Doing Business in the (Non)Indigenous Public Interest

Too often Native nations’ economic histories and conceptions of public and national good go overlooked. This panel asserts that when we ask questions about “public interest” in the United States, our answers become more complicated when we take (Non)Indigenous publics and interests into account. The panelists and the chair, Dr. Emilie Connolly, are trained in Native American and Indigenous studies and consider a wide range of political and economic strategies the Miami, Potawatomi, and Dakota communities enacted in the nineteenth century to preserve their futures in the face of colonial devastation. Joshua McGonagle Althoff theorizes what a “Miami public interest” looked like at the Fort Wayne Agency from 1818-1838 and offers “fiscal sovereignty” as an analytic to understand Myaamia economic strategies and goals and to problematize discussions around a universal or singular “public good.” Zada Ballew examines the founding of “Pokagon Village” in 1821 – the largest gathering of Potawatomi on “the most valuable land” in the Michigan Territory – and considers in whose interests its liquidation in the 1830s ultimately served. Heather Menefee uses previously unexamined and untranslated economic records from 1858-61 to show how Dakota people sustained their political kinship under US occupation. In this work, Menefee follows the advice of Dr. Mato Watakpe Clifford Canku, who argues that we must uncover how Dakota people conceptualized and navigated attempts to “impose capitalism as a normative economic and moral structure” prior to 1862. Above all, this panel demonstrates how no single tribal nation’s response to U.S. American commercial expansion was the same. By considering these three views from nineteenth century Native America, this panel shows the diversity of publics and interests that have always been present when Indigenous and non-Indigenous actors have done business on Native land.