Oh man, yeah, I don’t think I can watch that. I’m okay to read nonfiction because it lets me maintain a degree of critical distance, but I have a really hard time with fictional representations or movies of any kind. I think with nonfiction I can avoid imaginatively identifying with anyone involved, but that’s harder with movies and novels.

If you don’t want to read the whole thing RIGHT NOW, which is legit because it’s both long and tragic, the Slate review/article about the book is a pretty good overview. http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/cover_story/2016/01/native_american_slavery_historians_uncover_a_chilling_chapter_in_u_s_history.html

I doubt they even needed to get their inspiration from somewhere, honestly. It seems like everywhere I read about oppression, the people in power use the same tired old tactics. :/

Nonfiction November, oh, that’s such a good idea! I’ll have to keep it in mind when November rolls around as a possible recommendation.

Well, if it makes you feel better, I don’t think most white Americans know that American Indians were made slaves either. From what Resendez said in his introduction, this is a topic that hasn’t gotten a lot of scholarly attention by comparison with the African slave trade, and it’s definitely nothing we learned in school.

Yes! Resendez makes the case that a lot of the practices like the one in your middle school book were effectively slavery because the Indians didn’t want to be doing this work and were not legally permitted to leave. It’s just a really eye-opening book.

Yay! I hope you’re able to get a copy and read it. I almost mentioned it to you on twitter the other day when you were talking about reading more books by indigenous people, but since I wasn’t sure if the author himself was an indigenous person, I wasn’t sure it qualified. But it’s super good, and well worth a read.

Honestly, I don’t think my high school teachers knew. It sounds like this just hasn’t been studied nearly as much and isn’t a part of the cultural conversation, partly because the people practicing it concealed it behind other names. But yeah, I seriously think we need to be learning about this in schools.