History Seminar

Abstract: This talk explores the double-edged nature of federal trusteeship -- a legal framework that served as both a powerful tool of the United States' settler empire and a standard to which Native people held the federal government to account. Shortly after the United States' founding, the framers of its Indian policy decided to pay for Native land cessions in the form of annual payments and trust funds. What followed was a system of fiduciary colonialism, in which the federal government gained administrative control over Native wealth in order to further dispossess Native peoples and finance the very infrastructure -- canals, banks, and railroads -- that facilitated westward expansion. In short, if land was the "why" of U.S. settler colonialism, money was the "how." Yet, Indigenous leaders were not passive subjects of this system; they strategically navigated these financial ties to safeguard their nations' futures and insisted on trusteeship as a sacred, reciprocal obligation. Through stories of treaty negotiations, bond market crashes, and the crisis of the Civil War, this presentation reveals how the management of Native money became a central site of both imperial dispossession and Indigenous persistence.