Decolonizing Archives, Recovering Stories: The Stolen Relations Project and Native American Slavery
Date and Time
Mahindra Humanities Center Seminar on 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. More information.