Decolonizing Archives, Recovering Stories: The Stolen Relations Project and Native American Slavery

NATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

SPEAKERS: Dr. Linford Fisher, Brown University Department of History & Lorén Spears (Narragansett), Executive Director of Tomaquag Museum

The Stolen Relations project is a tribally collaborative effort to recover, sensitively interpret, and present to the public an archive of the long and hidden history of Native American enslavement. Under development for a decade but launched in May 2025 (www.stolenrelations.org), the project contains a growing database of individual records along with contemporary Native perspectives, artwork, music, and other resources for tribal and public use. This presentation will provide a short background on the history of Native enslavement and introduce the project while opening up larger questions regarding the nature of the archive and the erasures of Native histories in national narratives.

About the Speaker

Linford Fisher is Associate Professor of History and the Interim Faculty Director for the Center for Digital Scholarship at Brown University. He grew up in the rolling hills of southeastern Pennsylvania among the Amish and Mennonites. He received his doctorate from Harvard University in 2008 and joined the Department of History at Brown in the summer of 2009. His research and teaching relate primarily to the cultural and religious history of colonial America and the Atlantic world, including Native Americans, religion, material culture, and Indian and African slavery and servitude. He is the author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America, co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island's Founding Father, and co-author of Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indigenous Nations, and the Founding of America--A Documentary History. His most recent book, a long history of the intertwining of Native American enslavement and dispossession in the English colonies and the United States between Columbus and 1980, titled Stealing America: The Hidden History of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History, is due out with W.W. Norton/Liveright in April 2026. Additionally, he has authored over a dozen articles and book chapters. He is also the founder and principal investigator of the Stolen Relations: Recovering Stories of Indigenous Enslavement in the Americas project, which is a tribal community-centered collaborative project that seeks to create a public, centralized database of Native slavery throughout the Americas and across time. 

Lorén M. Spears, enrolled Narragansett Tribal Nation citizen and Executive Director of Tomaquag Museum, holds a Master’s in Education and received a Doctor of Humane Letters, honoris causa in 2017, from the University of Rhode Island and Doctor of Education, Honoris Causa from Roger Williams University in 2021. She is an author, artist and shares her cultural knowledge with the public through museum programs. She has contributed to a variety of publications such as Dawnland Voices, An Anthology of Indigenous Writing of New England; Through Our Eyes: An Indigenous View of Mashapaug Pond; From Slaves to Soldiers: The 1st Rhode Island Regiment in the American Revolution; and Repair: Sustainable Design Futures. Spears co-edited a new edition of A Key into the Language of America by Roger Williams; and recently co-authored “As We Have Always Done: Decolonizing the Tomaquag Museum’s Collections Management Policy" published in the Collections: A Journal for Museum and Archive Professionals. Under her leadership Tomaquag Museum received the Institute of Museums and Library Service's National Medal in 2016 and she has been the recipient of numerous awards and honors.