Prairie Edge Book Review

Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History
Author: Linford D. Fisher

Stealing America is a landmark work of historical recovery, and historian Linford D. Fisher, an associate professor at Brown University known for his deep research into Indigenous enslavement, the Atlantic world, and colonial-era unfreedom, delivers a book that forces the United States to confront a truth it has long buried.

Fisher’s central argument is uncompromising: Indigenous slavery was not peripheral to American history, it was foundational to it. Drawing on more than a decade of archival work, he demonstrates that from the 1500s through the nineteenth century, European colonizers enslaved hundreds of thousands of Native people in North America and millions across the hemisphere. This system of bondage predated African chattel slavery in the colonies and continued alongside it, often intertwined and deliberately obscured.

What sets Fisher apart is his ability to weave meticulous research with narrative clarity. He shows how colonists captured Native people during wars, raids, and land seizures, then often reclassified them as Black to hide the practice once Indigenous slavery became politically inconvenient. He traces how the American Revolution, celebrated as a fight for liberty, simultaneously accelerated the dispossession and forced labor of Native nations. And he exposes how the United States, even after formally outlawing Native slavery in 1867, simply shifted to new tools of domination: boarding schools, forced assimilation, child removal, and coerced labor under the guise of “civilization.”

Fisher’s expertise shines in the book’s breadth. He moves from New England to the Carolinas, from the Great Lakes to the Southwest, showing how Indigenous enslavement shaped economies, migration patterns, racial categories, and federal policy. His previous scholarship on Native communities in the Atlantic world gives him a rare ability to connect local stories to global systems of power.

Yet this is not only a story of violence. Fisher foregrounds Indigenous resistance, nations who fought, negotiated, rebuilt, and refused erasure. Their survival becomes a counter-narrative to the myth that the United States’ rise was inevitable or benign.

As a work of history, Stealing America is rigorous. As a moral intervention, it is urgent. Fisher’s prose is measured but devastating, his evidence overwhelming, his conclusions unavoidable: the United States was built not only on stolen land, but on stolen Native bodies. To understand America honestly, this history must be restored to the center of the national story.

$39.99, 539 pages, Liveright Publishing Corporation, a division of W. W. Norton & Company

The post Prairie Edge Book Review first appeared on Native Sun News Today.

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