Seeing Red

In Seeing Red, Michael Witgen shows how “a political economy of plunder” dispossessed Indigenous nations of their lands and resources in the western Great Lakes following the Revolutionary War. The Northwest Ordinance facilitated the “systematic dispossession of Native peoples in the service of expanding the territorial boundaries of the United States.” (p. 211) Settler colonial domination of the eastern seaboard occurred over the long durée of one hundred and fifty years. The federal government’s methodical reorganization of the trans-Appalachian frontier into the Northwest Territory dramatically reduced that ­disposession to thirty-five years, transforming Indigenous nations into minority inhabitants. Despite the ethnic cleansing of Indigenous nations, much of the Old Northwest remained a demographic, economic, and political Indigenous landscape. Witgin shows how in Lake Superior country and along the Upper Mississippi Valley Indigenous survivance proved possible because the Native people remained in place. Sadly, they were colonized and exploited by White profiteers and land speculators who reaped substantial profits from the land sales and timber rights of former Ojibwe lands.

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