Publishers Weekly
11/15/2021
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. (Jan.)
H-Early-America
An important work that draws together multiple threads that have all too often remained stubbornly disparate in the field of early American history. Witgen's "political economy of plunder" model achieves something simultaneously noteworthy and quite difficult. . . . Witgen makes the unthinkable imaginable, and even tangible, to his audience.
Civil War Book Review
An important analysis of Indigenous resistance to U.S. colonialism in the lands that would become Michigan and Wisconsin during the first half of the nineteenth century.
Early American Literature
A critical story of survivance. . . . This book joins a growing body of literature by Indigenous scholars and others working to rightly account for the Indigenous history of North America.
From the Publisher
A searing account. . . . [Witgen's] incisive and deeply researched study lays bare the mechanisms of this historical land grab."—Publishers Weekly
An important analysis of Indigenous resistance to U.S. colonialism in the lands that would become Michigan and Wisconsin during the first half of the nineteenth century."—Civil War Book Review
An important work that draws together multiple threads that have all too often remained stubbornly disparate in the field of early American history. Witgen's "political economy of plunder" model achieves something simultaneously noteworthy and quite difficult. . . . Witgen makes the unthinkable imaginable, and even tangible, to his audience."—H-Early-America
A critical story of survivance. . . . This book joins a growing body of literature by Indigenous scholars and others working to rightly account for the Indigenous history of North America."—Early American Literature
