Seeing Red

Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America

Michael John Witgen

• Publisher: Omohundro Institute and UNC Press
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781469664859
• Topic: Scienze sociali
• Subtopic: Studi su nativi americani

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.

CHAPTER 1

A Nation of Settlers

On December 22, 1804, a delegation of Native leaders from the lower Missouri River region arrived in Washington D.C. Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, traveling into the country of the Louisiana Purchase, sent these men east to meet with Thomas Jefferson, the president of the United States. A significant part of the mission of the Corps of Discovery expedition would be diplomatic—not so much discovering an empty wilderness as introducing the Republic to the Indigenous nations of western North America. The United States purchased an enormous territory from the French Empire, approximately 828,000 square miles, stretching from the Mississippi River to the Missouri River and encompassing land that would eventually become all or parts of the states of Arkansas, Missouri, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, North Dakota, South Dakota, Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado. The man behind this land grab knew full well that the country he had just acquired was occupied and owned by dozens of Native American nations. Jefferson instructed Lewis and Clark, as part of their mission, to send “a few of their influential chiefs,” whenever distance was practical, to visit the nation’s capital and meet the president of the United States. On New Year’s Day 1804, President Jefferson received “the Chiefs of the Osages, Missouris, Kanzas, Ottos, Panis, Ayowas, and Sioux” nations from the southern and central Great Plains at the White House.¹

Jefferson hoped to impress these Native leaders from the West with the modernity and the power of the United States. Americans imagined their relationship with Native allies in terms of kinship, following the diplomatic protocol first developed by the French. The chief executive of the United States, like the colonial regimes of France and Great Britain, assumed the role of a father presiding over a family of Native children. From the perspective of the colonial power, assuming the status of a parent and a patriarch made sense given the assumptions about its own political and cultural superiority.² Some Native nations resisted the implied subordination of assuming the role of a child and asserted their status as brothers, equal partners in the alliance. Many Native nations, however, managed their relationship with colonial regimes by accepting their status as children and then using that role to push the foreign power to act as a provider of trade goods and resources or as a political intermediary. Regardless of the specific tactic, negotiating the relationship between Native nations and colonial powers was a constant struggle over the degree of obligation and kinds of responsibility the parties owed to one another.³

When Jefferson met with the Native leaders from the lower Missouri, he sought to activate the diplomatic protocol of past empires, establishing himself as their father. He also wanted to make certain they understood that their American father, and the American people, were different from the colonizers they had treated with in the past. “My friends and children,” Jefferson began:

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. The French, the English, the Spaniards, have now agreed with us to retire from all the country which you and we hold between Canada and Mexico, and never more to return to it. And remember the words I now speak to you my children, they are never to return again. We are become as numerous as the leaves on the trees, and, tho’ we do not boast, we do not fear any nation. We are now your fathers; and you shall not lose by the change.

Perhaps the visiting leaders took note of the language of accommodation, the idea expressed by Jefferson that Americans were “united in one family with our red brethren.” Or, more ominously, maybe they noted that Jefferson claimed a Native or Indigenous identity for the United States—“we seem like you to have grown out of this land.” Jefferson’s claim was not necessarily exclusionary. After telling the visiting leaders that Americans wanted to live in peace “as brethren of the same family,” however, he also warned these men, “My children, we are strong, we are numerous as the stars in the heavens, and we are all gun-men.” The United States was a well-armed and fast-growing nation—an implicit threat. This new nation was descended from, but no longer part of, the “old nations … beyond the great water.” The Republic, Jefferson proclaimed, was an American nation, a creation of the New World just like the Indigenous nations visiting the White House. The United States was not a foreign power. It was a nation of settlers claiming an American identity.⁴

The State of Nature

Jefferson’s vision for the Republic and the continent was linked to a particular understanding of the relationship between Native peoples and the land. From his viewpoint, Native peoples could claim a title to their homelands, but they did not own that land as private property. Jefferson assumed a natural law legal perspective, derived from social contract theory, that Natives could claim aboriginal title, or right of occupancy, on their territory, but they did not exercise dominion over it. European powers, and later the United States, made this claim because they asserted that Native peoples lived in a state of nature—that is, they were not part of the civilized world. North America was terra nullius, a legal concept dating back to the Roman Empire designating territory as vacant or unoccupied. Declaring North America terra nullius 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.⁵

As early as the seventeenth century, these ideas about natural law and the state of nature informed Anglo-American understandings of private property. At the beginning of time, all the world was a commons whose resources were available to everyone. When human beings applied their labor to the things derived from this commons, the effort resulted in the creation of private property. A tree could be transformed into a table and chairs, making these items the possessions solely of their creator. A plot of land, similarly, could be transformed into a farm—with built structures, plowed fields and planted crops, and fenced enclosures—and entailed as private property. The cultivation of land thus carved out parcels of this shared landscape as private property, transforming the commons into a built or improved environment, a process accelerated by the creation and circulation of currency. In this increasingly complex setting, men and women were compelled to leave the state of nature and enter into civil society in order to protect their property. This was the social contract articulated most clearly by the English philosopher John Locke. Individuals gave up a portion of their rights, creating a government or sovereign designated to act on behalf of all members of society to ensure the rule of law and to protect the individual right to property and the pursuit thereof. In forming civil society, humanity left the state of nature and entered a world of laws and civil institutions designed to protect their rights in property. Appropriating the resources of the commons, men, particularly male heads of household, created civilization.⁶

With this rhetorical sleight of hand, European powers claimed possession of North America by right of discovery. Existing in a state of nature, the continent was an uncultivated wilderness and therefore an unsettled land. Using the same legal logic, European powers established dominion over their new possessions by converting land and resources into private property that, in turn, became part of colonial settlements, effectively establishing sovereign governments where supposedly none had previously existed. From the European perspective, immigrant communities in North America represented civilization and human progress. Native communities represented the uncivilized; they were a primitive form of humanity that had failed to advance beyond the state of nature. North America was thus imagined as the New World, an uncivilized continent waiting to be settled, and colonial settlers saw themselves as bringing civilization to that world. The people of the United States envisioned the newly formed Republic to be the successor of this colonial project. American citizens and government officials uniformly regarded western expansion as the spreading of civilization across a New World wilderness.⁷

This cultural and legal logic informed Jefferson’s actions and made the Louisiana Purchase possible, at least from the point of view of the United States and France. When the colonists arrived in North America, they found nothing that they recognized as private property. Of course, they encountered Native peoples with their own system of territoriality, distinct land-use practices, and political and social organization. By recognizing only concepts of property, property rights, and political self-determination specific to western Europe, however, they believed that North America remained in a state of nature. Part of this conceptual leap required that the colonizers see Indigenous peoples as less than fully human. They had not evolved socially and politically into a civilized people but instead remained in a state of nature where they lived as primitive social beings, or, in the language of the era of discovery, “savages.” By their very nature, the savage peoples of North America would be subordinate to the civilized peoples of Europe.⁸

The contention that Native peoples were uncivilized and therefore inferior or subordinate to peoples of European descent was thus based, not on empirical evidence, but on an ontology or political imaginary that assumed non-European peoples to be less than fully human while simultaneously presuming that European peoples represented the apex of humanity, civilization. To be of European descent and, more important, to live according to the social, political, and economic mores and traditions of western Europe was to be civilized. This reasoning constituted the ideology that shaped the political formation of the United States. For decades after its creation, the Republic, founded on the idea that all men were created equal, pursued policies predicated on the assumption that Native peoples were uncivilized savages. Their land was terra nullius, empty land, an unsettled wilderness. U.S. government officials, Indian agents, and countless settlers felt compelled to settle this land, to colonize it, to transform Native homelands into American homesteads—in fact, the identity of the United States as a political body depended on it.⁹

Unthinkable History

The United States thus claimed possession of the Northwest Territory following the conclusion of the Revolutionary War. The 1783 Treaty of Paris, which ended the conflict, set the western boundaries of the United States at the east bank of the Mississippi River. This vast Trans-Appalachian region had been previously ceded to Great Britain by France after the Seven Years’ War (1756–1763). All three of these colonial powers discovered that claiming possession of Indian country was not the same as exercising dominion over the territory. Notwithstanding the separate assertions of sovereignty over the territory by France, Britain, and the United States, the country between the Appalachian Mountains and the Mississippi River was occupied and controlled by a multitude of autonomous Indigenous nations. Indeed, the near-constant violence between Natives and settlers in the so-called backcountry west of the thirteen colonies during the Revolutionary War provided ample evidence of this Indigenous presence, belying claims by Anglo settlers that they were moving into an unsettled wilderness.¹⁰

Despite this contentious history, lawmakers in the United States began to formulate plans to settle the region as soon as the Revolutionary War was over. But the United States could not simply choose to ignore the presence of Native peoples or allow settlers to occupy land without government regulation. On September 7, 1783, four days after the Treaty of Paris was signed, George Washington asserted in a letter to James Duane, chairman of the congressional Committee on Indian Affairs: “To suffer a wide extended Country to be run over with Land Jobbers, Speculators, and Monopolisers or even with scatter’d settlers, is, in my opinion, inconsistent with that wisdom and policy which our true interest dictates.” Equally important, he noted, such a disorderly expansion “is pregnant of disputes … with the savages.” Washington feared that rapid and unregulated expansion onto western lands occupied by Native peoples would lead to violent conflict. He understood that “savages” lived in this territory, but he also thought of it as an unsettled part of the public domain of the United States.¹¹

In this same letter, the president informed Duane, who had written seeking policy advice, that Indian affairs would be closely tied to policies governing the expansion of the Republic onto western lands. Washington also warned the chairman that they needed to tell the Indians of the British cession of their lands to the Republic. At the heart of Washington’s answer to Duane was the presumption that the West, Indian country, belonged to the Republic. This belief is not surprising, given that the movement of settlers onto Indian homelands west of the thirteen British colonies south of Canada had provided fuel to the fire that led to the Revolution. Following the Seven Years’ War, the British Empire issued the royal Proclamation of 1763, which pledged to stop the expansion of colonial settlements west of the Appalachian Mountains. Many settlers defied the proclamation, resulting in widespread conflict with Native peoples, most of whom sided with Great Britain during the Revolution. The point was not lost on Washington. “The Indians … could not be restrained from acts of Hostility, but were determined to join their Arms to those of G Britain and to share their fortune,” he noted. “But as we prefer Peace to a state of Warfare,” he wrote, “we perswade ourselves that they are convinced, from experience, of their error in taking up the Hatchet against us, and that their true Interest and safety must now depend on our friendship.” Washington knew that rapid and unregulated expansion would inevitably draw the Republic into wars with Native peoples.¹²

Accordingly, the president imagined a boundary between the United States and the Native nations living in the West, much like the one Britain had sought to create with its 1763 proclamation line. Crucially, he also understood this boundary to be temporary. The United States, he apprised Duane, would “establish a boundary line between them and us beyond which we will endeavor to restrain our People.” He cautioned the congressman that, “in establishing this line, in the first instance, care should be taken neither to yield nor to grasp at too much.” Instead, the United States should “endeavor to impress the Indians with an idea of the generosity of our disposition to accommodate them.” The Republic needed to make clear to its Native neighbors “the necessity we are under, of providing for our Warriors, our Young People who are growing up, and strangers who are coming from other Countries to live among us.” The Indians needed to be told, he concluded, that although they might be dissatisfied with this boundary line, they would nevertheless be compensated for their loss.¹³

Asked about the relationship of the U.S. Republic and Native peoples, Washington responded that this diplomatic issue was necessarily about the connection between U.S. citizens and land. “At first view,” he wrote, “it may seem a little extraneous, when I am called upon to give an opinion upon the terms of a Peace proper to be made with the Indians, that I should go into the formation of New States; but the Settlemt. of the Western Country and making a Peace with the Indians are so analogous that there can be no definition of the one without involving considerations of the other.” From the Revolution to the founding of the Republic, the political leadership of the United States believed the country would expand into the West, settling Indigenous territory and adding new states to the union.¹⁴

Although member...