It’s a sunny spring morning as Nakai Clearwater Northup stands amid white pine trees, near a river, surveying the land. Looking at his Narragansett homelands in southern Rhode Island, he says hunting and fishing here are plentiful.
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Population Studies and Training Center
Linford D. Fisher
Associate Professor of History
Research Interests
Atlantic World, Colonial American and Native American History, Forced Migration and Mobility, Religion, Slavery
Affiliated Department
Department of History
Biography
Linford Fisher came to Brown in 2009 and to the PSTC in 2016. He is a historian who writes and teaches on religion, Native Americans, and slavery in colonial America. He is the author of The Indian Great Awakening: Religion and the Shaping of Native Cultures in Early America (Oxford, 2012; paperback 2014) and the co-author of Decoding Roger Williams: The Lost Essay of Rhode Island’s Founding Father (Baylor, 2014) and Reading Roger Williams: Rogue Puritans, Indian Nations, and the Founding of America -- A Documentary History (Pickwick, 2024).
His most recent book is a history of Native American enslavement in the English colonies and the United States between Columbus and the Indian Child Welfare Act (1978), titled Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Slavery in U.S. History (Liveright/Norton, 2026). He is particularly interested in the forced movement and forced migration of enslaved peoples around the Atlantic basin in the early modern period. Fisher is also the author of a dozen additional essays and book chapters on a wide variety of topics related to early American history. He has received numerous research fellowships from the National Endowment for the Humanities, the Massachusetts Historical Society, the American Antiquarian Society, the Newberry Library, the American Philosophical Society, Harvard University, Brown University, and the American Council of Learned Societies.
Fisher is also the 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. This project received startup seed funds from the PSTC and the Social Sciences Research Institute at Brown.
Publications
Linford D. Fisher. 2026. Stealing America: The Hidden Story of Indigenous Enslavement in U.S. History (W.W. Norton/Liveright).
Linford D. Fisher. 2024. “Definitions of Slavery and Trafficking,” in A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking in the Age of Encounters (1450-1700), R. A. Kashanipour, ed., vol. 3 in A Cultural History of Slavery and Human Trafficking (Bloomsbury).
Linford D. Fisher. 2023. “The Persistence of Indigenous Unfreedom in Early American Newspaper Advertisements, 1704-1804,” with Anjali DasSarma, Slavery & Abolition 44(2): 267-291.
Linford D. Fisher. 2020. “A ‘Spanish Indian Squaw’ in New England: Indian Ann’s Journey from Slavery to Freedom,” in Hearing Enslaved Voices: African and Indian Slave Testimony in British and French America, 1700-1848, eds. Trevor Bernard and Sophie White (Routledge).
Linford D. Fisher. 2017. “‘Why shall wee have peace to bee made slaves?’ Indian Surrenderers During and After King Philip’s War,” special issue on Indian slavery for Ethnohistory 64(1): 91-114.
Linford D. Fisher. 2014. “‘Dangerous Designes’: The 1676 Barbados Act to Prohibit New England Indian Slave Importation,” The William and Mary Quarterly 71(1): 99-124.
Linford D. Fisher. 2014. “Religion, Race, and the Formation of Pan-Indian Identities in the Brotherton Movement, 1700–1800,” in Native Diasporas: Indigenous Identities and Settler Colonialism in the Americas, Gregory D. Smithers and Brooke N. Newman, eds. (University of Nebraska Press).
Recent News
WNPR (Connecticut Public Radio)
The hidden history of Indigenous slavery in New England and beyond
New England has a long and hidden history of enslaving people who were Black, but Native American enslavement was “the most dominant form of slavery, probably, throughout most of the 17th century,” Fisher says.
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WBUR (Boston Public Radio)
A new website illuminates the history of Indigenous enslavement in New England
Brown University history professor Mack Scott grew up Indigenous in Rhode Island. He moved to the Narragansett reservation in Charlestown in middle school, where he was steeped in his culture. But prior to that he lived in Providence, where he said this identity was less present in his own life.
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