Film Screening: Traces of the Trade

In 2008, filmmaker Katrina Browne made a stunning discovery: her New England ancestors, the DeWolf family of Bristol, Rhode Island, were the largest slave-trading dynasty in American history. Traces of the Trade: A Story from the Deep North follows Browne and nine of her cousins as they retrace the Triangle Trade — from Rhode Island to the slave forts of Ghana to the ruins of a family plantation in Cuba — and return home to wrestle with what they found.

The film upends a familiar American myth: that slavery was a Southern institution. In fact, Rhode Island held the largest share of the slave trade of any state, and the network of banks, insurers, textile mills, and rum distilleries that profited from enslaved labor stretched across the North for generations. Over fifty years, the DeWolf family alone transported more than ten thousand enslaved Africans across the Middle Passage.

But Traces of the Trade is not only a history lesson. It is a deeply personal reckoning — with inherited privilege, with complicity, and with the question every generation must answer: What do we do now?

The New York Times called it “a far-reaching personal documentary examination of the slave trade… The implications of the film are devastating.”

This screening is offered in preparation for The Dean’s Hour on Sunday, April 26, when Dain and Constance Perry — facilitators who have led hundreds of screenings and conversations around the film — will join Dean Katz for a live discussion.

Free and open to all.

Produced and directed by Katrina Browne. Co-Directors: Alla Kovgan, Jude Ray.

This program is made possible with support from the Episcopal Health Foundation.