← New Books Network
New Books Network
Emilie Connolly, "Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States" (Princeton UP, 2025)
00:50:09
Loading summary
Transcript46 lines
- [00:00]
A
Hello, everybody.
- [00:01]
B
This is Marshall Po. I'm the founder and editor of the New Books Network. And if you're listening to this, you know that the NBN is the largest academic podcast network in the world. We reach a worldwide audience of 2 million people. You may have a podcast or you may be thinking about starting a podcast. As you probably know, there are challenges basically of two kinds. One is technical. There are things you have to know in order to get your podcast produced and distributed. And the second is, and this is the biggest problem, you need to get an audience. Building an audience in podcasting is the hardest thing to do today. With this in mind, we at the NBM have started a service called NBN Productions. What we do is help you create a podcast, produce your podcast, distribute your podcast, and we host your podcast. Most importantly, what we do is we distribute your podcast to the NBN audience. We've done this many times with many academic podcasts, and we would like to help you. If you would be interested in talking to us about how we can help you with your podcast, please contact us. Just go to the front page of the New Books Network and you will see a link to NBN Productions. Click that, fill out the form, and we can talk. Welcome to the New Books Network.
- [01:07]
C
Hello, and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. Emily Connolly about her book titled Vested Interests, Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States, published by Princeton University Press in 2025. Now, as the title suggests, we're going to be talking about the process. Processes, maybe we'll talk about that, of how the United States federal government took over territory and sovereignty and income. We'll get into that from various Native American tribes that obviously lived in what is now the United States before the United States existed. This is, of course, a massive topic. What this book helps us understand is, I don't know, maybe like a drier, more boring bit of the process. Maybe. But as this history helps us understand, like it might seem boring, it's kind of quiet. It's about treaty documents, about departments and jurisdiction, but it's actually really core and central to what might seem like the shinier elements. Because what we're talking about is kind of who gets to control land, who gets to control income, and that. That's not just a sort of one time, one moment thing, that there's all sorts of processes and policies here to make this a much longer dispossession obviously, as the subtitle suggests, then perhaps we might think in our sort of overgeneralized textbooks a lot of the time. So we clearly have a lot to excavate and investigate here. Emily, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
- [02:43]
A
Oh, thank you so much, Miranda. And thank you for that introduction too, I think. I promise this isn't actually boring is kind of a constant refrain for me given the kinds of things that I'm interested in. So I appreciate that you eased us in that way.
- [02:58]
C
Well, speaking of getting us into the topic, could you introduce yourself a little bit and then tell us how you even got into this topic? Right. Why did you write this book?
- [03:06]
A
Yeah, so I teach early American history at Brandeis here in Waltham, Massachusetts. And this book began as a dissertation at nyu. And I think, like a lot of us who study capitalism, I'm a child of the 2008 financial crisis. I came to grad school really interested in political economy. And there was all this amazing work that was happening in this sort of emerging field of the history of capitalism. And I think I found that, you know, within that literature, colonialism and the history of Native people tended to be relegated to a kind of prelude. And so again, I also appreciate that you pointed out the kind of ongoingness of colonialism in this story. And I think I wanted to explore how colonialism didn't just set up the conditions for capitalism to emerge, but was really embedded in the capitalist economy that the 19th century United States relied on.
- [04:12]
C
Okay, so with those particular questions or kind of big picture interests, how did you end up with this specific topic and decide to write your dissertation and a book on it?
- [04:21]
A
The short answer is I just poked around in, you know, the history of US I guess Indian Affairs Administration might be the old fashioned term for it, and stumbled on this existence of the trust funds, which I can explain, I guess, in a moment, but knowing that the government was actually. That the federal government was actually investing money on behalf of Native people, brought together these realms of financial history and Native history that I hadn't seen discussed together until that point. And so I really dove in, you know, once I stumbled upon mentions of these in, in the literature, of which there were not many, I have to say.
- [05:06]
C
Right. Well, and that's something that is interesting too, like, oh, this is an intriguing thing and it hasn't been written a lot about, okay, what's going on.
- [05:13]
A
Right.
- [05:14]
C
So within then this broader framework of kind of all the colonialism that could be and has been, we're talking About a specific aspect of it. So can you help us understand what's going on? Got trust? We've got fiduciary colonialism. What is the system? How is it meant to work, and who's meant to benefit from it?
- [05:32]
A
So the idea of fiduciary colonialism, this is a concept that I came up with over the course of researching and writing this book. What I mean by fiduciary colonialism is a kind of imperial strategy to acquire Native land that operates by gaining and maintaining control over Native wealth. So how does that work? It builds on this foundation of compensated dispossession. The fact that the federal government chose to buy Native land in the first place, and it did so by paying for Native land in a very specific way, Namely by offering annual payments which were known by all sides as annuities. And I'll just say very quickly that those of us, especially who are inclined to be interested in finance, Will hear the word annuities and think of an insurance product that, you know, grants annual payments associated with, say, the elderly or with wives. In the 19th century, annuities, in this case, just means annual payment. So those were the kind of format that Native people were being paid for their land. Annuities would be promised in treaties. And as I mentioned before, in terms of the trust funds, I noticed over the course of, you know, this research that more and more of these annuities were being paid for by investments that were promised in treaties. And these investments were to be held in trust. So those were known as Indian trust funds. And so the. The idea behind paying for Native land with this specific, protracted kind of payment Is that it granted the federal officials who controlled that wealth pretty significant leverage over Native people. So you can think of it as kind of weaponizing compensation. And this allowed them to further dispossess Native people of their land. And they did all of this by clothing it in the language, ideology, and concrete legal forms of trusteeship. Now, one of the things that I think is kind of counterintuitive about this Is that Native people actually had their own understanding of trusteeship and their own reasons for embracing it. And part of that is that they could understand the kind of relationship that trusteeship implied in terms of their own diplomatic customs. When they entered into these relationships with Europeans and later with officials of the United States, they already had an understanding that, you know, alliances, relationships between sovereigns could be unequal and that they could be unequal without extinguishing sovereignty for the sort of junior partner or the less resourced Partner of these alliances. And they also put this understanding in terms of the law of nations. And figures like Vattel, who said the same thing. Right. That there can be unequal relationships between sovereigns. So as native people and their leaders recognized that there were fewer and fewer alternatives to engaging with the United States, with the federal government, they chose to engage with trusteeship and with annuities and even with trust funds, and tried to navigate. Navigate this system, extract the best kinds of compensation that they could through these treaties.
- [09:21]
C
Okay, time for me to put my cards on the table. I am not a political economist, so that's great. But, like, practically, who is getting money for what, when, and who is, at least on paper, meant to benefit from this? Like, does this mean that I give you my land, and in return, you pay me a hundred bucks, but actually, it's going to be spread out over five years, and so it's 20 bucks a year.
- [09:44]
A
Yeah. So there were different variants of the exact terms. But a treaty would offer usually specific amounts of money or, in earlier periods, goods. But we really see a transition to monetary payments in the 18 teens. And so those annuities would be, again, pre. Said they would either be perpetual, which was interesting, or. Or more often, and increasingly often, they would be of a sort of fixed term. So they would last 20 years or 30 years. So those annuities could either be funded by appropriations from Congress, Meaning, you know, through the usual budgetary process, Congress would set aside, say, $20,000 for the Osage nation that would receive that annuity for, you know, 20 years, or they could be funded by a trust fund. And that trust fund would be, let's say, $100,000 principal that was again promised in this treaty and would be funded. And here's where it gets even more complicated, but bear with me. That trust fund principle would either be funded by a congressional appropriation again, and then kept in the hands of the Office of Indian affairs, which would decide which investments to make with that money. At other times, there was a bit more of a complicated system in which that principle would accrue through the sale of the native land that was being ceded itself in the treaty. So the revenue from those land sales would kind of drip in over time, sometimes flood in, given, depending on the condition of the land market at the time. And officials would sort of invest that as the money, as the principal grew, essentially.
- [11:45]
C
Got it. Okay. And when you say that this system could be used to weaponize kind of further dispossession, how did that work?
- [11:52]
A
So, because officials could. They Had a kind of control over the future of these payments. Right. By spreading this payment across time, they could decide when, where, and if they would even release further installments of these annuities. And this was something that dawned on them as a really effective technique to continue to dispossess Native land. So they could coerce Native people into coming back to the negotiating council in order to draw a new treaty. They could compel forced removals, right, by dictating that these payments would only be granted in the, you know, assigned home, the assigned reservation that they had, you know, promised or kind of compelled people to move to. You know, it was also a way of sort of purchasing peace. Native people would agree in these treaties not to retaliate militarily against the United States States or to align with any other competing empire on the continent. And so, yeah, this was a system that essentially granted officials leverage. And that leverage could be reinforcing as nations would sign sort of treaty after treaty with these officials.
- [13:24]
C
Okay, that's very helpful to help us understand how this system actually works. But as you mentioned there, it kind of wasn't this whole thing from the get go. Right. You mentioned that first it was goods, then it sort of switched to monetary. So when and why do we see the system developing?
- [13:40]
A
So in the beginning, you know, soon after the revolution, obviously, the United States had to deal with the power of Native people. During the revolution. Many native nations, most native nations, sided with the British crown during the revolutionary War. And so, you know, the federal government, kind of flush with arrogance after their victory over the British, decided they had these kind of aspirations, this, like, arrogant plan to punish Native people and to seize the land essentially by force. So they signed these really sort of fig leaf treaties in the 1780s that were fraudulent, that Native people rejected and used what Native people at the time especially called a doctrine of conquest. And essentially this provoked a multinational Native confederacy to form in what was then known as the Ohio country, the Wabash and Maumee river valleys. And these were people like the Miami, the Shawnee, the Kickapoo, Ottawa, Joy, Potawatomi and others. They essentially thwarted American expansion into this region and delivered this really crushing defeat in 1791 that caused this, you know, national reckoning and existential threat to the United States, which was still this kind of infant republic, which was heavily indebted to foreign creditors, you know, which was ostensibly opposed to a standing army. This was, you know, inscribed in its constitution. So, you know, this was also incredibly costly. So Congress had to appropriate a million dollars in the wake of 1791, in order to try to reinforce its military and actually seize the native lands that they considered essential to their political economy and for settlement. So Congress and the War Department at the time, they made kind of back of the envelope calculations and really believed and estimated that this would be. That engaging in compensated dispossession would ironically save them money. It would save them the costs of an all out war. So they eventually, when they defeated this northwest Confederacy, this confederacy from the Maumee River Valley, they decided to initiate this process in a 1795 treaty where they promised to each signatory nation, all of the nations of this former confederacy, annuities, these annual payments over time. And George Washington actually called them something like these annuities would sort of wed Native nations to the attachments of the United States. That was the phrase that he used. So these really started out as ways of pacifying native nations and kind of staking a future claim on them as these kinds of coerced allies of the United States. This was still a time when the British Empire very much had a presence in the region. They were continuing to maintain forts in that borderland between the new United States and British colonies and were, you know, feeding Native people supplies, rations, even weapons. So this was in many ways a kind of defensive position that the United States was taking, a defensive policy at the same time as it was a proactive one in seeking to dispossess Native people of their land.
- [17:39]
C
Hmm. Okay. That context is very helpful to remember. Just because, though this is the first time we really see the policy being enacted by the US Government doesn't mean that necessarily kind of George Washington came up with the idea on the spot.
- [17:51]
A
Right.
- [17:51]
C
We often, often can look at intellectual origins before the policy is implemented. Is that the case here?
- [17:57]
A
Absolutely. So, you know, this is something where it's actually a good topic to be able to talk to historians from many different time periods and regions. Because the idea that an empire is legitimately seizing indigenous people's land, resources, labor, because that empire has this tutelary function or is a trustee or is the only legitimate civilizer of Native people. I mean, that idea, you know, is as old as empire. It's certainly as old as the settlement of the Americas. So the precise legal mechanisms, I think we can have more recent and specific origin points. So one that I find really important is the 1763 Proclamation, which obviously predates the United States, but was a, you know, kind of declaration on the part of the British Crown that native polities west of essentially the Appalachian range would be protected from the encroachments of British subjects east of that line. And there was a. In the same breath, this granting of protection also this claim that Native nations, were they to ever sell those lands, could only do so to the Crown and not to any other competing empires. So that idea of protection is a sort of underlying, you know, kind of diplomatic concept that trusteeship and the actual fiduciary mechanisms builds on over this period.
- [19:45]
C
Okay, that's helpful to understand because as we said. Right. Nothing kind of comes out of nowhere. So thinking then, about the implementation of this policy, to what extent was this initially accepted by the various Indigenous tribes that this sort of offer?
- [20:01]
A
I suppose.
- [20:02]
C
I mean, maybe that implies more equal power than there was. But what was the initial reaction on the side of Native tribes?
- [20:09]
A
And I should say, you know, Native people never engaged into these treaties, particularly treaties of dispossession, without some form of coercion. Right. This was either overt coercion, the use of force. Some of these treaties came on the heels of, you know, these devastating military campaigns and invasions of their land. Sometimes that coercion was more subtle. Maybe they were having a depletion of game animals in their region because of nearby settlements or maybe they had just had, you know, some of their other alliances cut off by the regional geopolitics in which the US Had a strong hand. So coercion is a given in these treaties. But within that reality, Native people had very clear strategies that they were using in order to be able to navigate this to their best advantage. So, again, you know, there's. I mentioned before, there's ways that Native leaders could really recognize these kinds of relationships. They had, you know, the idea of there being certain obligations that were carried by parties to an alliance that were more. That were stronger kind of militarily, had better resources. This was something that they could recognize from their own diplomatic conventions. But there were also these very important material reasons. So especially in the wake of the Revolutionary War and other sort of military attacks, a lot of Native people were experiencing kind of existential threats of their own. And they were seeking to find ways to create endowments, essentially, for their own descendants. So, you know, in some early treaties, Native nations did accept lump sums. Some of these treaties were signed actually with, you know, American states rather than the federal government in these early chaotic years after the Revolution, before the federal government kind of monopolized control over federal Indian affairs. So they had had this experience, some of it direct, some of it, you know, kind of seeing their neighbors go through this of having these lump sums very quickly evaporate through trade. Or because they were unwieldy and have little lasting positive impact on their condition. And so they actually saw the prospect of regular, you know, long lasting, predictable annual sums of compensation to be an advantage. It allowed them to have this longer horizon to plan for the future. And, you know, they hoped to keep their nations intact. They also saw trust funds increasingly as an advantage. You know, they recognized that this meant that their wealth would not only be kept somewhere in storage, but grow. And they would, you know, use metaphors to explain this in councils and to their own people. Sometimes referring to a hen that lays many eggs. Or in other cases, as, you know, corn harvests that would increase as they're kept in a corn crib. And so, you know, this was something that they were very tuned into as an advantage. And over time, Native leaders also found ways to use the financial aspects of treaties to be able to provide for their own priorities. So one of the most prominent ones is education. A lot of native leaders were really preoccupied with being able to train a rising generation of leaders who would be able to stand toe to toe with federal officials and, you know, be able to negotiate, again, better forms of compensation and smaller land sessions. And in a really significant way, that strategy did pay off. By assigning annuities specifically to education, Sometimes by asking for trust funds that would specifically fund schools, Native leaders were really able to provide that kind of education for younger generations. And in many ways, provide, in many instances, actually train these leaders to be more effective negotiators.
- [24:45]
C
That's really interesting to think about kind of what their priorities are and how they're thinking about making this work for them. Is that actually, though, what happened with all the money? I mean, you've just given some examples there of the trust being set aside for particular purposes and being used it for. But obviously, the colonial officials have a lot of control over this money. In fact, you mentioned in the book that this is something. The amount of control grows by the federal officials over time. So what's going on with this? How are they getting more control?
- [25:14]
A
Why?
- [25:15]
C
And what are they doing with it?
- [25:16]
A
Exactly. So, I mean, the basic answer is that control over these funds and the actual sum under trust grows over time. Because dispossession is accelerating over time, and dispossession is advancing over time. So one of the biggest moments of growth of this entire fiduciary system that I look at Is during a period of time that historians refer to and that contemporaries refer to as Indian removal And so this is under President Andrew Jackson in the 1830s. And, you know, during his two terms, Jackson oversaw something on the order of 70 treaties. 46,000 people were displaced because of those treaties. About 100 million acres of land was acquired in that period. So by the time Jackson left office, the sum that the federal government was paying out as annuities had more than tripled in size. So he really wielded this system of fiduciary colonialism in service of this policy of Indian Removal. His aim was to remove, you know, every eastern nation, every nation east of the Mississippi river to the west, into reservations where they would be kind of consigned and contained. But during Jackson's two terms, it wasn't only that the amounts of annuities were growing, but also that the mode of financing changed. So there was a dramatic increase in the use of trust funds to finance these annuities. I think in 1830, trust funds financed around 4% of annuities. And by 1837, when Jackson left office, the proportion had increased over a quarter. And so the reason that this happened was also pretty simple, was that demand for investment had shot up in this same period, and specifically demand for investment from states. States started to borrow in the millions of dollars in this period. And this also actually has everything to do with the challenges of a settler economy and how to create economic development on recently seized Native land. So these states, particularly, like I said, these kind of frontier states, had to kickstart their economies and were seeking to build infrastruct in order to do that. They wanted to build banks, they wanted to dig canals, they wanted to improve roads and dredge rivers. But of course, that costs money, and states needed revenue to do that. They, you know, revenue usually relies on taxation, but those states actually lacked the taxable population and capital that they would need. And that taxable population and capital would only arrive once those banks were founded and once those canals were dug. So borrowing allowed the future value of these recently acquired native lands to be available to states in the present. And that's why they went on this kind of borrowing binge in this period that overlapped with, you know, exactly with Indian Removal. So, you know, by the early 1840s, at the tail end of this period, states had actually borrowed over $230 million, which is a large amount of money in. In the mid 19th century.
- [29:04]
C
I mean, that still sounds like a lot of money, but good point. Like, building, digging a canal is still a big undertaking. So the numbers might be slightly different, but, like the logic of it, I think, is something that we can definitely understand. And thinking then as well, about the kind of amounts here, was it that they literally couldn't have dug the canal without the money from these trust funds? Like, how big a component was the money from the trust funds in enabling this settler colonialism to continue?
- [29:34]
A
Yeah, I. I do want to make clear, I'm not trying to say that Indian trust fund money kind of secretly financed American capitalism. And I don't think I need to make that argument in order for this, you know, history to be important. But if we consider that borrowing boom as a whole, on aggregate, Indian trust funds were only about 1% of. Of states debts. But if you break it down in time and look more granularly at some of these investments, it's actually quite significant. So in 1838, and this is at kind of the. A lot of the debt, I think it's something like in the three years between 1836 and 1838, which was a period in which there was first a credit crunch and then a banking panic in 1837. So in those three years, states borrowed more than they had during the previous 50 years. So this is a really crucial period that states are seeking to borrow. And in fact, they're seeking to borrow in order to service earlier debts because they're falling more and more into a kind of state of economic collapse. But in that period, you see some of the largest investments of Indian trust funds. And so if you look at 1838, which is in the heat of this moment, Indian trust funds held 11% of Alabama's debt, 12% of Kentucky's debt, and actually 17% of Tennessee's debt, which included the entire $500,000 bond issuance that the state had used to capitalize the Union bank of Tennessee. So those are pretty significant proportions, obviously. And the other thing is that as the nation sunk into this banking panic, states were having a harder and harder time floating these loans. And so what that means is essentially finding a major investor, a broker, a banker, to buy that loan up wholesale and then to sell it retail to individual investors. A lot of states couldn't find a single major investor for these loans, except for the Office of Indian affairs, which was willing to lend to states even though they were pretty toxic investments because of connections that they might have had with specific state representatives. There's one Kentucky senator, you know, I mentioned that 12% ownership of Kentucky's debt. There's one Kentucky senator, Richard Mentor Johnson, who had his hand in a lot of pots in terms of being able to tap different kinds of Native wealth that the government had under its control. And he was really key in securing that investment from the Indian trust funds for Kentucky. So those kinds of connections of. Of patronage and sort of, you scratch my back, I'll scratch yours, they really can explain a lot of the contingencies of which bonds were actually selected for investment by these officials in the Office of Indian Affairs.
- [32:50]
C
Got it. That's helpful to understand the kind of process side of this. If we're talking, then, about kind of patronage relationships, sometimes those sorts of things are useful because they can be kind of kept relatively secret or kind of behind closed doors.
- [33:05]
A
Right.
- [33:05]
C
If it's a very small group of people. Was that the case here? Or did, for instance, Native groups know what was happening to the trust funds?
- [33:14]
A
So I don't know what Richard Mentor Johnson was thinking. He sent a lot of letters that just said unofficial on them or confidential. But of course, they were going right into the records of the Office of Indian affairs, which is how I found them. There was a lot of chicanery that I had to infer from, you know, some of the convenient deals that were made in this period or that turned up in, you know, later lawsuits or claims investigations that would happen. So, yeah, that. You know, like all historians, we have to deal with the limitations of our sources. But some of these schemes were pretty evident in terms of information. You know, there was a very deliberate strategy on the part of these government officials to keep this information from Native leaders. Right. So they were not being transparent about the kinds of investments they were making. That was something that Native leaders would really have to develop strategies over time to be able to access, to learn more about their own investments.
- [34:31]
C
And once they did find this out, how did they react?
- [34:35]
A
Different Native nations had different approaches to this. They had different. You know, there were some nations that had kind of a more statist approach. They might have had their own auditors. They would have had, you know, treasurers who would be specifically tasked with interfacing with the federal government. Other nations didn't necessarily do that. They might have had more diffuse systems of government and would have had some delegates that might have been appointed. So I'll just say that quickly. Right. There was a variety of approaches. Like I mentioned before, there was this trend towards using treaty negotiations to be able to set aside certain funds. So that was certainly an adaptation that many nations engaged in. There were attempts that I found really interesting starting in the 1830s, to try to get these guarantee clauses and treaties, kind of trying to make the federal government into an FDIC insured bank. And those failed. The government refused to guarantee that there would not be any losses on these trust funds eventually, by the late 1850s. And I should mention that a lot of the Native people who are negotiating in these treaties and in these sort of subsequent councils with federal agents, they are themselves, you know, entrepreneurs, or they're major planters and slaveholders. They're people who had a lot of experience in this world of merchant, commercial and even banking debt. Right. They understand those credit networks. And so eventually, as they're. As they succeed in gaining more information. And they do this through, you know, by petitioning the Office of Indian affairs directly. Or sometimes by petitioning Congress and kind of using an array of legal strategies. You do start to see leaders asking very specific questions about specific investments or. Or requesting a shift from one state's bonds to the others and putting these things in terms of their own calculations on yields that they could be getting. But gaining that kind of information was, throughout the period that I write about, a big challenge.
- [36:56]
C
So what did that mean then for the. You know, if we zoom out just a little bit to the wider relations between these Native tribes and the federal government, like, how did this influence those relations? It's like, well, hang on a second, guys. What are you up to? You're up to some strange things. We are using the money to get educated because we'd rather do some other things. Like, what is the sort of wider impact of this stuff that's sort of buried deep in all sorts of documents on native U.S. government relations more broadly?
- [37:28]
A
I mean, it's a great question. There's a couple of different facets I mentioned before. These legal claims in order to gain information. But they were also legal claims to hold trustees to account. So these claims would take form, you know, as petitions that would be submitted to Congress that would, in many cases, actually prompt these major investigations. Because there had been things like corruption in. And land speculation. And in the implementation of these treaties. Sometimes there was annuity. There were annuity payments that had, you know, not been delivered, even though they had been supposed to be. So this strategy of submitting these kinds of claims and prompting these kinds of investigations Was a tactic that really became important for Native leaders in the wake of removal. And so much so that Congress became overwhelmed with these claims and started to bar Native nations from drawing contracts with attorneys. So there actually were these laws passed in the 1840s that barred those kinds of agreements. So once Native people couldn't rely on lawyers to assist them with this sort of Lobbying. They became lobbyists themselves. And this is an example of the kind of return on investment and education that I was talking about before. It was a pretty effective strategy to have certain Native leaders be versed enough in, you know, the. The world of US Politics and law. That they were able to actually take on these cases. You know, this was not an unqualified victory. A lot of these, you know, investigations dragged on for years. And they were, you know, depending on using the courts of the conqueror sort of, so to speak. And they were also starting to price injustice in dollar terms. Right? So this was a period of struggle after the loss of homelands had, you know, had occurred. And so they were now pursuing monetary redress. It as these claims escalated, like I said, one of the things that happened is, you know, the government was increasing. And finding ways to ratchet its control over annuities. And it both barred these contracts with attorneys and other outsiders. But it also began to pay out annuity payments per capita. And what that did is undermine the power of Native governments. To actually allocate resources. To allocate annuity payments within their own nations. So that might have cut off funding for Native government salaries for Native statesmen. Or it could have disrupted their own infrastructure. Whether that be mills or agricultural goods and training schools. So you do see this dynamic of Native people challenging federal fiduciary power. And the federal government ratcheting up its own power. But there is also this kind of paradox. And this is something that I didn't anticipate going into this project. But in 1871, the federal government ends the practice. Of drawing treaties with Native people altogether. And after that moment, trusteeship actually becomes a really important aspect. Of how Native people have their sovereignty recognized by the federal government. Because it acts as a kind of cord to this period before 1871. When there still was nation to nation diplomacy. And it becomes still a legal toehold for Native people Who are experiencing, you know, what we really know as a nadir of federal Native relations. The period of allotment, of assimilation going into the 20th century, the termination era. And so trusteeship starts to be invoked by Native leaders. As an aspect of that nation to nation relationship. And that endures today. There's a broad and pervasive trust responsibility. That the federal government is bound to uphold. That is rooted in this era of treaty diplomacy.
- [42:03]
C
So this is happening now. This has an influence of what could happen going forward.
- [42:08]
A
It does. So, you know, today there's still billions of dollars that's under trust management. The composition and specific terms of that trust, those trust funds have. Has really changed since the time that, you know, my book covers. Among other things, there are actually millions of individual trust fund accounts, which created so much bureaucratic chaos and mismanagement and negligence in trying to manage all of those accounts that it prompted the largest class action lawsuit against the federal government in the history of the United States. So, you know, that's one story. But just more generally there. Yeah, there's this, you know, this idea of the trust responsibility is kind of at the foundation of federal Indian law. And it. It echoes that concept of protection that I mentioned that dates back, you know, at least to the 18th century, in which the federal government has a responsibility to protect Native nations from its own citizens, from states, certainly. So state governments are, you know, throughout the 19th century and today, seeking to usurp that relationship, that special relationship between the federal government and Native nations. And it's also supposed to be about protecting Native nations from the harms of its own citizens, of corporations. This is supposed to include entities like, you know, fossil fuel companies, mining interests. And we're really living through a period right now in which those capitalist forces are encircling federal Indian law and really trying to hack away at it. And we've seen these struggles happen over pipelines, and I think those have been rightfully acknowledged because there are these incredible uprisings like we saw at Standing Rock. But one thing that I think is also really concerning is the Green Transition. So there's one study that estimates more than 75% of the rare earth minerals that are needed for the Green transition are within 35 miles of native American reservations. And that. That has, you know, to do with the sort of geography of colonialism and where reservations, where most reservations are located. But these incentives to undermine federal Indian law and the trust responsibility are only going to intensify as the global rush for these metals continues.
- [44:59]
C
All the more reason then to understand the history of kind of how we got here and what the ties are. So thank you for explaining it to us. And of course, anyone who wants to can find out more in the book that we've been discussing titled Vested Interests, Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States, published by Princeton University Press in 2025. But, Emily, before I let you go, I'd love to know what you might be working on now that this book is out in the world.
- [45:24]
A
Yeah, so this goes back to. I promise this isn't boring. I'm starting to work on a project about taxes and Native sovereignty and colonialism in the United States. You know, in the Constitution of the United States, Native people are actually referred to as, quote, unquote, Indians not taxed. And that's always struck me as really interesting, especially for, you know, a nation that had just been founded in a revolt against imperial taxes. So I want to explore what that kind of immun Immunity or untaxability sort of says about the way that Native sovereignty was framed in that moment. And, of course, I want to look at the moments in which Indians were taxed and the attacks on sovereignty that were carried out specifically by extracting taxes. This happened with greater frequency across the 19th century. And while there was a dimension of seeking revenue for states, for municipalities, and even for the federal government, as often these moments of taxation were specifically seeking to expropriate Native people of their resources and especially their land. So this is another way of looking at colonialism as a fiscal and a financial process, not only one that's carried out through, you know, military or even solely legal means.
- [47:04]
C
Well, definitely related to what we've been discussing. So best of luck with that project, and thank you for joining me on the podcast to tell us about your latest book.
- [47:12]
A
Thank you so much, Miranda. This was great.