Abstract

"Fiscal Sovereignty: Myaamia Public Interest at the Fort Wayne Indian Agency, 1818-1838"

Josh Althoff, University of Minnesota (altho070@umn.edu)

By the mid-1820s, settler inhabitants of Indiana were increasingly calling for Indian Removal to become national policy. Their arguments struck familiar notes. Some argued Indigenous lands could act as a remedy to the “crime and poverty” of the growing state by “giv[ing] the poor a place to settle.” Others insisted that Removal was a moral imperative as Myaamiaki (Miami people) and their neighbors deserved to live without the interference of white settlement. Northern Indian Removal’s emergence as a public interest quickly dovetailed with an explosion of “internal improvement” projects like roads and canals, accelerating the pace at which Congress attempted to coerce Native nations into signing land cessions.
Myaamiaki held a different set of public interests. While U.S. officials like Lewis Cass saw Miami people as ungrateful wards taken in from a conquered state, Miami people instead acted as a sovereign nation embedded, coercively and forcefully, within a new community network that prioritized their relationship to the U.S. federal government. Pinšiwa (Jean Baptiste Richardville), the principal civil leader, led the Miami National Council in resisting calls for Removal. Miami leaders gained significant annuities from land cession treaties, but the emergent annuity economy spawned traders who would excessively price goods, distribute them on credit, and then claim their inflated reimbursement from the arrived payment. After petitioning for his own license as an Indian trader, he and the National Council began demanding that Pinšiwa be given the “exclusive” right to trade with the Miami nation. Just as the U.S. Congress held the ability to “regulate commerce [...] with the Indian Tribes,” the Miami National Council used the language of business to assert their right to regulate commerce with the United States.