Fisher said Stolen Relations has grown exponentially since he first conceived of it 10 years ago, thanks to close collaboration with a dozen tribal leaders across the Northeast, staff at Brown University Library’s Center for Digital Scholarship, graduate and undergraduate research assistants and high school-age volunteers hailing from all corners of the U.S. 

Center for Digital Scholarship Director Ashley Champagne and her colleagues have been hard at work on Stolen Relations since 2016, leading the creation of the database and working with a subcommittee of tribal partners to help inform design decisions. 

“The technology behind a project like Stolen Relations cannot be separated from its research and community-driven work,” Champagne said. “The technology shaped the project as much as the project shaped the technology.”

Fisher said forging close partnerships with people who brought a diverse set of experiences and perspectives to the project helped add context to Stolen Relations’ records, most of which were written by European and American colonizers. It also enriched the website with present-day perspectives from Native Americans.

“For Native people, the painful past is still part of their present,” Fisher said. “It was important that this website communicate their present-day ‘survivance’ — a term that combines survival and resistance. We’ve commissioned artwork and music that elevates Indigenous perspectives to illustrate that they’re still here, actively shaping their futures.”

A ‘foundational layer’

For Lorén Spears, a Narragansett Tribal Nation citizen and executive director of the Tomaquag Museum in southern Rhode Island, Stolen Relations forms the foundational layer of what will eventually become a full, multidimensional history of the enslavement of Indigenous people in the Americas. In a 2023 video interview featured on the website, Spears said she imagines Stolen Relations’ raw data will yield landmark research, bestselling books, conversation-starting art and enhanced school curricula that will uncover yet more stories

“Stolen Relations will help us delve in and continue to tell those stories,” Spears said. “You see the newspaper article about John, the boy who was enslaved, but you don’t [yet] see who their parents are, who their grandparents are. You don’t see what community they come from. [But] there’s going to come a time when some of their stories are going to be recovered… that could be a mother’s journal; that could be someone else in the household… it’s going to take some time.”

Fisher agreed that the project’s records likely represent a small fraction of the information that’s out there, waiting to be resurfaced. He believes many more than 2.5 million Indigenous people in the Americas were forced from their homelands into servitude. But compared to the history of African chattel slavery, the proof is more challenging to uncover. Indigenous people who were sent abroad weren’t often listed on ship manifests, as enslaved African people were. They were also left off census records. Perhaps most confoundingly, they were often mistaken for or recorded as people of African descent: At least half of the soldiers in the Continental Army’s famous “Black Regiment” of Rhode Island were actually Indigenous, according to Fisher.

“Calling attention to these historical erasures that allowed the U.S. to become a global superpower — from my perspective, that’s the most patriotic thing I can do,” Fisher said. “I love our country, and I’m trying to be honest about its past. Even if we can’t undo the past, we can do a better job of recognizing the sovereignty of the descendants of those who originally stewarded this land.”

A May 10 symposium at Brown will celebrate the launch of Stolen Relations and feature conversations with Indigenous leaders, scholars of history and culture, and many of the people who helped bring the research project to life. The event takes place from 9:30 a.m. to 5 p.m. at the Petteruti Lounge inside Stephen Robert ’62 Campus Center at 75 Waterman St. in Providence. Registration is encouraged.