This is hidden brain.
I'm Shankar Vedantam.
All countries have national myths.
Here in the United States, thanksgiving evokes the warm glow of intercultural contact.
European settlers were struggling to make it.
In the new world, and native american.
Tribes were eager to help.
If we were to think a little more deeply and a little more critically, we might remember other stories from history classes.
These are tales of exclusion and expulsion of native american tribes pushed out from their homelands as settlers colonized the continent.
But there's a third story you might not have heard.
Many Native Americans came to know the settlers not through happy thanksgivings or even through war and colonization, but through slavery.
We say that there have been 12.5 million Africans forcibly transported across the Atlantic as slaves into the new world.
That is a very powerful thing to say.
And I wanted to get a rough sense of how indian slavery compared to that.
So I came up with a figure of 2.5 to 5 million native Americans enslaved throughout the Americas since Columbus.
To people this week on hidden brain, we explore this hidden history and the psychological reasons its remained submerged for so long.
Andres Resendiz is a history professor at the University of California, Davis.
Hes the author of the other the Uncovered Story of Indian Enslavement in America.
Andres, welcome to Hidden Brain.
It is a pleasure to be here.