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

Indians 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 1900.

2.5 to 5 million people.

This week on Hidden Brain, we explore this hidden history, and the psychological reasons

it's remained submerged for so long.

Andres Resendez is a history professor at the University of California Davis.

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