Review of Stephen Kantrowitz

Citizens of a Stolen Land

By Madelon Proctor  

In Citizens of a Stolen Land, Stephen Kantrowitz endeavors to tell the story of Ho-Chunk bands and their experiences with the nineteenth century policies of Indian removal and settler colonialism. Filling a gap in available historiography, the author addresses a region and a people oft neglected. Utilizing government treaties and court documents, territorial papers and other government records, as well as archives, periodicals, and private correspondence, Kantrowitz recounts the lives of the Ho-Chunk. He offers a thorough examination of their history, their ingenuity, and the ways their story fits into the larger narrative of post-bellum America. The book is enjoyable and easy to read while still enabling the reader to make insightful connections.

Ho-Chunk ancestral lands were set in the Old Northwest Territories. There, they participated in trade relationships and alliances with French and British colonists for generations prior to America’s expansion. Through a series of treaties, the United States government slowly secured their landholdings and admitted settlers deemed more acceptable for citizenship in that country. Kantrowitz examines strategies the Ho-Chunk employed to keep access to tribal grounds in the decades leading up to, and after, the Civil War. While portraying the ways the group redefined themselves to ensure the security of their customs, the author draws on the similarities and differences in their experiences to those of other tribal nations of the period.

The Ho-Chunk bands of southern Wisconsin formed kinship bonds with French traders, siding with that government when the British tried to assert claims over that jurisdiction. After the French left, they built new trade relationships with their former enemies. When the Americans sought independence from Great Britain, the bands again found themselves allied with the side of the defeated. In the aftermath of the War of 1812, having gained surety in their claims over the Northwest Territories, the United States began a pattern of treating with indigenous nations like the Ho-Chunk throughout which it attempted to obtain their lands. Although they tried to prevent additional conflicts by harboring the British Band during the Black Hawk War, they gained the suspicion of Americans and the policy of “‘conquest & contract’ became ‘conquest by contract.’”^[1] In a remarkably insightful statement, Ho-Chunk orator Little Elk said that “no sooner had [the American] seen a small portion of our country than he wished to see a map of the whole of it; and, having seen it, he wished us to sell it all to him.”^[2]

Even after official land cessions, however, many bands refused to leave, or at least stop returning to, their ancestral lands. Not all settlers wanted their complete expulsion; some encouraged them to remain and continue as trading partners; and differences in the ways Ho-Chunk people used the land also contributed to less forceful removal policies for some. A few members, particularly those of mixed descent, sought American citizenship and renounced their traditions to claim land in the ways of white settlers. Others, however, journeyed to the General Land Office to try to purchase land outright. They maintained their seasonal transitions from maple sugaring to cornfield, from life on the hunt to life near the river. Even the bands who migrated across the Mississippi chose not to stay where they were expected to according to the terms of treaties but moved further south to climates similar to those they had left.

Alongside the discussion of treaty terms and Indian removal, the author grapples with the definition of citizenship in nineteenth century Wisconsin, the Ho-Chunk tribes, and the greater United States. At the country’s inception, Indians became “domestic dependent nations,” ineligible for citizenship by dint of race and prior allegiance to their tribal communities.^[3] With its tradition of granting citizenship by birthright to European and Chinese immigrants, and even the children of freed slaves, the country created exclusions for indigenous peoples because of their status as America’s wards. The author shows how discussion about Indian civilization was transferred into the political arena during the antebellum era in the framing of constitutions for the newly admitted states.

Kantrowitz draws from the histories of the southern Trail of Tears, the New York tribes who came into Wisconsin, and the genocidal actions against natives of the west coast to create a baseline and comparable frame for the story of the Ho-Chunk. A band of Potawatomi, “by representing themselves as …‘civilized,’” made a successful claim to retain their lands in the 1833 Treaty of Chicago, and some Choctaws were able to remain “on allotments and other lands within Mississippi rather than endure removal to Indian Territory.^[4] In contrast, however, Brothertown, Stockbridge-Munsee, and Oneida tribes endured successive removals from New England to New York, then west again into Wisconsin.^[5] Also, by mid-century, settlers in the far western territories of Oregon and California devastated “Native communities” through “well-organized campaigns of murder”^[6] In an attempt to avoid expulsion from their ancestral lands, Ho-Chunk leaders placed a bid on citizenship through an assertion of their “civilized” status. They hoped to obtain legal claims to land ownership in this “least bad option available” to them.^[7]

After removal, some of the Ho-Chunk bands remained in Wisconsin while others forged a path for themselves in the area around Blue Earth, a town in southern Minnesota. Kantrowitz discusses the different paths they took in attempting to preserve their families, their lands, and their way of life. Against the backdrop of the Civil War and the recent Dakota War, the Ho-Chunk were forced to walk a fine line in diplomacy to achieve these goals. With their acceptance of allotment in the Treaty of 1859, the Minnesota bands also signed an agreement that the president had the power to amend any previous treaty terms for any reason he deemed necessary. After attacks on settlers by some members of the Dakota tribes in 1862, President Abraham Lincoln signed legislation removing the Ho-Chunk from the land they had fought to maintain and sent them further west. While some members were able to stay around Blue Earth because of their mixed-race status, most underwent a horrific journey to the Crow Creek Reservation, during which hundreds died. In comparison, leaders of the Wisconsin bands were temporarily imprisoned, but they negotiated for peaceful restoration as simple nomadic traders on the outskirts of the settlement.

In the aftermath of the Civil War Congressmen quibbled over policies for Reconstruction and amendments guaranteeing the rights inherent to one’s American citizenship, regardless of race. In these discussions, there arose questions surrounding how those definitions applied to Indians. Only intended to grant citizenship to Black Americans on an equal standing to their white neighbors, the Civil Rights legislation presented in 1866 brought up additional concerns over inclusion or exclusion of “particular categories of Native people… [and the] unintended and often undesirable consequences of those formulations.”^[8] In his discussion of the debates over the “Indian question,” the author brings together the “myriad and divergent histories of settlers and their settler states and their complicated legacies of cultural interaction with Native communities.”^[9]

Rather than use the language of the Fourteenth Amendment to grant an equal citizenship to the indigenous populations, however, its final wording bestowed that status only on those under the jurisdiction of the federal government. Although ambiguously stated, it was understood to exclude any Indians not deemed acceptable by neighboring settlers and their elected representatives. An unlikely ally appeared in the form of “Democratic U.S. senator Allen Thurman of Ohio” who pointed out the hypocrisy in Republican enforcement of racial equality in the South but their abhorrence of it regarding the Indians.^[10] Thurman used their own political ploys and holier-than-thou admonitions against the Republicans, advancing the cause of the Ho-Chunk. The author’s references to Thurman and his rhetoric create a great sense of justice and amusement for his readers! It is especially encouraging to read how friendly, or at least sympathetic neighbors used mob force to hold back removal for some. By the time Kantrowitz arrives at the finale of his work, he has progressed through a series of amazing acts, whether providential or simply lucky, which enabled the Wisconsin Ho-Chunk to remain in their homeland.

Throughout his depiction of Ho-Chunk defiance, assimilation, persistence, and alliance, Stephen Kantrowitz draws from the histories of various tribes from regions across the United States in the nineteenth century. He compares their struggles to better highlight the terms of treaty negotiation the United States used and how the definitions of civilization and citizenship were refined. The Ho-Chunk rebuilt, as well as maintained, their nation in the years leading up to the Civil War. After its culmination and the abolition of slavery, new laws held provisions with which they were able to reassert themselves again. The Ho-Chunk won the “right to take up homesteads, the right to remain in the state, and even the right to vote.”^[11]

[1] Stephen Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023), 29.

[2] Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land, 23.

[3] Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land, 60.

[4] Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land, 70 and 69.

[5] Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land, 70.

[6] Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land, 67.

[7] Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land, 69.

[8] Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land, 108.

[9] Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land, 111-112.

[10] Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land, 140.

[11] Kantrowitz, Citizens of a Stolen Land, 154.