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A LEGACY OF PLUNDER  
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Francisco Cantú
June 2, 2024
The New York Review
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_ In its reexamination of entrenched narratives about the
expropriation of Native land, Michael Witgen’s work is changing how
Native people are situated in the arc of North American history. _

An advertisement for the sale of Indian land by the US Department of
the Interior, 1911. The man pictured is Padani-Kokipa-Sni of the
Yankton Indian Tribe, DeLancey Gill/Library of Congress

 

Growing up in the southwestern United States, I often heard stories
from my stepfather about people who enriched themselves by stealing
from Natives. These were not tales from the past, but ongoing stories
taking place on the reservation lands where he was employed and later
lived. My stepfather spent much of his career working to preserve land
and water rights for tribes and their members, and he spoke to me
frequently of the businesspeople, corporations, lawyers, and federal
and tribal officials who routinely tried to defraud Native people.
Though my stepfather is white, he grew up with extended family who
were enrolled members of western tribes, and he became invested from
an early age in understanding the bureaucratic machinations that
denied people land and money that was rightfully theirs. As a boy I
imagined the predatory individuals and entities he described as simple
villains, and even as I grew older and began to comprehend the shape
and design of their trickery, they remained faceless, the means of
their duplicity hidden and incomprehensible.

The institutional lineage of indigenous dispossession is at the center
of Michael John Witgen’s _Seeing Red_,_ _which was a finalist for
last year’s Pulitzer Prize in history. It is neither a popular
history nor a polemic, offering instead a deeply researched look at
the ideological and legal foundations of the systems that have
despoiled Native nations. Witgen’s subtitle, “Indigenous Land,
American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North
America,” reveals the scope of his history, which examines the ways,
both sweeping and quotidian, that early American settlers, traders,
diplomats, and politicians stole and expropriated land. The Native
people in Witgen’s account, however, are recognized not for their
victimhood, but for their adeptness at reasserting their rights,
dignity, and sovereignty against the supposedly insurmountable power
of the state.

Witgen’s first book, _An Infinity of Nations: How the Native New
World Shaped Early North America_ (2011), told the history of the
first encounters between Natives and white explorers in the Great
Lakes region. Witgen emphasizes how the Native people of this region
and beyond, contrary to popular mythology, remained unconquered and
unassimilated well into the nineteenth century, living in a “Native
New World” that endured and thrived for hundreds of years after
European contact. Through his reexamination of entrenched narratives,
Witgen has joined a flourishing group of Native writers, including
Nick Estes, David Treuer, Jacqueline Keeler, and Leanne Betasamosake
Simpson, whose work is helping to change how Native people are
situated in the arc of North American history.

In _Seeing Red_ Witgen maintains his attention on the Great Lakes
but shifts his focus to the nascent days of Manifest Destiny, when the
region was imagined as part of a northwestern frontier preordained to
be incorporated into a rapidly expanding nation. Witgen writes about
this region for a reason: he is a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of
Lake Superior Ojibwe, whose modern-day reservation is located in the
far north of Wisconsin. The Red Cliff Band forms part of the Great
Lakes people known as the Anishinaabe, whose ancestral homelands span
both sides of what is today the US–Canada border, including swaths
of Quebec, Ontario, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, encompassing
peoples often referred to as the Odawa, Chippewa, Potawatomi, or
Algonquian. With the arrival of Europeans this vast area became an
early American borderland where Native life converged with the
interests of various colonial powers, newly formed governments, and a
shifting array of immigrant and American-born settlers.

The colonists who arrived in North America understood the indigenous
people they encountered as “a primitive form of humanity that had
failed to advance beyond the state of nature,” writes Witgen,
inhabitants of “an uncivilized continent waiting to be settled.”
This notion, inherited from the Catholic Church’s fifteenth-century
“Doctrine of Discovery,” meant that even as the newly independent
United States forged a new government that supposedly rejected
colonialism, it held fast to the principle that non-Christian Natives
could not truly possess their land. The expansion of an American
settler state was further supported by the prevailing belief that
Natives were destined to diminish before an inevitable tide of white
settlers. “The construct of the vanishing Indian,” Witgen writes,
“was a central trope of the ideology that imagined North America as
the New World and was meant to rationalize what US citizens would now
recognize as ethnic cleansing.”

As the United States entered the nineteenth century and sought to
dominate the continent, its gaze became increasingly fixed on its
periphery. The terrain beyond its newly established boundaries was
understood to be _terra nullius_, land owned by no one. That phrase
evoked the romance of exploration while also functioning as a legal
term of enormous consequence: “Declaring North America terra
nullius,” Witgen writes, “implied that the land had never been
properly cultivated or truly settled. It remained, in effect, in a
state of nature, the condition in which it existed at the beginning of
time.” Under this principle, inherited from the same European laws
that supported the establishment of the original thirteen colonies,
such land constituted an expansive commons that could be
converted—through settlement, cultivation, and other forms of
development—into private property owned by the individuals who
“improved” it.

Early presidents like Thomas Jefferson liked to imagine the United
States as different from the foreign powers it had fought against and
replaced. After sending the newly formed Corps of Discovery west into
the Louisiana Territory, Jefferson recounted his philosophy to Native
leaders who traveled to meet him:

We are descended from the old nations which live beyond the great
water but we and our forefathers have been so long here that we seem
like you to have grown out of this land: we consider ourselves no
longer as of the old nations beyond the great water, but as united in
one family with our red brethren here.

Jefferson was quick to clarify that the Republic’s vision of family
relations was subject to unambiguous hierarchy: “We are now your
fathers,” he proclaimed, “and you shall not lose by the change.”

Jeffersonian Indian policy flowed naturally from the idea of Natives
as children; living in an uncivilized state of nature, they could not
be legally entitled to anything that belonged foremost to their
civilized parents. Americans in the new republic had always understood
their national boundaries to be temporary, and in short order the US
established a system to designate the lands at its periphery as
territories that would be gradually incorporated into new states as
their white populations grew. The first of these was the Northwest
Territory, founded in 1787 and made up of the land between the
southern shore of the Great Lakes, the Upper Mississippi, and the Ohio
River. While removing indigenous people to make way for settlement
became an immediate priority of territorial governments elsewhere on
the frontier, here, Witgen writes, “this process proved to be most
lucrative, not when Native peoples were eliminated, but when they
remained in place as part of an ongoing colonial project.”

Something that set the Northwest Territory apart from the
industry-fueled North or the plantation-powered South was the presence
of the fur trade, which remained a dominant economic force in the
region for around two hundred years. Here indigenous people’s
intimate knowledge of the geography and their unmatched skill in
hunting and trapping beaver, fox, otter, mink, muskrat, and marten
were essential to meeting demand in eastern and European fur markets,
which meant less pressure for removal. Thus Natives continued to
outnumber white settlers in the Northwest Territory well into the
nineteenth century, giving them a degree of political and social power
seldom acknowledged in the annals of Western expansion.

Witgen often pauses his scholarly account to capture the rhythms of
Anishinaabe life, describing the movement of people through boreal
forests and across treeless expanses of plains and prairies. He
describes, too, the ebb and flow of harsh winters and bountiful
summers, the seasonal gatherings to hunt and harvest and make sugar
from maple, and the bustling villages and outposts connected by
networks of alliance, marriage, gift-giving, and trade. The freedom
the Anishinaabe maintained in these lands, Witgen asserts, “forced
the United States to negotiate place and belonging with the Indigenous
inhabitants of a land they wanted to imagine as an empty
wilderness.”

Gradually, however, the fur trade in the Northwest began to wane, and
soon new infrastructure like the Erie Canal, completed in 1825,
facilitated travel to the region and made the removal of lumber and
other resources more profitable. This opened the door to what Witgen
calls “the political economy of plunder—the extraction of wealth
from colonized Indigenous subject nations through the treaty
process.” These deals were usually engineered by government
negotiators to extinguish the limited rights Natives had to their
ancestral lands. Under US law, Natives were not recognized as outright
owners of their land, but they could claim a lesser legal “title”
established through occupancy. Under these treaties, Witgen writes,

Native peoples ceded title to their lands to the federal government,
which then converted this territory into the public domain of the
United States. The federal government, acting as the sole proprietor
over this land base, made it available for purchase as private
property to settlers. These settlers were almost exclusively white,
and they took possession of this land at a subsidized price in
exchange for settling Native homelands and making them part of the US
Republic.

The tribal land ceded during the treaty-making process was sold off
not only to individual settlers who converted parcels into private
homes, farms, and ranches, but to agents of industry who reaped
enormous profits from the terrain through logging, fishing, mining,
and transportation. Even as it became clear that everyone except the
Natives was earning money from the cession of their territory, US
agents continued to present these measly deals as tribes’ “only
chance for compensation,” turning the signing of these treaties,
Witgen argues, into “an involuntary or coercive process.”

Most of these treaties also included agreements by the government to
pay cash annuities and supply yearly provisions to the tribes. These
forms of compensation were usually stipulated to sunset after several
decades, in line with the idea of the “vanishing Native.” Though
the payouts were supposedly “designated for Native peoples,”
Witgen explains how they “mostly wound up in the hands of traders,
territorial officials, and local merchants.” In one memorable
passage, he describes how large portions of the benefits agreed upon
in the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters were diverted into the pockets of
white settlers. During negotiations, Wisconsin governor Henry Dodge
ultimately agreed to pay annuities of $30,500 for twenty years.
However, this was subdivided into a mere $9,500 in actual cash
payments to the tribe, with $19,000 coming in the form of trade goods
and another $2,000 as yearly provisions to be supplied by the
region’s white traders—thus guaranteeing them two decades’ worth
of annual pay from the government.

Of the cash designated to flow directly to the tribes, more than a
third was earmarked by the government to pay off debts supposedly owed
to white traders. Two of the region’s most prominent merchants
received payments as large as $25,000 and $28,000 from this
arrangement—nearly six years’ worth of the tribe’s cash annuity.
White traders and merchants were also notified in advance of when and
where Natives would receive their annuities, and were even advised
which goods could be most easily sold to them as they emerged from the
government office with cash in hand.

Further muddying the waters was the fact that treaties were rarely
negotiated solely between government agents and tribes and usually
involved a plethora of middlemen. While some were allies, many more
were the same kind of opportunistic criminals who would a century
later perpetrate the Reign of Terror against the Osage (as depicted in
David Grann’s and Martin Scorsese’s _Killers of the Flower
Moon_), or the same kind of modern-day thieves and schemers I heard
about from my stepfather growing up. “These white interlocutors,”
Witgen writes, “who most often had Native wives and mixed-race
children, facilitated the negotiation of treaties by acting as
interpreters, counselors, and debt collectors to the leadership of
Indigenous nations.” The services of these men rarely came free, and
they usually laid claim to some portion of the negotiated settlements,
payouts, and even, in some cases, land grants.

During treaty negotiations special benefits and privileges were often
arranged for those known in that era as “half-breeds”—the
children of intermarried white and indigenous parents. The unique
in-betweenness of mixed-race Natives meant that if they spoke English
and were willing to conform to “American” behaviors and customs,
they could often enjoy access to American privileges while benefiting
from the economic compensations available to them as Natives. Witgen
explains:

To make good on these connections and claim their place in the civil
society of the US Republic, the half-breeds of the Northwest would
have to embrace their identity as a civilized people, denying or at
least denigrating their Indigenous identities and selling out their
Indigenous nations as part of the bargain.

At times this bargain backfired: in some negotiations—such as the
1836 Treaty of Washington and the 1837 Treaty of St. Peters—their
mixed identity ended up shutting them out of rights to land that were
reserved exclusively for full-blooded Natives. In these instances,
Witgen writes, “they were Indian enough to be compensated for the
extinction of Native title to their ancestral lands but not Indian
enough to be granted a reserved homeland.” This led certain groups,
such as the “Council of the Half Breeds” of the Chippewa Nation,
to insist upon full incorporation into American society by petitioning
the US for all “the privileges and immunities of free White Citizens
of the United States.”

Among the Anishinaabe and many other Native groups, race and national
identity were largely ambiguous notions, and many refused American
attempts to impose categorizations based on blood, adoption, or
citizenship.

 Much more important for most Natives, Witgen writes, was kinship.
White settlers grew to understand and exploit this, too—many
missionaries and traders, for example, took Native wives with the
expectation that they would serve as domestic laborers, translators,
and interpreters who could also provide access and influence in
matters of tribal decision-making. While marriage allowed many of
these women to be included in American civil society, Witgen is
careful to cite the historian Lucy Eldersveld Murphy, whose work
describes how wedlock “drew Native wives into the US body politic,
subjecting them, their children, and their property to the control of
their husbands and to the new government and its courts.”

As _Seeing Red_ nears its end the Anishinaabe seem to be hurtling
toward the grim outcome readers have been conditioned to expect. In
his closing chapters Witgen reveals how government agents sowed
discord among tribal members during treaty negotiations, and he
gestures toward a Native world that had been “disavowed and
dismembered.” Then, on February 6, 1850, President Zachary Taylor
issued a removal order nullifying previously negotiated treaties and
calling for the Anishinaabe “to move onto lands not yet ceded to the
federal government.”

This order severely underestimated the degree to which the Anishinaabe
had ingrained themselves into the local economy of the Great Lakes,
and was quickly met with petitions, protests, and a deluge of letters
and editorials by the area’s prominent white missionaries,
legislators, and journalists. The removal, they declared, was
“uncalled for by any interest of the government or the people of the
United States.” But their concern, Witgen writes, was more economic
than altruistic:

In the last states to be forged out of the Northwest Territory, Native
peoples as well as Native land had become a source of wealth creation
for American settlers. Native peoples were no longer obstacles in the
way of US immigrants as they had been in Ohio, Illinois, and Indiana.
Rather, the presence of Native peoples, stripped of virtually all
their land, denied citizenship in the Republic, and legally deemed
wards of the federal government, represented a source of cash income.

As white citizens of the Wisconsin and Michigan territories petitioned
the government for a reversal of the removal order, Gichi-Bizhiki, the
principal leader of the Lake Superior Ojibwe traveled to Washington to
request an audience with President Millard Fillmore, who had succeeded
Taylor following his unexpected death. As Gichi-Bizhiki made his way
to Washington in the company of his American son-in-law, who
chronicled the trip, he was met with Army officers, Indian agents, and
US marshals who attempted again and again to turn his party back.

Upon arrival in Washington Gichi-Bizhiki was ordered to return home by
none other than the Commissioner of Indian Affairs and the Secretary
of the Interior. However, a chance encounter with a friendly senator
at a Washington hotel finally landed him his long-hoped-for audience,
in which he steadfastly demanded that the US honor its previously
negotiated treaties. President Fillmore ultimately agreed, leading to
the creation of permanent reservations in Wisconsin where several
bands of Lake Superior Chippewa still live to this day.
“Gichi-Bizhiki and the Anishinaabe people throughout the Great Lakes
region refused to vanish,” Witgen writes. Instead they insisted
“that the United States allow them to remain in their homelands and
continually negotiate the terms of their colonization.”

At the conclusion of _Seeing Red_, the downfall of the Anishinaabe
that many readers will have braced for never comes, elucidating
Witgen’s overarching point about the false inevitability of
Indigenous disappearance. Even as he meticulously recounts the
construction of a political mythology that infantilized and diminished
Native peoples—laying bare the inner workings of the policies,
business dealings, and treaty negotiations that perpetuated
ever-increasing forms of dispossession—he also reveals all the ways
tribes of the Northwest Territory subverted and outlasted the engines
of their demise.

In the book’s final pages Witgen brings us into the modern era by
offering a brief account of his grandmother, a direct descendant of
Gichi-Bizhiki whose extended family lived on the very same
reservations Gichi-Bizhiki forced the United States to establish in
the 1850s. Finishing Witgen’s book, I began to wish that the
accounts I heard from my stepfather, about the people and policies
that still pilfer Native wealth and resources, could have more often
been paired with images like these, of indigenous permanence and
ongoing lineages of cunning resistance. But even more, I wish I had
been taught to recognize exactly how the heroes of the stories told
again and again about our past—those quintessentially American
pilgrims and settlers, traders and trappers, governors and
presidents—participated in plundering and expropriating an infinity
of indigenous nations in the creation of our own.

_FRANCISCO CANTÚ is the author of The Line Becomes a River:
Dispatches from the Border. (June 2024)_

_THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS has established itself, in Esquire’s
words, as “the premier literary-intellectual magazine in the English
language.” The New York Review began during the New York
publishing strike of 1963, when its founding editors, Robert Silvers
and Barbara Epstein, and their friends, decided to create a new kind
of magazine—one in which the most interesting and qualified minds of
our time would discuss current books and issues in depth. Just as
importantly, it was determined that the Review should be an
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* Native Americans
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* Indigenous Rights
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* settler colonialism
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* Tribal Lands
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* treaties
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