This concise and revealing history reconsiders the Civil War era by centering one Native American tribe's encounter with citizenship. In 1837, eleven years before Wisconsin's admission as a state, representatives of the Ho-Chunk people yielded under immense duress and signed a treaty that ceded their remaining ancestral lands to the U.S. government. Over the four decades that followed, as "free soil" settlement repeatedly demanded their further expulsion, many Ho-Chunk people lived under the U.S. government's policies of "civilization," allotment, and citizenship. Others lived as outlaws, evading military campaigns to expel them and adapting their ways of life to new circumstances. After the Civil War, as Reconstruction's vision of nonracial, national, birthright citizenship excluded most Native Americans, the Ho-Chunk who remained in their Wisconsin homeland understood and exploited this contradiction. Professing eagerness to participate in the postwar nation, they gained the right to remain in Wisconsin as landowners and voters while retaining their language, culture, and identity as a people. This history of Ho-Chunk sovereignty and citizenship offer a bracing new perspective on citizenship's perils and promises, the way the broader nineteenth-century conflict between "free soil" and slaveholding expansion shaped Indigenous life, and the continuing impact of Native people's struggles and claims on U.S. politics and society.
Stephen Kantrowitz is Plaenert-Bascom and Vilas Distinguished Achievement Professor of History at the University of Wisconsin-Madison.
Citizens of a Stolen Land is a model of braiding local stories to national metanarratives. Concise and lucid, this book deserves a wide readership among those trying to understand America in the nineteenth century."--Journal of American History Kantrowitz adds intriguing nuance to the intersection of race and citizenship. . . . Today, Ho-Chunk members own nearly nine thousand acres in Wisconsin, some individually and some in tribal trust, a small portion of their historic territory. It is, nonetheless, a profound example of cultural endurance and, as Kantrowitz makes clear, part of a larger story of race and citizenship in the United States."--Middle West Review As historians seek to better understand the Civil War's wide-ranging consequences, Kantrowitz provides a model for understanding how the war challenged and changed ideas about race and citizenship--and how marginalized groups used the conflict to assert their rights as Americans."--The Civil War Monitor
