Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611

  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States

Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States

Connolly, Emilie

Hardcover

19th Century United States History

ISBN10: 0691240124
ISBN13: 9780691240121
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Published: Nov 25 2025
Pages: 336
Weight: 1.60
Height: 1.34 Width: 6.22 Depth: 9.29
Language: English

WINNER OF THE BANCROFT PRIZE

How a system of colonial trusteeship converted Native wealth into settler capital

From the earliest days of its founding, the United States set its sights on Native territory. Amid better-known Indian wars, the federal government quietly built an empire by treaty, offering payments to Native peoples for their land. Routinely inadequate, these payments were nonetheless pivotal because federal officials chose not to deliver them as a lump sum. Instead, the government kept the bulk of payments owed to Native nations under its own control as a trustee, and made access to future installments contingent on Native compliance. In Vested Interests, Emilie Connolly describes how a system of fiduciary colonialism seized a continent from its original inhabitants--and, ironically, furnished Native peoples with financial resources that sustained their nations.

Connolly documents two centuries of dispossession in the guise of fiduciary benevolence. Acting as both dispossessor and trustee, the federal government invested Native wealth in state bonds that financed banks, canals, and other infrastructural projects that enabled the country to expand further westward. Meanwhile, Native peoples protected the money they did receive for future generations, investing it in their own institutions and mounting legal challenges to hold their trustees accountable. Still, federal trusteeship placed tight constraints on Native economies with the aim of containing Native power, forcing nations to endure through sheer resilience and ingenuity. By chronicling the long history of Native land dispossession through financial paternalism, Vested Interests reveals the unequal dividends of colonialism in the United States.

Also in

19th Century United States History

View All