# 449 Stealing America: Indigenous Slavery and the American Revolution

Page: https://stenobird.com/podcast/ben-franklin-s-world-320219/449-stealing-america-indigenous-slavery-and-the-american-revolution
Text version: https://stenobird.com/podcast/ben-franklin-s-world-320219/449-stealing-america-indigenous-slavery-and-the-american-revolution.md
Podcast: [Ben Franklin's World](https://stenobird.com/podcast/ben-franklin-s-world-320219)
Published: 2026-08-18T05:00:00+00:00
Episode link: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/449
Audio file: https://episodes.captivate.fm/episode/337ff634-8fe3-4b91-9c5e-86113caf9c3c.mp3
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JSON: https://stenobird.com/v1/public/podcasts/ben-franklin-s-world-320219/episodes/449-stealing-america-indigenous-slavery-and-the-american-revolution
Duration seconds: 5551

## Resource

More than half a million Indigenous people were enslaved within the present-day borders of the United States. Historian Linford Fisher spent fifteen years in archives across North America, the Caribbean, and Britain to investigate this forgotten history. What he found was not a second story running alongside African slavery. It was something different in kind. Europeans and early Americans enslaved people who lived on land they intended to possess. This practice made slavery a tool of dispossession. The American Revolution is where this process accelerated. Lin and Lorén Spears, a Narragansett tribal citizen and the executive director of the Tomaquag Museum , trace how the Revolution opened space for captive raiding on the western frontier, how Native nations weighed which side to take during the war, and how their Stolen Relations digital project is recovering the names of the Natives early Americans enslaved. Lin’s Website | Book | Show Notes: https://www.benfranklinsworld.com/449 EPISODE OUTLINE 00:00:00 Introduction 00:01:23 The Declaration's Overlooked Grievance Against Indigenous People 00:02:29 The Other Revolutionary War 00:03:20 Investigating the Hidden History of Indigenous Enslavement 00:07:07 Uncovering the Scale of Indigenous Enslavement 00:13:43 Building Stolen Relations Through Archival and Tribal Collaboration 00:20:51 Decolonizing Archival Records 00:30:40 Connection Between Indigenous Enslavement & Land Dispossession 00:33:53 How Native Nations Navigated the American Revolution 00:37:16 From Colonial Experimentation to Revolutionary Expansion 00:41:15 How the American Revolution Expanded Indigenous Slavery 00:45:20 How Indigenous Nations Weighed Neutrality, Alliance, & Survival 00:52:51 The Declaration of Independence's Impact on Indigenous Co…

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