The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land Became U.S. Property

The story of "western expansion" is a familiar one: U.S. government agents, through duplicity and force, persuaded Native Americans to sign treaties that gave away their rights to the land. But this framing, argues Martin Case, hides a deeper story. Land cession treaties were essentially the act of supplanting indigenous kinship relationships to the land with a property relationship. And property is the organizing principle upon which U.S. society is based.

U.S. signers represented the relentless interests that drove treaty making: corporate and individual profit, political ambition, and assimilationist assumptions of cultural superiority. The lives of these men illustrate the assumptions inherent in the property system-and the dynamics by which it spread across the continent. In this book, for the first time, Case provides a comprehensive study of the treaty signers, exposing their business ties and multigenerational interrelationships through birth and marriage. Taking Minnesota as a case study, he describes the groups that shaped U.S. treaty making to further their own interests: interpreters, traders, land speculators, bureaucrats, officeholders, missionaries, and mining, timber, and transportation companies.

Odds are, the deed to the land under your home rests on this system.

Author: Martin Case
Publisher: Minnesota Historical Society Press
Published: 06/01/2018
Pages: 224
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 9.00h x 6.00w x 0.69d
ISBN13: 9781681340906
ISBN10: 1681340909
BISAC Categories:
- History | Indigenous Peoples of the Americas
- History | United States | State & Local | Midwest(IA,IL,IN,KS,MI,MN,MO