The following excerpt comes from Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America (UNC Press, 2022) by Michael John Witgen, which was a finalist for the 2023 Pulitzer Prize in History. Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg (Ojibwe) resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland, Anishinaabewaki, in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and US development in the Old Northwest. But, as Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves, who reasserted and insisted upon their sovereignty in the wake of the devastation wrought by US colonialism. In this excerpt, Witgen examines the 1850 Sandy Lake incident, in which US government officials moved annuity payments to the Lake Superior Ojibwe from nearby La Pointe, Wisconsin, to central Minnesota with the goal of forcing them to resettle west of the Mississippi. The result was disease, starvation, and death for many who took the trek—an outcome that added fuel to the fire of resistance and self-advocacy for the Anishinaabeg to remain in their ancestral home.
On February 6, 1850, President Zachary Taylor issued an executive order revoking the right of the Anishinaabe people to continue living on lands ceded to the United States under the Treaty of Saint Peters in 1837 and the Treaty of La Pointe in 1842. The order specifically nullified “the right granted to the Chippewa Indians of the Mississippi and Lake Superior, by the Second Article of the treaty with them of October 4th, 1842 of hunting on the territory which they ceded by that treaty.” The order also called for “all of the said Indians” to move onto lands not yet ceded to the federal government. The Office of Indian Affairs justified the removal order, like the congressional Indian Removal Act of 1830, as a necessary means of protecting Native peoples from encroaching white settlers and promoting their “civilization and prosperity.” In fact, this removal order had nothing to do with the US civilizing mission. It was instead a deadly manifestation of the political economy of plunder.1
Taylor’s executive order ending the usufruct rights of the Anishinaabeg in Wisconsin and northern Michigan represented an effort to force the region’s Native population to relocate to the newly created territory of Minnesota. Taylor appointed fellow Whig politician Alexander Ramsey as governor, and Ramsey passed a resolution through the territorial legislature calling for the removal of the Anishinaabeg in Wisconsin and the Upper
