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

At the heart of Seeing Red is the massive land transfer from the Anishinaabeg to the United States as the newly independent country sought to transform Indigenous homelands into American homesteads. Focusing on the sixty years after US independence in 1783, Michael Witgen—himself an Anishinaabe scholar—examines the legal and diplomatic mechanisms that US officials used to dispossess Indigenous peoples living in today's states of Michigan and Wisconsin from their homelands. Whereas the United States expelled by force most Indigenous peoples living between the Appalachians and the Mississippi River through its infamous Indian Removal policy, Witgen asserts that US officials dealing with the Anishinaabeg implemented a different approach, which he calls a “political economy of plunder.” With this new concept, Witgen makes an important contribution to our understanding of Indigenous dispossession in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, demonstrating that, in the Upper Great Lakes, the US empire acted less as the settler empire it sought to be than as a traditional exogenous colonizer exploiting Native peoples and their resources.The opening chapter, “A Nation of Settlers,” explores the legal mechanisms that the United States devised to colonize the Northwest Territory (today's states of Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin) following the American Revolution. The 1787 Northwest Ordinance was the key piece of legislation organizing the territory's transition into states and regulating the sale of land from the public domain to US settlers. As Witgen explains, the provisions of the Northwest Ordinance were grounded in a political fantasy of the Northwest as empty land devoid of Indigenous presence. Even though US officials and settlers knew that Indigenous peoples still lived on these unceded lands, they nonetheless believed that Indigenous peoples could claim title to the land but did not properly own it because, unlike Euro-Americans, they lived in an alleged state of nature without private property and farms. For the US settler state, the idea of Indigenous self-determination on Indigenous land was simply unthinkable. Instead, US westward expansion demanded the elimination of Indigenous peoples from the land, through either removal or assimilation.Moving chronologically, the four other chapters illuminate how, time and again, the United States failed to implement its settler vision in the Michigan Territory, resorting, instead, to the political economy of plunder. Unlike the southern part of the Northwest Territory (Ohio, Indiana, and Illinois) that saw a rapid settler invasion of Indigenous homelands after 1783, the Michigan Territory long remained dominated by the fur trade, which required the ongoing presence of Anishinaabe families hunting and processing the furs. Into the 1830s, the Anishinaabeg dominated the demography in most areas of the Michigan Territory. Individual stories, such as the experience of anglophone Protestant missionary William Boutwell, who felt like an outsider in an Anishinaabe-speaking world dominated by kinship ties rather than private property, convincingly illustrate how elusive US ambitions to settler sovereignty over the region were. In this context, US officials relied on traders and Indian agents with kinship ties to the Anishinaabeg to bring the latter to the treaty table and fraudulently negotiate land cessions, starting with the 1819 Treaty of Saginaw. Understanding that the fur trade was in decline, traders intended to profit from the treaties by claiming much of the cash that the United States paid the Anishinaabeg for their lands as debt and by providing the trade goods promised in various treaties. Contrary to the familiar focus on removal, Witgen illuminates how plundering annuities paid to the Anishinaabeg for decades was what benefited traders the most in the absence of a large white settler population. While impoverished and reduced to a fraction of their former territory, the Anishinaabeg evaded removal, forcing the United States “to see itself as a nation of settlers living on stolen land” (337).A short review cannot do justice to Witgen's fine analysis or the multiple subarguments he develops. Witgen is to be commended for emphasizing the ongoing legacy of the economy of plunder into the twenty-first century and calling for a reckoning with the United States' original sin of Indigenous land theft, not just the sin of enslavement. In fact, Witgen masterfully illustrates the intricacy of settler colonialism and anti-Black racism in the early nineteenth century by analyzing how the states carved from the Northwest Territory were premised not only on Natives' dispossession and elimination but also on the exclusion of free Black people through a series of black codes. Seeing Red significantly contributes to our understanding of the white supremacist history of the United States and its legacy.