Did an expansionist desire for land contribute to the American Revolution? Learn about westward expansion.
Episode 33: The Settlement of the Midwest and the Founding of the United States
Transcript.
Joe: None of us can undo the fact. Right? Just a fact that the United States, from its colonial origins through its founding, favored white settlers and allowed the subjugation, enslavement, and exploitation of persons of color. This racist legacy continues to haunt us in ways that many of us are unaware of. Part of what I'm trying to do today is to show you how that legacy shapes this place and particularly our attitude towards native peoples.
Penny: Welcome to the Diversity and Inclusion for All project supported by Calvin University and the Calvin Institute for Christian Worship. Together, we'll listen to key perspectives, build our knowledge, inform our thinking, and get a little better equipped to engage our world.
This episode of the Diversity and Inclusion for All podcast of Calvin University highlights excerpts of a presentation by Calvin Professor Joe Kuilema, entitled “Our Country was Given to us by the Great Spirit, Settler Colonialism and the Treaty of 1821.” In this episode, we hear about practices and ways of thinking that shaped how European settlers went about settling what is now the United States.
Joe: My name is Joe Kuilema. I teach in Sociology and Social Work. So Jack Forbes, writing in 1992 on the 500th anniversary of Columbus, says that he believes the United States was started by a spirit of cannibalism. And when he says that he means that the people who came here who quote unquote discovered this place did not respect the people or the lands, right? And ended up in some essence eating that which might have supported them, destroying themselves … the consuming of another's life for one's own private purpose or profit…how he defines it.
How did we get here? How did Europeans get here? Part of that's Christianity. The popes issued a bunch of decrees known as bulls, papal bulls, declaring that anywhere there weren't Christian Europeans was empty - terra nullius. And you could take it and you could sell it and you could enslave it, and you could take that money and do what Christians were most fascinated with doing at the time, in 1095, which was crusades. They wanted to take land and take people in order to fund holy apocalyptic wars to take Jerusalem. So the first of these was in 1095 by Pope Urban, who also launched the first crusade, another papal bull, this one 1452. So these are rolling out over a 500 year period. This one, again saying to the Christian kings of Europe, go and subdue Muslims and pagans. Wherever you find them, you can make them your slaves. You can take their kingdoms, duke-doms, counties, principalities, dominions, and you can convert all of that to your profit. Right? Take it. Use it. Let's go get Jerusalem. This is, in fact, what animates Columbus. Little known fact: he was very much motivated by the desire to retake Jerusalem. He writes a letter in 1493 to Ferdinand and Isabella, saying, If you let me exploit these islands for another seven years, I can give you 50,000 cavalry to retake Jerusalem. He's obsessed with it. He's obsessed with getting gold. Take Jerusalem and doing whatever it takes to do that. He's also a deeply Christian man. He did devotions every day on the boat, celebrated communion. This was because of his Christianity, not in spite of it.
You've heard of Jamestown, right? 16 hundred, first folks get here. The Powhatans I remember mention Jack Forbes. His people were in this area. You get Pocahontas, which is not the story Disney told you … doesn't even marry John Smith, marries a guy named John Rolfe, who is significantly older. Pocahontas becomes Rebecca, which is maybe not as interesting to be Becky, and Becky unfortunately dies in 1617 in England, where she had been taken, probably from an illness she caught there. Her son that she had with John Rolfe is never really mentioned, and he comes back with his dad and fades into obscurity.
Penny: Colson Whitehead describes the early United States as quote Stolen bodies working stolen land. Professor Kuilema continues his presentation, outlining how in many ways the native lands were stolen and how the desire by white colonists to expand into and take Indian lands, including lands that were declared off-limits by Britain, was a factor in the colonial independence movement.
Joe: What I want to talk a lot about is land, right? So if we say the United States is founded on slavery and genocide, on stolen labor and stolen land, there's a lot of attention and including from myself on slavery and its role in founding. Nikole Hannah-Jones, who put together this 1819 project, I don't think is wrong, that slavery was one of the factors that motivated independence. But I'm going to make a case here to you that land was a big one.
The first European to get anywhere near where we are today was Étienne Brûlé. 1621. But he went up to St Lawrence and was later killed by some native peoples. For a long time Michigan is French. From 1621 until 1762, it's all France, right? New Canada. This all changes later. But Europeans at this time are only living at Michela-mackinaw, right at the tip of Michigan, and at Detroit Fort Pontchartrain du Détroitwhich was …there's my French accent…, which was founded in 1701, right?No one was anywhere in West Michigan. No one was anywhere around here. And even then, you're talking a couple of hundred Europeans.
So what happens? Land speculation is what happens. I'm going to talk to you a little bit about some companies out of Virginia, the Loyal Company of Virginia and the Ohio Company of Virginia.Virginia, you may know, was the big colony in colonial times. It was a powerhouse, and they wanted to be even bigger, so they wanted to speculate in land in the Ohio River Valley. The land in the Ohio River Valley was lush and good farmland, and they wanted it.
I said it was French for a long time until it wasn’t. The French and the British fight over this in the terribly named “French and Indian War” because it's really a war between the British and the French, with native people on both sides. Native people trying to survive by allying themselves with colonial powers that they thought would treat them better. Right. So this rages for a while. I'm not going to get too into it, but the long and short of it is that the French lose, and they have a big debate about whether they're going to keep Canada or they're going to keep an island of Guadeloupe in the Caribbean. And the French actually prioritize Guadeloupe over all of Canada because they can grow sugar there. And at this time, colonialism is mostly interested in slavery and sugar plantations.
So the British get Canada and with it, New Canada, which was Michigan.
All through this time, the people fighting are very clear that they think that native people are subhuman and ought to be killed by any means necessary. This is probably the most famous quote about this, but this is Jeffrey Amherst, who is fighting for the British, who would later become the Americans, saying “This is the vilest race of beings to ever infest the Earth.” And actually deliberately engaging in biological warfare. At the end of the war, King George, who you know from the Declaration of Independence, draws a line through the Appalachian Mountains. It's called the Proclamation of 1763. He says all this business of fighting over New Canada …over Michigan …is costing us too much. You can't go over there. That's going to be native land, right? So King George says, the 13 colonies, you have to stay on the sea side of that line.
Now the thing is, they already owned land on the other side of that line. So they don't like this. They hate this. And I would submit to you that this is this is definitely one of the drivers of the Declaration of Independence.
Also, at the end, you get some indigenous resistance. I'm going to talk about this a couple of times, but when I was growing up, we sort of talked about this as expansion into an empty country. Right? That was more or less never pushed back on. Everyone seemed fine with it. The opposite is the case at several junctures. Native people try as hard as they can to stop this. The first major one of these is Pontiac, not just a car. Chief Pontiac was Odawa chief. He was from in and around this community. And when he went to war in 1763, he had spent the previous summer in Grand Rapids in 1762, recruiting soldiers for this fight. Pontiac put together one of the first large scale pan-Indian confederacies. Up until this point, the U.S. government had been working single tribe by single tribe, And Pontiac went round and said, Look, we're getting we're getting killed this way, right? We have to come together to stop this. So he puts together a confederacy and goes to war with the United States and does quite well. Actually, there's a quote from him about this, right? “It's important for us, my brothers, that we exterminate from our lands, this nation which seeks to destroy us.”
One of the subsequent actions the next year…so that's 1763, right? Proclamation line comes out. Pontiac rebels because he doesn't want to be under British control. He felt much more comfortable with the French, who were largely leaving him alone. Right? So that's all part of the same deal. Right? We switch from French to British control. Pontiac tries to get independence at that moment. He’s put down, and then the United States starts paying people to scalp Indians. This is from the governor of Pennsylvania offering 150 Spanish dollars or pieces of eight for the scalp of any Native American male Pennsylvania. Not the only place to do this. We often associate scalping with native people, and that's certainly the propaganda that colonial media put out there. But we, as a government, were actually paying people bounties, more than you could earn in a year, for the scalp of a Native American.
We don't like the line who doesn't like the line. George Washington doesn't like the line. That's a younger George Washington. Not the usual pictures you see of him. But he fought in that war, right, with Pontiac and with other people and in the French and Indian war for the British, right. At this time, he was Lieutenant Colonel. Washington, as part of recruiting militia in Virginia, promises them 200,000 acres in the Ohio River Valley. He says, Hey, if you come with me to fight native people, I'll give you free land. So he's counting on having land on the other side of that line to pay back his soldiers.
He also has selected the best land among it for himself. In 1773, he bought personally 20,000 acres on the Ohio river. When he died in 1800, he had 52,194 acres in Virginia, Pennsylvania, Maryland, New York, Kentucky and Ohio. 81 square miles. If you look at just what that was worth in raw dollars at the time, it's about $780,000. Not so impressive. If you do inflation, it's about $15 million. Still not that impressive. I think the equation that I've seen that captures this the best is to look at his personal wealth compared to the entire GDP of the United States at the time, which is to say what slice of the entire economy of the United States was George Washington's? That makes sense? And if you do that calculation, he had about $26 billion. So, Washington was a land billionaire by any, I think, modern reasonable calculation. He stood to benefit from this tremendously. And again, he started his career as a land surveyor.
So, there's George Washington making his plans to enrich himself with land in the Ohio River Valley. Now again, we pitched the Revolutionary War as fought for principles of equality, democratic government. It was also fought for greed, right? Greed for land.
At the same time, we're increasing our brutality towards native people. People move in here. People looking for cheap land, right? For free land. And they kill the native people there. They do this in large part by getting them drunk, right? and then killing them for profit and then claiming that they had been attacked. This was not a war started by native people. I would say this is definitely started by terrorists. And then when they fought back to defend themselves, the colony of Virginia organized the 2000-man militia and invaded the Ohio River Valley. Again, this is not part of the United States. We've been explicitly told by King George to stay out of it. And here we are marching an army in. Lord Dunmore, who is the governor of Virginia at the time, said that his war was undoubtedly attended with circumstances of shocking inhumanity, but that it was worth it because the victory may be means of producing happy effects by impressing an idea of the power of the white people on the minds of the Indians.
When we declare independence, we flip the script and say it is the Indians who are attacking us and that's why we need independence. We don't mention that two years before this, we sent an army into the Ohio River Valley to attack them. Instead, we say, as justification 27, the final justification of the Declaration of Independence, right? We have a whole list of grievances with King George. And the last one is this one: He has excited domestic insurrections amongst us. That means slave rebellions. They were very afraid that the British would get their slaves to rebel against them and kill them, and endeavored to bring on the inhabitants of our frontiers, the merciless Indian savages whose known rule of warfare is an undistinguished destruction of all ages, sexes, and conditions. Sure, there were acts of inhumanity by native warriors against frontier's people, but they were largely provoked by those frontier’s people. Right? And certainly the most egregious examples were often the other way around.
This narrative, though the narrative that we had to defend ourselves from the natives. Right? Not that the natives needed to defend themselves from us and our westward expansion, but we had to defend ourselves from them was sold by all the politicians, including Ben Franklin. He put out a supplement to the Boston Independent Chronicle. Here's the thing: that doesn't exist. He made this up and what he said this was was an interception of a letter from Indian, from Seneca warlords to the British bragging about how many colonists they were killing. Right. So he said, we happened to intercept in sort of the emails type thing, right? We have to intercept this communication that was going to the British from these Native Americans who are bragging about how many people they've killed. And he said that the letter was accompanied by bags and bags of colonial scalps. Now, none of that was true, but he went into great detail right in bag number eight there were this many scalps of clergy people. In bag number nine there were this many scalps of girls. Right? Again, totally making up all of this.
He's doing this in 1782 because the war is not going well. We declare independence in 1776, but we don't get it until 1783. So we're still fighting and people are beginning to be like, maybe we're better off with the British. And Franklin and other people are very interested in a narrative that says, No, we're not. Look, the British are collaborating with native people to kill us, right? This feeds independence fervor among people, but it's always been this sort of racialized thing.
Then we win the war, right? The Treaty of Paris signed in the name of the most holy and unchanging Trinity. So, we end the war, but we have designs on what was New Quebec from the very beginning. Now this is 1784. We’ve won the war, but we don't even have a constitution yet. And I think that's an important detail. Even before we signed the Constitution, we're already saying we're going to take this land. 1821, where we actually take the land, is a long way off. But even as we're putting the country together, we obviously intend to take it, right. This was always part of the plan.
We signed the Constitution. We the people. And wouldn't you know it? The native people are like, No, thank you. Not really interested in this. We would like you out of here. This is the second great attempt to push back the United States.
So you had Pontiac’s war after the French and Indian War. And then you have what's variously called Little Turtle’s War or the War of the Western Confederacy. Again, native people come together and say, we have to work together. So Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, the Shawnees and Little Turtle of the Miami's bring together a huge again group of native people and fight against the United States. They actually achieve the single most devastating defeat of the United States that has ever taken place. It's called St Clair’s defeat. George Washington sends a general name St Clair to attack Little Turtle and Blue Jacket, and he engages them in a battle and they kill 97% of the colonial army. Over 1000 people go in. 24 Europeans come out. So we rebrand the entire army and call it the legion of the United States. We put it under control of Anthony Mad Wayne. And he goes out and defeats Blue Jacket and Little Turtle and takes the Miami capital of Kekionga, which is a community of several thousand people, demolishes it, and builds someplace that you probably know today is Fort Wayne. Michigan, for a while was entirely known as Wayne County of the Northwest Territory. So Wayne County Detroit comes from the fact that for a while it was all named after this guy.
Yeah, so Indiana is called Indiana because it was supposed to be a perpetual home for Indians. Anthony Wayne said, Hey, I'm going to take Kekionga, but the land over there is Indiana. That's Indian land. You can keep it forever. Now that lasted about 20 years. Forever tends to be about 15 to 20 years when the United States says it for the next hundred years. But as you can see right there, the whole territory is called Indiana. It was going to be an Indian territory.
We get into another fight with the British. They burned down the White House. That's pretty humiliating. And you get the person that most people would say is the most famous Native American. Tecumseh was from the Panther clan of the Shawnee. His name means shooting star. He fought in Little Turtle’s War and then again in the War of 1812. You can see native people seizing moments of possibility for their independence. Right? So after the French and Indian war, right after the creation of the United States, during the War of 1812, they're saying, Is this a window where we can finally secure a future for our people. And Tecumseh steps into that in the War of 1812 and just before with his brother …is known as the prophet… Tecumseh and his brothers start a village in Indiana that's called Prophets Town. And it draws between six and 10,000 people, making it by far the largest settlement of people anywhere in this entire region. So it's this massive settlement. And of course, the United States attacks it, led by a guy named William Harry Henry Harrison, who goes on to be president, and he is elected virtually entirely on this accomplishment. If you've ever heard the phrase Tippecanoe and Tyler, too, it's an ancient political slogan that refers to the Battle of Tippecanoe, where William Henry Harrison attacked Prophets Town when he knew Tecumseh was gone. So he attacks. Prophets Town is defeated and burned to the ground. But Tecumseh survives and goes on to fight with his British allies against the United States again to try to achieve independence. He's ultimately killed on October 5, 1813, at the Battle of Thames near Lake Erie, and the man who supposedly kills him goes on to be vice president of the United States on the strength of his having killed Tecumseh. It's a really sort of tragic tale.
Now, to get to Grand Rapids, the connection here is that the local Odawa chief Noahquageshik or Chief New Day was at that battle and received Tecumseh’s hatchet and hat, so he carries on the legacy of Tecumseh into the future.
Michigan. Lewis Cass. So there's a Cass Street, right by my house, Cass County, Cass Tech School, all these named after Lewis Cass. Lewis Cass was not a very good person. So, he is the first governor of Michigan, the first governor of the Michigan territory. He's a general who fought in 1812, and is sort of given this spot because of his military service. So, he says, the creator intended the Earth to be reclaimed, and we don't want to leave the land in a state of perpetual unproductiveness. We have to make the land productive. When we came here, when our forefathers came here, they found it in a state of nature, traversed but not occupied by wandering hordes of barbarians.
We talk about these treaties now, but remember, the US government had laid this out back before the Constitution was signed the northwest territory, right. So now they're just getting to it. And they basically force these treaties down these communities’ throats at the barrel of a gun and a bottle of whiskey. Right? Their standard operating procedure is to roll into town with troops and huge amounts of booze. Get everybody drunk. Sign the treaty while the troops are sitting over there and call it good and happy, right? They do this all over the Midwest.
Same thing happens with the Treaty of Chicago. Lewis Cass again goes and again, people are like, we don't want to do this. So much so that Noonday, who is who I mentioned, who had to pumps of stuff was very much the leader of West Michigan, he's not even at this conference, right? He says, I'm not going. I have no intention of selling lands.
So Cass negotiates it with people he knows don't even really have the authority to negotiate what they're negotiating. And even then, the people who show up say, We don't want this. Unequivocally. And this is recorded in our own documents. Matea says a long time has passed since we first came upon our lands and our old people have sunk into their graves. They had sense. We are all young and foolish. We do not wish to do anything they would not approve, were they living. We are fearful. We shall offend their spirits if we sell our lands. We are fearful. We shall offend you if we do not sell. This has caused great perplexity of thought because we have counseled among ourselves and do not know how we can part with the land. Our country was given to us by the great spirit who gave it to us to hunt upon, to make our cornfields fields upon, to live upon, and to make our beds upon when we die. And he would never forgive us should we bargain it away. Right, so this is the literal recorded speech of the guy Cass is negotiating with. This doesn't sound like a yes to me, right? This does not sound like a yes to me. And in fact, he's framing it very much as this is the land God put aside for us, right? And there's a theological question at play here about who the great spirit is, about is about what God really thinks about Manifest Destiny. Certainly, the settler colonialists said God wanted them to have the land. And here, Matea says, the great spirit wants us to maintain the land. You have to think about what you believe about that.
Now he did, right, at least according to the government. He sold them the land for $5,000 and a blacksmith and a school that were built at what's now the site of the Grand … Gerald R. Ford [Museum]. So at the time of the Treaty of 1821, everything on the other side of the Grand River remained Indian country for at least the next 15 years until it was also taken.
Key themes: settler colonialism and missionary activity was part of a Christian narrative about race, place, identity, and land. We were the people, white people who were going to make the land productive. The native people never really owned it, and they were racially inferior and didn't deserve it. That's a clear narrative. This idea about greed. The exploitation of both the Earth and the people. Today we talk about environmental justice that you have to care for the people and the place together. Indigenous resistance, there's always been there and it's still there today. And then finally, the idea of racist ideas justifying benevolent behavior and racist policy. All through our history, we have had this problem largely because our history again parallels the development of racial science. So there's always been a tie between conquest, colonialism, Christianity, and an apocalyptic end of the world eschatology.
Penny: If you're interested in learning more specifically about the Midwest and how Indiana and Michigan went from being Indian lands to settled states, listen to our next episode where we explore the history of the native peoples of West Michigan.
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