Vested Interests
Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
About this book
How a system of colonial trusteeship converted Native wealth into settler capital
From the earliest days of its founding, the United States set its sights on Native territory. Amid better-known “Indian wars,” the federal government quietly built an empire by treaty, offering payments to Native peoples for their land. Routinely inadequate, these payments were nonetheless pivotal because federal officials chose not to deliver them as a lump sum. Instead, the government kept the bulk of payments owed to Native nations under its own control as a trustee, and made access to future installments contingent on Native compliance. In Vested Interests, Emilie Connolly describes how a system of “fiduciary colonialism” seized a continent from its original inhabitants—and, ironically, furnished Native peoples with financial resources that sustained their nations.
Connolly documents two centuries of dispossession in the guise of fiduciary benevolence. Acting as both dispossessor and trustee, the federal government invested Native wealth in state bonds that financed banks, canals, and other infrastructural projects that enabled the country to expand further westward. Meanwhile, Native peoples protected the money they did receive for future generations, investing it in their own institutions and mounting legal challenges to hold their trustees accountable. Still, federal trusteeship placed tight constraints on Native economies with the aim of containing Native power, forcing nations to endure through sheer resilience and ingenuity. By chronicling the long history of Native land dispossession through financial paternalism, Vested Interests reveals the unequal dividends of colonialism in the United States.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright
- Dedication
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Table
- Acknowledgments
- Map
- Introduction
- Chapter 1. Strategies of Succession
- Chapter 2. Inheriting the Earth
- Chapter 3. Banking on Removal
- Chapter 4. Money Flows
- Chapter 5. American Insecurities
- Chapter 6. Unsettled Claims
- Chapter 7. The Fall and Rise of Fiduciary Colonialism
- Epilogue: The Past and Future of Trusteeship
- Abbreviations
- Notes
- Index