The 12-minute film is part of the Teaching Hard History project, an effort launched by Teaching Tolerance in 2018 to improve classroom lessons about the history of slavery in the U.S. It offers a critical contribution to the unfolding conversation about what young people should learn about American history.
The historians featured in the film explain how the enslavement of Indigenous people preceded and helped shape the system of African enslavement in New England, which came later. “This is our shared history,” historian Andrés Reséndez says in the film. He estimates that between 2.5 and 5 million Indigenous people were enslaved from the time of Columbus to 1900 in the Americas.
