Jacob Jurss is a Community Faculty member at Metropolitan State University and an adjunct professor of history at the University of St. Thomas. He is a resident of the East Side of St. Paul and received his Ph.D. in history from Michigan State University.
My house rests upon Dakota land. Not historical Dakota territory, not once-upon-a-time Dakota space, but current, present-day Dakota homeland. To acknowledge that is to acknowledge my own role in inheriting the settler colonial legacy of Henry Sibley, Alexander Ramsey, Henry Rice, and the other white American settlers who laid the foundations for the City of Saint Paul through the use of treaties, often signed under duress, with the Dakota.
Martin Case’s The Relentless Business of Treaties explores just how these traders, bureaucrats, and soldiers used the process of treaty making with tribes like the Dakota, Ojibwe, Ho-Chunk, and hundreds of others to reshape American Indian lands into American private property, often enriching themselves in the process. As Case argues,
The idea of land ownership is so deeply seated in American society that at times it can be difficult to imagine land as anything other than real estate. But rather than being property sales, the treaties were in effect moments when the natural world becameprivate property in the United States. (Case, 7)
Case’s study chronicles this process through six concise chapters focusing on “the lives of the signers as the connective tissue,” and explores how treaties were integral to the expansion of the United States. (Case, 12) Using data obtained through his research as part of Indian Land Tenure Foundation Case untangles a web of relationships essential to the making of treaties. Traders who gained the trust of local tribal leaders either through marriage or their long-term relations leveraged those connections to serve as American representatives to treaty councils. Case does well to highlight these links of famous trading families, Indian agents, and career politicians.
The spotlight placed on the relationships between the American signers is perhaps one of the most fascinating aspects of The Relentless Business of Treaties. Case pulls at the threads of this tapestry by lifting the names of signers off of treaties and tracing their connections to one another while adding narrative flesh to the at times bare-bones historical record. Henry Sibley’s father Solomon served as a territorial delegate from Michigan and signed an 1821 treaty with the Ojibwe, Ottawa, and Potawatomi while Sibley’s brother-in-law, Charles C. Trowbridge, served under Michigan Territorial Governor Lewis Cass during Cass’s expedition to find the source of the Mississippi River. Cass signed dozens of treaties often targeting lands rich in mineral resources like lead. He advocated for the removal of tribes west of the Mississippi River and served as the Secretary of War during American Indian removal era of the 1830s. Political connections were important and Case’s research exposes the insular connections between American treaty signers.
Readers interested in Case’s work will benefit from further reading widely other works on the world of the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century fur trade, particularly books on the cultural implications of the fur trade like Susan Sleeper-Smith’s Indian Women and French Men, Lucy Murphy’s Great Lakes Creoles, and Carolyn Podruchny’s Making the Voyageur World. Readers may also be interested in books like Richard White’s The Middle Ground, Bethel Saler’s The Settlers’ Empire, and Anne F. Hyde’s Empires, Nations, and Families that will provide wider macro-level knowledge on the socio-political issues affecting the individual lives around which Case centers his work.
Importantly, especially as our contemporary moment grapples with how to best acknowledge past through monuments, name restorations, and proper land acknowledgments, is Case’s final chapter entitled “Mythmakers”. The American treaty signers not only participated in the physical reshaping of American Indian lands into American private property, but also served as the first writers of that history. The narrative they created, Case argues, “were so one-sided that they diverged from the course of history into myth.” (Case 147) The treaty signers became the founders of the historical societies that housed their memoirs.
Acknowledging whose land you stand on does not reconcile historical injustices or change contemporary issues. But it does represent the smallest of steps towards acknowledging a history that is still too rarely recognized. Without such recognition no productive conversation can begin. The East Side Freedom Library encourages all to join in acknowledging this history by reading and participating in community conversations surrounding and related to American Indian and United States relations.
In addition picking up Martin Case’s The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land Became U.S. Propertyvisitors to the library will also be interested in browsing the library’s growing collection of titles related to American Indian studies including David Treuer’s The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee; Heid Erdrich’s New Poets of Native Nations; Nora Murphy’s White Birch, Red Hawthorn; Colin Calloway’s Pen and Ink Witchcraft, and Waziyatawin’s What Does Justice Look Like?. Be sure also to join the East Side Freedom Library at 7pm on Thursday November 7 in welcoming Martin Case who will offering a talk entitled,“History Revealed: Relentless Business of Treaties.”