Plunder and Resistance in the Old Northwest

A reframing of Native history with Professor Michael John Witgen

Amid a growing body of scholarship revealing that Native peoples didn’t simply vanish from their homelands, as the old stereotype suggests, I spoke to Michael John Witgen, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and the author of Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America.

Michael is a professor in the Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia. Seeing Red was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. In the book, and in conversation, Professor Witgen explores the “political economy of plunder” in the Old Northwest, some ways that the Anishinaabeg (including the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Mississaugas, Nipissing, and Algonquin peoples) resisted it, and the plunder’s legacy today.

A condensed transcript edited for clarity is below. You can also listen to the audio of the conversation, which includes further exploration of “unthinkable history,” details of Professor Witgen’s ancestors’ resistance, the ludicrous ideology that rooted American expansion, and more:

The fee structures of treaties in the 1800s sounded eerily familiar

Ben: Professor Witgen, thank you so much for being here. 

MJW: Happy to be here. 

Ben: To get us going, when did the U.S. government set its eyes on the Old Northwest, and what was the Old Northwest?

MJW: The Old Northwest roughly encompassed what eventually became Ohio, Indiana, Illinois, Michigan, and Wisconsin. Politicians like George Washington had their eyes on it even before there was a United States. After the revolution, all of the founders were thinking about this space as uninhabited territory for America to expand into. 

Ben: And who occupied the so-called “unsettled” territory?

MJW: It was Indian territory. In what would now be kind of western Pennsylvania and eastern Ohio, you had the Shawnee, the Delaware, and the Miami; farther down into Illinois country lived the Illinois; and then moving northward to what would now be Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota was Anishinaabe territory, where bands of the Potawatomi, Odawa, and Ojibwe peoples lived throughout the Great Lakes.

For American politicians, it was unthinkable to imagine this land as an Indian nation, polity, or homeland equivalent to the United States, France, Canada, etc. If they thought of it that way, they'd realize they were invading another country and that in pushing out its inhabitants, they were committing at best ethnic cleansing, at worst genocide.

Ben: I thought your discussion of the conception of “unthinkable history” (a term coined by the Haitian historian Michel-Rolph Trouillot) was really... well, thought-provoking. 

You add that, for Thomas Jefferson, “like most Americans, it was simply unthinkable to imagine Native peoples living as discrete Indigenous nations in perpetuity within the boundaries of the United States.” Can you talk about the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and how the law embodied some of this (un)thinking?

MJW: The Northwest Ordinance created a process where once you had 5,000 white men in an area, you could organize it as a territory. And once that territory grew to 60,000 free inhabitants, including women and children, the territory could then draft a constitution and apply for admission to the union as a state.

Of course, Native people weren’t willing to give their land up. In the Northwest Indian Wars of the 1790s, the U.S. lost a series of conflicts. Only when the U.S. signed a treaty with Great Britain and the British subsequently withdrew military support for Indians did Native people negotiate a treaty. 

The federal government then took Indian lands that had been ceded and made them available for sale at subsidized rates to white settlers. Conceiving of Indian land as untamed because it hadn’t yet been transformed into private property was part of the imaginary thinking that gave rise to the political economy of plunder.

Ben: As I understand it, this term applies in large part to the treaties negotiated in the decades following the Northwest Ordinance and the Northwest Indian Wars. Is that right?

MJW: Yes, take for example the 1836 Treaty of Washington, which ceded approximately thirteen million acres of Odawa and Ojibwe land in then Michigan Territory to the republic. In return, the government agreed to an annual payment of $30,000 for twenty years. 

But the treaty also provided a one-time payout of $300,000 to traders who claimed the Anishinaabeg owed them money. And then, when later it actually came time to pay out the annuity, the traders claimed well, in the year since we made this deal, I have now x number of dollars of debt that I am owed. 

So the first people to get paid from the annuities weren't the Native people—they were white, sometimes mixed-race traders.

Ben: This sounds a little like buying a ticket on Ticketmaster.

MJW: Ha, exactly! And when the first payment of $30,000 went to the Anishinaabeg, it was just a small fraction of the promised amount.

So one of the reasons Indians didn’t get removed from places like Michigan or Wisconsin is that settlers realized that the Indian business—the business of negotiating treaties, selling land, and paying out non-Indians—was lucrative. In short, residents of Michigan and Wisconsin realized that actually having Indians in their territory was valuable. That’s the economy of plunder.

Ben: This was a very different pattern than in, say, the South where, as you point out, the government infamously did remove Native peoples to make way for cotton farming.

Then again, you detail how Black citizens were enmeshed in the economy of plunder in the Old Northwest, too.

MJW: It was fascinating to discover how much Indigenous and African American identity in the Northwest was linked.

Every territory that became a state in the Northwest passed laws called Black Codes. For example, if you were a free Black citizen moving to Ohio, you had to notify the justice of the peace in the county that you were moving there. You also had to provide proof that you were free, and you had to post a $500 bond, a lot of money at the time. If you didn’t do those things, you could be expelled from the state. If you employed a free Black person and didn’t verify that they’d taken the necessary steps, you could be fined.

So the economy of plunder extended to Black residents of the Old Northwest, too. Despite the disincentives, they still moved to the area and found ways around the laws.

Ben: You also chronicle various forms of Native resistance, like negotiating hunting and fishing rights.

MJW: Right. Being from a nation long in Wisconsin, I was curious why huge numbers of Native peoples weren’t removed, as the common meta narrative suggests.

This again brings us back to the treaties. Native peoples didn't want to cede their land, but they were basically being told, you've got no choice. Cede it now, get compensated, or we'll just take it. They said okay, we'll cede land, but so long as it's public domain, not settled by individual property holders, we want to retain our right to hunt and fish. That was an important provision throughout most of the treaties in the Northwest Territory, and it's the basis by which Native peoples today exercise hunting and fishing rights off reservation.

Ben: How did people like Gichi-Bizhiki, the principal leader of the Lake Superior Ojibweg, further navigate government attempts to seize Native land?

MJW: I’m a direct descendant of Gichi-Bizhiki. The government told him they wanted to mine copper on Anishinaabe land, but he didn’t want to be removed. He said, I want my children's children to be born in their homeland, so we're not going to sell our land. We're not going to accept removal. Forced to make concessions, he struck a deal negotiating reservations.

But then the government reneged on the treaty. In response, Gichi-Bizhiki and a group of warriors essentially snuck off the reservation and made their way to Washington, stopping along the way to get signatures from people saying they didn’t want the Ojibwe removed. By the time they got to Washington to plead their case, Gichi-Bizhiki had a document saying citizens of Wisconsin wanted to keep the Ojibwe in their state. He ended up securing a face-to-face meeting with President Millard Fillmore, who agreed to allow them to stay on the land.

It’s an extraordinary example of survivance; of people refusing to leave their land in the face of an expanding United States.

Ben: You connect the legacy of the political economy of plunder in the 19th century to the Black Lives Matter movement, and also to protests at Standing Rock over the Dakota Access Pipeline. How do you see similar dynamics playing out today?

MJW: As I was writing the book, I couldn’t help but think about the murder of Michael Brown in Ferguson.

The police force in Ferguson is almost exclusively white. The municipal government was funded almost exclusively on fees and tickets coming from the policing of Black people, similar to the Black Codes in the Old Northwest. The sort of over-policing that led to Brown’s murder was present throughout the Northwest Territory. And the tragic thing is that by the time I got my manuscript back, Breonna Taylor had been murdered, as had George Floyd.

The same connection to a history of governance through plunder led the U.S. to sanction the construction of the Dakota Access Pipeline under the Missouri River near the Standing Rock Sioux reservation. In violation of treaty rights, they didn’t seek the tribe’s permission to do that, revealing another throughline: violating treaties in order to make money off Native people. 

All of these events, going on as I was writing, were striking reminders of how woven the disadvantaging of Black and Native people is into the social contract of America. 

Ben: And a lesson, I think, that maybe you should write a little faster, lest more tragedies occur in the interim.

MJW:  Ha, maybe. But this history is why I push for Land Back, returning stolen territories to Native people where it’s possible—and for acknowledgment that the country we live in was created not only by Indigenous dispossession but taking wealth from Native people; by taking the money that was meant to compensate them for their land loss.

And my goal is to show that people like the Anishinaabeg have survived, thanks to their efforts to work a coercive system and remain in their homeland.

Ben: Another welcome reframing of the past.

Professor Witgen, thank you so much for your scholarship, and for speaking with me today.

MJW: Thank you. It was my pleasure.