Thanks to NetGalley and Liveright for the ARC.

Intended to be the definitive history of the enslavement of Indigenous people in the American colonies and the USA, this book is exhaustively researched and impressively presented. In many ways, the act of writing alone feels like preservation of history, given how little time and space is typically devoted to discussing slavery when it comes to mixed race or Indigenous people. Overall, the book accomplishes its goal, though as a white lady I would love to hear the thoughts of an Indigenous American on it.

Fisher is thoughtful about the language he uses to describe the people discussed in his book (he talks about “self-emancipating” rather than “running away,” for example) — there is extensive discussion of word choice in the introduction, which I really appreciated — and that care extends to his discussion of their exploitation and abuse. His book proceeds chronologically, so its first half is the most familiar, at least to people who have studied American history. There’s little revelatory about the discussion of the enslavement of Indigenous people in the colonies and on the east coast, but that doesn’t mean that it doesn’t merit serious examination. It’s also useful to read Fisher’s discussion of the way in which Indigenous identities were often erased in records, thus making it nearly impossible for us to ever really know how many of them and their descendants were forced into slavery.

For me, though, where FIsher’s work really shines is in his discussion of the enslavement and slaughter of Indigenous people in the American west — the fact that the American military was essentially leading slaving raids in the west during the Civil War while fighting to end chattel slavery in the other half of the country is something I’d never known, and it perfectly illustrates the nation’s hypocrisy about the issue of race, particularly when money is involved. Nearly everything in that section of the book was new to me, because I’d never previously considered how the early settlers of California established and worked their vast estates — of course it was with enslaved labor. of course it was! And they were doing it as, in the Compromise of 1850, California was brought into the union with great fanfare as a “free state.”

My complaints about the book are fairly minor. First, its opening third is very repetitive and could have been much tighter. (I assume Fisher is using repetition so that the reader can never forget the link between the murder and enslavement of Indigenous people and the colonial hunger for their land.) Second and more importantly, one of the events Fisher discusses that I know a fair amount about (Bacon’s Rebellion in Virginia) is presented in a way that is, if not dishonest, is incomplete in a way that renders it more useful to his argument. The fact that this happened with one of the very few events in the book that I know well makes me wonder about his presentation of the many I don’t, and a writer losing the trust of his reader is never a good thing.

Anyway, highly recommended in spite of my issues — it’s a long, intense read but worth it, particularly the final 25-30%.