Citizens of a Stolen Land - (Steven and Janice Brose Lectures in the Civil War Era) by Stephen Kantrowitz (Paperback)

About the Book

"In this book, Steven Kantrowitz explores the transformations of American citizenship in the Civil War era through the history of the Ho-Chunk people. Kantrowitz has had opportunity to work closely with members of the Ho-Chunk tribe, whose home territory centers around Madison, and this work grows out of his interest in their particular struggles for citizenship and recognition"--

Book Synopsis

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.

Review Quotes

"A careful narrative analysis of the history of the Ho-Chunk peoples in their relations with the engulfing power and contradictory agendas of the imperial U.S. republic across the 1800s."--Journal of Social History

"Creative [and] elegant. . . . As Americans continue to debate to whom they will extend a pathway to citizenship in ways that echo the deeply white supremacist past iterations of this conflict, Kantrowitz reminds us not to ignore the complexity of that exalted status."--Journal of the Civil War Era

"Citizens of a Stolen Land is an excellent book that does what we all want our scholarship to do. It makes a complicated story accessible without making it simple and enriches our understanding of the world in the process."--American Historical 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."--Civil War Monitor

"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

"This book tells heartbreaking stories of desperation, loss, and Indigenous persistence over a colonial power. . . . [Kantrowitz] helps to provide detailed information regarding the ways Great Lakes Tribes persisted through bullying, murder, deceit, and, in most cases, removal from their homelands."--Aatotankiki Myaamiaki