“Sah Quah"

More than two decades after the passage of the Thirteenth Amendment, a Haida man named Sah Quah entered a United States courtroom in Sitka. Sah Quah’s English was limited, but it would be impossible to ignore the gravity of his allegations: that he had been sold into slavery as a child, trafficked up a Northwest Coast slave-trading network, and was currently enslaved to a Tlingit man in Sitka. Sah Quah had come to the American court, he said, to seek “papers” freeing him from his bonds.