Author Talk: Linford D. Fisher — Stealing America - with Mishy Jacobson

Author Linford D. Fisher discusses their book "Stealing America" at Politics and Prose bookstore in Washington, D.C.

In this expansive narrative, Fisher weaves together accounts of major episodes in American history including early colonization, the American Revolution, and the Civil War with lesser-known stories of Native enslavement and land loss. Fisher upends conventional histories about the nature of American slavery, revealing enslaved Natives in places we have overlooked, including southern antebellum plantations and the nineteenth-century American West. After Congress outlawed Native slavery in 1867, Americans forced Indigenous children into boarding schools and white homes, where they labored under forced assimilation. This practice was not reformed until the latter twentieth century, when Native nations finally secured increasing rights and self-determination.

Nearly fifteen years in the making, this magisterial volume not only uncovers a five-century genocidal history but also illuminates the myriad ways Native Americans have fought for their sovereignty and maintained community. The most comprehensive work of its kind, Stealing America emerges as a saga of both persistent colonialism and Indigenous resilience, one that reframes American history at its core.

Linford D. Fisher is an associate professor of history at Brown University. The author of The Indian Great Awakening and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations project, he lives in Providence, Rhode Island.

Fisher will be joined in conversation with Mishy Jacobson, a Politics & Prose bookseller.

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