Papers presented by Misty Kay Peñuelas since 2019
2022 Mexico City
"Economic Democracy in Unexpected Places: Property, Discipline and Money in the Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Nation"
Misty Peñuelas, University of Oklahoma
Abstract:
When surveying the development of liberal state-building over the course of the Nineteenth Century, one would hardly expect the find a vanguard of the liberalization movement flourishing on the rough Indigenous frontier of the United States. Yet, my current research on Cherokee fiscal-monetary policy upends current historiographical representations of the Cherokee economy as a subsistence or frontier exchange economic order. Instead, the codified law and the records of the Cherokee National Treasurer show that the Cherokee Nation successfully secured for its citizens the two main pillars of the liberal state, that is, the protection of property and the maintenance of disciplinary institutions to reinforce those rights. More important however, as my research suggests, was the fiscal monetary apparatus they created in order to sustain their model liberal state, the primary tool of which was the sovereign ability to create currency. In fact, not only do we find an internationally renowned and sophisticated, liberal, fiscal-monetary state in the Cherokee Nation, we also learn from them that sovereign monetary policy is in fact the third, indispensable, even existential, pillar of the successful liberal state. In this essay, following the above-mentioned core themes of property, discipline, and money, I will look at a few specific examples that show how, when defined in terms of property rights, the Cherokee Nation used their fiscal-monetary state not only to build their Nation, but also to secure genuine and unassailable national sovereignty well into the Twentieth Century. When defined in terms of property rights, then, there can be little doubt that, as vanguards in the international drive for liberalization, the Cherokees, with a success not shared with other liberalizing nations of the era, independently created a social, political, and economic order that could in fact be considered a model economic democracy flourishing in this previously unexpected place
Keywords:
2020 Charlotte, North Carolina
"Neither Conquest nor Collusion: ‘The Spirit of Masonry” in the Evolution of the Nineteenth-Century Cherokee Fiscal-Monetary State"
Misty Peñuelas, University of Oklahoma
Abstract:
On February 14, 1876 representatives of the Five Civilized Tribes gathered in Tahlequah, I.T. to institute the Indian International Agricultural Society. Belying the mundane title, this “Society” was a cross between a joint–stock company and the Populist cooperatives of the next decade. Whereas cooperatives depended on banks, the IIAS raised capital through membership dues and stock. Anyone could join for 5.00 and for 25.00 the purchaser became a voting, “director of the Agricultural Society.” Upon payment the purchaser received “stock certificates,” not to exceed the IIAS initial capitalization of 5,000.00. This episode highlights two themes central to my dissertation project: high finance and Cherokee-Anglo cooperation in the creation of a fiscal-monetary state in the Cherokee Nation. While US treaty obligations did create the need for a centralized fiscal and monetary policy, the US never fulfilled its fiduciary responsibilities. Thus, the Cherokee elite were forced to construct their progressive institutions of social welfare and devise methods, as did the IIAS, for funding them without the so-called “help” of the US. My dissertation argues that under these circumstances, the Cherokees erected a fiscal-monetary state entirely on the basis of fiat currency and that the Cherokee model was the basis for the US fiat system of the twentieth century. For this essay, in line with the conference theme of cooperation over corruption, I will examine the ideology of the Cherokee elite, many of whom were freemasons. In freemasonry, the source of Cherokee cosmopolitan internationalism and enlightened progressivism is readily apparent. The ubiquitous presence of freemasons suggests that the evolution of the Cherokee fiscal monetary-state was neither a case of conquest nor collusion, but was rather cooperation and coordination among men who shared a similar vision, deeply rooted in the “spirit of masonry,” of what constituted a civilized society.