Growing up, Dominique Williams visited her grandmother every weekend.

And on each trip, she was greeted by a piece of her past, a name stitched in fabric, filled with centuries of legacy and mystery.

“She had this beautiful quilt draped on her couch that says ‘St. David’s Indians’ on it,” she recalls.

Williams lives in Bermuda – and her grandmother’s house was situated at the eastern tip of the archipelago on a secluded island called St. David’s.

Residents included fishermen, farmers and boat builders. And for centuries, they faced discrimination.

“We looked different, we sounded different,” Williams says. “People called St. David’s Islanders, ‘oh you poor, dirty Mohawks over there.’”

“That’s why a lot of people in St. David’s thought that they were Mohawk people,” she says.

The truth was more complicated.

It’s part of a hidden history of Native American enslavement – a surprising and overlooked story in the narrative of early America.

As colonial powers took over Native land in the 1600s, white settlers were also enslaving Native people. Some worked in New England. Others were sold overseas. And some, like Williams’ ancestors, were kidnapped and shipped to an isolated tropical island.

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