Committee:

Laura Edwards, co-adviser
Elizabeth Ellis, co-adviser
Michael Blaakman
Gregory Ablavsky, Stanford Law School

Abstract:

This dissertation investigates the transformation of belonging – membership in the social and economic world – on the ground of the Southwestern Great Lakes. It argues that generations of trading families with kin ties to several distinct Native communities navigated and shaped a changing legal order between the 1760s and 1840s. These families maintained relative autonomy and helped preserve overarching, and deeply Native practices of belonging, embodied in adoption rituals, speech-making, gifts, and calumet-smoking.

Trade logs, correspondence, and autobiographical accounts reveal that these earlier systems and practices of belonging persisted during the British occupation and even after the War of 1812. Newcoming traders sought to plug into pre-existing networks and, though they helped form a new trade class at posts, they continued to rely on the plural families outside those posts. After the War of 1812, American traders, bureaucrats, and corporations managed to incentivize U.S. citizenship. Local trade families adopted this citizenship to stave off bureaucratic interference. In attempts to maintain kin and economic ties, these trade families contributed to the changing legal order, inadvertently empowering the U.S. authorities they appealed to. Although an unintended consequence, the buy-in of these inhabitants was essential for establishing courts and the extractive treaty regime.

This project challenges the conventional periodization of British and American imperial expansion by illustrating continuing local and Native authority well into the nineteenth century. It builds on scholarship on persistent Native power, local influence on legal change, and imperial memory-making. Contributing to Native American history, early American history, and legal history, this dissertation shows the limits of narratives that frame U.S. expansion as a top-down imposition of authority. Rather, this dissertation demonstrates that nineteenth-century citizenship in the Great Lakes emerged from earlier forms of belonging and through negotiation, adaptation, and resistance on the ground level.

A copy of the dissertation will be available for review two weeks before the exam. Contact Lee Horinko for a copy of the dissertation and the Zoom meeting link and password.

All are welcome and encouraged to attend.