On January 4, 1775, an enslaved Indigenous man named Jo disappeared from the plantation of Stephen Hazzard in South Kingstown, Rhode Island. Hazzard immediately suspected that Jo had escaped to freedom, and so paid for a “runaway” ad in the Newport Mercury. As described in the ad, Jo was approximately twenty years old and was “part Spanish Indian,” meaning at least one of his parents had been caught up in the Native American slave trade out of the Caribbean (or perhaps out of the Carolinas half a century earlier).

Stories like Jo’s form the core of the Stolen Relations project at Brown University (www.stolenrelations.org). Together, the 6,500 records (and counting) of Indigenous enslavement and unfreedom reveal often overlooked dynamics of settler colonialism. In every single English colony and (after 1776), most American states, enslaved Native Americans labored in households, on ships, and on plantations, right alongside enslaved Africans.

Founded in 2015, this project has been housed at the Center for Digital Scholarship and, starting in 2019, has been collaborating directly with thirteen regional Native nations and communities in order to respectfully recover and interpret the stories contained in various colonial archives and documents.

With vital funding from the Simmons Center, for the past three years we have offered a summer institute for 6-8 tribal members, most of whom were from the New England region. The most recent one was offered in July 2023, and was co-led by Lydia Curliss (Nipmuc and University of Maryland PhD Student) and myself. We had eight participants representing various tribal nations and ages, which created the context for intense conversations about the database project and settler colonialism more generally. The Simmons Center also supports our Research Assistant Coordinator who works with approximately thirty high school, undergraduate, and graduate interns and research assistants each year. With a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities it received in 2022, Stolen Relations plans to go live in 2024.