The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land Became U.S. Property - Study Circles Online Conversation

 

The Disproportionality Technical Assistance Network, or “The Network,” is offering a unique opportunity for all participating school staff, equity teams, and partners for continuing our personal and professional racial equity work, with a focus on the American Indian student experience. Join us in a Study Circles Online Conversation and the exploration the book, There There by Tommy Orange. Each online session will use Orange’s book as a foundation for the conversation while exploring the impact of the opportunity gap on our American Indian students in the state of Wisconsin.

The Study Circles Online Conversations help to address racial and ethnic barriers to student achievement and family involvement by engaging school staff, community members and partners in dialogue and problem solving.

 

The story of "western expansion" is a familiar one: U.S. government agents, through duplicity and force, persuaded Native Americans to sign treaties that gave away their rights to the land. But this framing, argues Martin Case, hides a deeper story. Land cession treaties were essentially the act of supplanting indigenous kinship relationships to the land with a property relationship. And property is the organizing principle upon which U.S. society is based.

U.S. signers represented the relentless interests that drove treaty making: corporate and individual profit, political ambition, and assimilationist assumptions of cultural superiority. The lives of these men illustrate the assumptions inherent in the property system–and the dynamics by which it spread across the continent. In this book, for the first time, Case provides a comprehensive study of the treaty signers, exposing their business ties and multigenerational interrelationships through birth and marriage. Taking Minnesota as a case study, he describes the groups that shaped U.S. treaty making to further their own interests: interpreters, traders, land speculators, bureaucrats, officeholders, missionaries, and mining, timber, and transportation companies.

 

• have an opportunity to read and discuss the selected book with other participants from across Wisconsin
• engage in conversations with colleagues and explore multiple perspectives about American Indian studies and the education of American Indian students
• address misconceptions and stereotypes of American Indian peoples, communities, and nations

 

REGISTRATION: The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land Became U.S. Property - Study Circles Online Conversation