Fiduciary Colonialism: Annuities and Native Dispossession in the Early United States

Date: 

Wednesday, November 3, 2021, 6:00pm

Location: 

Zoom Meeting

bowls of berries, leaves, and petalsNATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

SPEAKER: Emilie Connolly, Brandeis University

The United States’ continental empire was largely built by compensated dispossession. To be sure, the sums federal officials paid for Native homelands were uniformly far below settler judgements of its value -- and impossible to commensurate with the invaluable importance of these homelands for Indigenous polities themselves. Yet the money paid for Native lands still had consequences. This talk will explore those consequences by tracing the evolving impact of annuities, annual payments from the federal government to Native polities for lands ceded to the United States. In the decades after the War of 1812, annuities evolved from payments in goods to payments in high-powered money. Their financing shifted from congressional appropriations to investments held in trust. In the process, annuities repeatedly altered the economies in which they circulated, and ultimately shored up federal power to further dispossess Native peoples.

Emilie Connolly teaches Early American History at Brandeis University. She is currently at work on a book manuscript that recounts the first century of federal control over Native American monetary and financial wealth.

How to Join

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If you have any questions, please contact Dylan Nelson at dylannelson@g.harvard.edu