The story of "western expansion" is a familiar one: U.
S.
Odds are, the deed to the Land under your home rests on this system.. treaty making to further their own interests: interpreters, traders, Land speculators, bureaucrats, officeholders, missionaries, and mining, timber, and transportation companies.
Taking Minnesota as a Case study, he describes the groups that shaped U.
S.
In this book, for the first time, Case provides a comprehensive study of the treaty signers, exposing their Business ties and multigenerational interrelationships through birth and marriage.
The lives of these men illustrate the assumptions inherent in the Property system-and the dynamics by which it spread across the continent. signers represented the Relentless interests that drove treaty making: corporate and individual profit, political ambition, and assimilationist assumptions of cultural superiority.
U.
S. society is based.
And Property is the organizing principle upon which U.
S.
Land cession treaties were essentially the act of supplanting Indigenous kinship relationships to the Land with a Property relationship.
But this framing, argues Martin Case, hides a deeper story. government agents, through duplicity and force, persuaded Native Americans to sign treaties that gave away their rights to the land.
The story of "western expansion" is a familiar one: U.
S
