Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession of the United States

Shortly after the United States’ founding, the federal government decided to pay for Native land rather than attempt to take it by military force alone. And therein hangs a tale. Hundreds of treaties transferred Indigenous homelands to the United States in exchange for annual payments, called annuities. With increasing frequency over the course of the nineteenth century, the government funded annuities with investment accounts held in trust for Native nations, purchasing a portfolio of bonds on their behalf. What followed was a system of fiduciary colonialism, in which the federal government gained administrative control over Native wealth to take Native land and, at once, finance the very debt-funded 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 peoples were not passive subjects of this system. Native leaders strategically navigated their financial ties to the federal government to safeguard their nations’ futures and insisted on their view of trusteeship as a sacred, reciprocal obligation. Through stories of treaty negotiations, bond market crashes, and the crisis of the Civil War, this talk recounts how the management of Native money became a central site of both imperial dispossession and Indigenous resilience.