“Stealing America” by Linford Fisher

With the story of the American Revolution being retold as we approach this country’s 250th anniversary, we hear a lot about George Washington, Paul Revere, Thomas Jefferson, Benjamin Franklin, and Thomas Paine, among the many individuals who played a part in the formation of the United States of America.

What we don’t hear much about is that, concurrent with the war that ousted the British, was what Linford Fisher, a history professor at Brown University, described as a war on a different front, one waged against Native Americans. In his book, Stealing America, Fisher said the prevailing opinion at the time in the American colonies was that “native people were in the way.”

The American colonists wanted them out of the way and were willing to go to almost any lengths to accomplish that. Washington is known as the father of our country, but the Iroquois had another title for him: town destroyer, because, as a general in 1779, Washington led a ruthless campaign to destroy Indian lands.

“In November 1776 the North Carolina General Assembly offered ‘considerable rewards’ for the scalps of Indians and allowed native children under a certain age to be taken prisoner as slaves,” stated Fisher.

It’s not surprising that U.S. efforts to eradicate native people don’t turn up in many history books regarding the Revolution. “After the American Revolution, the United States debated the role slavery should play in the new nation,” Fisher noted. “Americans later rewrote the history of the era to focus solely on the conflict with the British…The war against native nations was an inconvenient aspect of the period that later Americans found less celebratory and so conveniently left out of the telling of history.”

The rewrite of history is not the only thing that Fisher explores in Stealing America. The other is the enslavement of Native Americans. Fisher estimates that 600,000 Native Americans were enslaved in North America. Between 1492 and the late 19th century, estimates range from 2.5 million to 5.5 million indigenous people were enslaved across North, Central, and South America, including the Caribbean region.

From the viewpoint of Native Americans in California, the California Gold Rush was anything but a windfall, Fisher stated. The sudden arrival of thousands of settlers looking for gold destroyed traditional homelands, polluted water supplies, and enslaved thousands of Native Californians in the 19th century.

Fisher’s research has taken more than 15 years, since records and accounts of native enslavement are not readily available. Fisher points to resources like the Stolen Relations website (stolenrelations.org) that seeks to “illuminate the significance of the enslavement and servitude of Indigenous peoples in American history, as well as their resilience, through the recovery of individual stories.” Some 7,000 records are available on the site.