Stolen Relations is currently accepting application for volunteer researchers!

Linford Fisher

Volunteers primarily examine historical documents and/or enter information into the database. We greatly appreciate those generous enough to spend time on this invaluable work. Volunteer researchers should be detail-oriented and good communicators. We also expect volunteers to thoughtfully and humbly engage with the difficult legacy of Indigenous enslavement as part of white supremacist settler colonial […]

Behind the Scenes of Stolen Relations: Highlighting the Development Team

Laurie Tamayo

Whether it’s scrolling through our website’s intricately placed historical maps and photographs, learning more through the simple act of clicking a site subheading, or navigating through the archival database— our users owe it all to the Stolen Relations development team. Their work is the glue that holds the project together, as they design the user […]

Indigenous Freedom Suits and the Problem of the Law

Zoe Zimmermann

Zoe Zimmermann One of the many paradoxes of Indigenous enslavement is that, in many regions, the practice flourished well after it was supposedly abolished. The Stolen Relations research team is constantly astonished at the number of cases we discover after colonies and states passed laws against enslaving Indigenous people and even after the 13th amendment. […]

Our Community’s Perspective: Highlight on Lorén Spears

Laurie Tamayo

Although Stolen Relations started out in 2015 as a mostly academic project, the team members realized over time that it needed input from and collaboration with the Indigenous nations in New England who were most directly affected by settler colonialism. In 2019 the project as a whole took a more intentional turn toward community collaboration […]

Behind the Scenes of Stolen Relations: Highlighting Zoe Zimmermann, Research Assistant Coordinator

Laurie Tamayo

Behind the clean minimalism of a straightforward website and future accessibility of our historical database, a lot goes on. Years of strategic planning, hours of meticulous research, endless development Zooms— they’re all integral parts of the process. Today, we’ll be highlighting the backbone of the project: our research assistants. Throughout the years, we’ve had countless […]

A Brief Background on Indigenous Enslavement

Linford Fisher

The reality that Indigenous people were enslaved in large numbers was new to me when I first learned about it, and it may be to you, too. This is understandable, since it is a topic that is not really taught at all in secondary schools and even many college level classes. Most people know something […]

Welcome and Update!

Linford Fisher

Welcome to the Stolen Relations Blog! In this space, we hope to give more information about the various aspects and activities of this project. For the next three years we will be engaged in growing and developing Stolen Relations in particular ways thanks to a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities (NEH). While […]

A brief introduction and update (2017)

Linford Fisher

A short intro and update.