Seeing Red
Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
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- $18.99
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- $18.99
Publisher Description
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and U.S. development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves. Outnumbering white settlers well into the nineteenth century, they leveraged their political savvy to advance a dual citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal members to lay claim to a place in U.S. civil society. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of U.S. expansion.
Deeply researched and passionately written, Seeing Red will command attention from readers who are invested in the enduring issues of equality, equity, and national belonging at its core.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Historian Witgen, a member of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, examines in this searing account the "massive transfer of wealth from Native peoples to white American settlers" that occurred in the Northwest Territory in the 19th century. Though this transfer occurred without significant military conflict, Witgen argues that the "involuntary or coercive process" of treaty-making "created a political economy of plunder" that benefited white settlers, traders, and territorial officials while divesting Native nations, particularly the Anishinaabeg, of their land. White proponents of the treaties, including Michigan governor and U.S. secretary of war Lewis Cass, argued that Indigenous people weren't entitled to keep their land because they hadn't converted it into private property. While many Anishinaabeg were able to avoid forced removal to Indian Territory, cash payments for the territory they ceded often ended up in the hands of merchants and other "white interlocutors" who had married Native women. Noting the irony that Michigan's Osceola County was named for a Seminole warrior who resisted U.S. expansion into Florida, Witgen explains how "including the noble dead into the story of America's creation... obfuscated the exclusion of living Indians from the social contract that the Republic extended to white citizen-settlers." Though repetitive at times, Witgen's incisive and deeply researched study lays bare the mechanisms of this historical land grab. Illus.
