“Ladies and gentlemen, the Bronx is burning!” That legendary and apocryphal phrase, allegedly uttered by announcers during the 1977 World Series as flames rose above Yankee Stadium, seemed to encapsulate an entire era in this nation’s urban history. Across that decade, a wave of arson coursed through American cities, destroying entire neighborhoods home to poor communities of color. Yet as historian Bench Ansfield demonstrates in their new book, Born in Flames, the most destructive fires were not set by residents, as is commonly assumed, but by landlords looking to collect insurance payouts. Driven by perverse incentives—new government-sponsored insurance combined with tanking property values—landlords hired “torches,” mostly Black and Brown youth, to set fires in the buildings, sometimes with people still living in them. Tens of thousands of families lost their homes to these blazes, yet for much of the 1970s, tenant vandalism and welfare fraud stood as the prevailing explanations for the arson wave, effectively indemnifying landlords.

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.