Creating content for Stolen Relations in the college classroom

Linford Fisher

One of the many joys of the Stolen Relations project is that it has provided the opportunity to involve my students here at Brown in content creation for the website. This is something that any humanities professor could do, by the way, so let me share a bit about that process in case this interests you as well.

Greetings from Research Assistants

Linford Fisher

In anticipation of our public launch in May 2025, we asked some RAs to record a short video as a way of recognizing them and their valuable work. Not everyone was able to submit a video, but we compiled a short presentation of their greetings.

Stolen Relations Launch Symposium: summary, pictures, and videos

Linford Fisher

On May 10, 2025, the Stolen Relations project went live! To mark the event, the whole team held a public day-long symposium hosted at Brown University that featured short presentations from many of our tribal representatives and core team members on various aspects of the project.

Stolen Relations Launch Symposium, May 10, 2025

Linford Fisher

The Stolen Relations project will be going live on May 10, 2025! We have planned day-long symposium to hear from our tribal representatives, Brown team members, tribal collaborators, members of the Academic Advisory Board, and others.

Stolen Relations is Currently Accepting Applications 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Volunteers primarily examine historical documents and/or enter information into the database.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

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. Slaveholders used […]

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 […]