Native Dispossession in the United States, ca. 1783-2020

Between the American Revolution and the New Deal, the United States expanded across a continent at the expense of hundreds of Native American nations. Independent Indigenous polities controlled most of the territory within US boundaries in 1783. Less than 150 years later, when further incursions stopped, less than 2% of the United States remained under Indigenous control. Accompanying the takeover were myriad efforts to dismantle Native American cultures—“to kill the Indian in him, and save the man,” as the architect of the federal boarding school system put it in 1892. As Native populations plummeted and became impoverished, the United States parceled out the expropriated lands to settlers, states, and corporations, redistributing a bounty of natural resources that propelled US development. Although Native populations would recover in the twentieth century, their communities would continue to lag behind in life expectancy, educational attainment, and economic opportunity as they lobbied for the return of land or compensation for losses. Recent scholarship has been grappling with this history, contributing to a growing sense that the United States is a settler colonial power masked as a postcolonial nation. The Paper will examine the key claims in this emerging body of work and consider its evidentiary basis.
After an introductory meeting focused on background reading and general themes, the seminars will move forward chronologically from the American Revolution to the present, covering a series of milestone topics charting dispossession and its consequences. As we move past the Indian New Deal in Lent Term, we will consider a series of legal and political efforts to confront and overcome legacies of dispossession.
Major themes will include the development of federal policies toward Indians, territorial development, and land distribution; programs promoting assimilation; state and settler violence, including questions of ethnic cleansing and genocide; property-making and sovereignty; factor endowments and resource redistribution; the making of the settler colonial present; and protest, reconciliation and redress. Throughout we will consider how Indigenous peoples have critiqued and resisted US colonialism

General Reading:
Blackhawk, Ned. The Rediscovery of American: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University, 2023).
Carlos, Ann M., Donna L. Feir, and Angela Redish. “Indigenous Nations and the Development of the U.S. Economy: Land, Resources, and Dispossession.” The Journal of Economic History 82, no. 2 (2022): 516–55.
Frymer, Paul. Building an American Empire: The Era of Territorial and Political Expansion. Princeton University Press, 2017.
Holden, Vannessa M. and Michael John Witgen, eds. “Forum: The End of Early America,” William and Mary Quarterly 81, no. 1 (Jan. 2024): 37-42; 93-134 [select contributions by Holden and Witgen; Sweet; Lowery and Snyder; Witgen; Parmenter].
Jacobs, Margaret D. After One Hundred Winters: In Search of Reconciliation on America’s Stolen Lands (Princeton University, 2021).
Park, K-Sue. “The History Wars and Property Law: Conquest and Slavery as Foundation to the Field.” The Yale Law Journal 13, no. 4 (2022): 1062-1153.
Prucha, Francis Paul. The Great Father: The United States Government and the American Indians (1984), Volume I and II (University of Nebraska, 1984).
Wolfe, Patrick. “After the Frontier: Separation and Absorption in U.S. Indian Policy,” Settler Colonial Studies 1, no. 1 (2011).