the losses that native communities feel. is what I'm trying to gesture to with this broader framework of stealing that includes chattel slavery that was in sort of British colonies and also the United States, but is much broader than that as well. There's a really beautiful and really moving line in your book where you say 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. Were you surprised when you were writing and researching this book the extent of this stealing?

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