Thanks, Lin, for bringing us inside an exciting and important initiative: Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas. And congratulations for it! Please start with an overview of Stolen Relations, which is based at Brown University.
The Stolen Relations project just launched in May as the first-ever database of Indigenous slavery in the Americas. Many Americans are familiar with the centrality of African slavery in American history, usually narrated as starting in 1619 and ending with the American Civil War in 1865. Stolen Relations reveals a history that most Americans have not heard of, namely, the way that Indigenous people in this country and throughout the hemisphere were enslaved and coerced into various forms of labor for centuries. These processes started in 1492 with the arrival of Columbus, continued with English explorers who kidnapped Native people from the coastlines as trophies, servants and slaves, or to extract knowledge of local landscapes. Every European power enslaved Native peoples, whether through outright warfare or through legal means, such as slavery as a punishment for crime or debt.
Importantly, Stolen Relations is a tribally collaborative project, and we are honored to be working with a dozen Native nations, communities, and institutions in New England to ensure that we are telling this story in a sensitive way that is useful for Native communities and that does not add to the harm and the trauma of the archive and this history. Our focus is on the recovery of individuals, and so far we have records of thousands of Natives from 1492 into the early twentieth century. Most of the records are drawn from English-speaking colonies, but we are slowly expanding into other languages and regions.
What are the roots of Stolen Relations?
Stolen Relations was conceptualized in 2015 and emerged out of my research for my current book project (Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in American History [Liveright, forthcoming 2026]). I was traveling to archives all over the US and the Caribbean, as well as England, and felt like I was coming across people whose stories would be relevant for Native communities as well as researchers. I began working with the Center for Digital Scholarship at the Brown University Library in 2016, and slowly began working on the technical side of things. In 2019 we intentionally reached out to tribal leadership of a number of regional communities and nations, which fundamentally reshaped the project — including the name we currently have, but also expanding our notion of what slavery is. In 2022 we received a NEH grant that allowed us to build a new website and search interface. We went live on May 10th, but in many ways, it is only the beginning of what I hope is a much longer project since there is so much information hidden out there in archives.
A recent Brown News story gave an estimated number of Indigenous People in the Americas who “were taken from their communities and forced into enslavement and servitude.” What was that number and where in the Americas did these displacements occur?
Scholars have put forward various estimates, but in reality we are only at the beginning of understanding its full scope. Historian Andrés Resendéz in his excellent book The Other Slavery estimates 2.5-5 million Natives who were enslaved in the Americas as a whole between 1492 and 1900, with approximately 300,000 or so enslaved in what is now the United States. Those are huge numbers, which should cause us to ask why we have ignored this history for so long!
Tell us about the team and contributors behind Stolen Relations.
Stolen Relations is made up of several different groups and teams. There is a core team that usually meets weekly, made up of half a dozen folks at the Center for Digital Scholarship and the Brown Library, along with two tribal staff members, our undergraduate research assistant coordinator, a few other researchers and fellows, and myself. Ashley Champagne, the CDS Director, is the project manager and brings her incredible organizational skills to this complicated, layered project. Our Native Advisory Board meets twice per year, and we also have subcommittees with tribal reps that meet more frequently. The Academic Advisory Board meets as needed, usually once per year, with emails and other exchanges in between. Our RA team is quite large, with 30-40 researchers on the project at any given time, including Brown undergrads, and a whole range of high school and other volunteers. We have a streamlined process of onboarding folks and an application that is online for anyone interested in helping out.
Lin, in that Brown News story you were quoted as saying: “I’m constantly asking people around me, ‘Who learned about Indigenous slavery in school?’ and I hear dead silence.” Can you elaborate?
I hope that this is changing, but I never learned about Native slavery in high school or college, and neither did many of the people I speak with, including our current high school interns. If there is any awareness of Native slavery, it is associated with the very early period and almost exclusively with the Spanish. The idea that early English colonists and later Americans continued to enslave Natives is totally foreign to the stories and narratives we as Americans are used to hearing.
So one of the many goals of Stolen Relations is changing that. To that end, there are many resources available for K to 12 educators. An overview, please.
As part of the Stolen Relations project, we are producing curricular materials to help give lesson plans, sources, and tools for teachers mostly in 6-12 classrooms who might want to teach this history but aren’t entirely sure where to start. We have five units planned with individual lesson plans that connect with topics and themes that already exist in US history surveys and AP US History. We know that teachers don’t have time to teach through a stand-alone curriculum, so instead we are designing it to complement what educators are already doing in the classroom. We already have Unit 2 “Tools of Removal: Enslavement during Warfare” available on the curriculum page. We started with this unit since 2025 is the 350th anniversary of the start of King Philip’s War (which at the suggestion of our collaborators we are rebranding as the War for New England). The unit also contains lesson plans on the war enslavement of Native played during Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia during the same time period (1670s). We have a terrific team of undergraduates working with the educate team, and routinely receive input from tribal advisors.
Now let’s dig deeper into Stolen Relations. The elements include stories. Please elaborate.
From the beginning, the feedback we received is that highlighting individual stories was of the greatest interest to a wider usership. So for now we have nearly a dozen shorter (750 words or so) stories of individuals in the database, with additional research filled in by RAs and students in my classes. We have several dozen more in the works.
And there is a searchable database.
The database of more than 7,000 individuals is really the core of the project. Users can search by keyword, name, etc., or use the many filters to narrow their search. Results come in the form of individuals, for whom each is given a short biographical summary. Clicking on an individual results card allows users to see the transcription of the document and, in many cases, an image of the original source.
Also, a map.
One of the coolest features of the site is a map that allows users to quickly visualize the astonishing geographical range of his enslavement history. The dots on the map only represent the records we have input so far, of course; if we could enter all of the millions of records, the Americas would literally be full of dots. But users can zoom in and click on specific people, which takes them to the individual results page.
And a timeline.
We realize that the long, hemispheric history of Indigenous enslavement might be new to most people. So we’ve put together a lengthy timeline that, while mostly focused on the United States, begins to tell some of this story, connecting the dots between early wars of enslavement in the seventeenth century and nineteenth century boarding schools, for example.
And many Tribal Partners.
Our tribal collaborations have been essential to this work. We are so grateful for the officially-appointed tribal representatives from roughly a dozen nations, communities, and institutions who meet regularly with us and help us think through all aspects of this project. We have a tribal partners page where we link directly to their community webpages for people to learn more.
And music, poetry and artwork.
From the beginning, our tribal partners have pushed us to find ways to move beyond the silences and biases of the archive and include other Native perspectives. So we were able to commission new artwork, poetry, and music for the site, with more planned for the future.
Next, Indigenous voices. One is Lorén M. Spears, executive director of the Tomaquag Museum, a Narragansett and member of our Advisory Board who was recently inducted into the R.I. Heritage Hall of Fame.
Having voices and perspectives from present-day tribal members felt like an essential way to counterbalance the Anglo-centric archive. It has also been an important way for us to say to the public: Native peoples are still here, and we need to listen to and honor their perspectives. We have interviews from three tribal partners currently, broken up into shorter segments (ideal for classroom use!), with more planned for the future.
Anything else we should know?
We are actively seeking additional volunteer research assistants and institutional partners! Please visit our Get Involved page to learn more.
