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Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
Against long odds, the Anishinaabeg resisted removal, retaining thousands of acres of their homeland in what is now Michigan, Wisconsin, and Minnesota. Their success rested partly on their roles as sellers of natural resources and buyers of trade goods, which made them key players in the political economy of plunder that drove white settlement and U.S. development in the Old Northwest. But, as Michael Witgen demonstrates, the credit for Native persistence rested with the Anishinaabeg themselves. Outnumbering white settlers well into the nineteenth century, they leveraged their political savvy to advance a dual citizenship that enabled mixed-race tribal members to lay claim to a place in U.S. civil society. Telling the stories of mixed-race traders and missionaries, tribal leaders and territorial governors, Witgen challenges our assumptions about the inevitability of U.S. expansion. Deeply researched and passionately written, Seeing Red will command attention from readers who are invested in the enduring issues of equality, equity, and national belonging at its core.
384 pages, Hardcover
First published February 22, 2022
39 people are currently reading
2867 people want to read
About the author
Michael John Witgen
1 book10 followersMichael Witgen is a professor in the Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia University, and he is a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe. He specializes in Indigenous and Early North American history, comparative borderlands, and the history of the early American Republic.
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Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews
August 9, 2023
This is another must-read book on indigenous history in the U. S. It starts out well, structuring the narrative on the stories of an abortive "revolution" and of a white boy captured and raised as indigenous and his travels and travails that reveal the complexity of American expansion. The middle and last parts of the book are much less compelling writing because of the lack of this narrative structure, falling back on repetitive and detailed (and very well documented) history of treaties and their outcomes.
The title misleads a bit, as this history focuses almost entirely on the Anishinaabeg doodemag (clans) in the "Old Northwest" around the Great Lakes, and on the first part of the nineteenth century. It does include some material on Canada, but not much, and very little about the even bigger plunders of other indigenous peoples (California's development, for example, does not appear at all).
I would also argue that the term "political economy of plunder," which Witgen uses so extensively that it really ought to be an acronym (PEP :) ) is not well defined. I infer he means something like what we're now calling "systemic racism" and related to "critical race theory" as a coherent analysis of the sociopolitical causes and impacts of racism. He never uses these terms, to be clear. The overall drift of Witgen's arguments is that the U. S. government and its representatives and institutions are examples of "settler colonialism," a strand of political economy very popular these days. I found his evidence and explanation of this aspect totally convincing. The other drift is that the Anishinaabeg were able to pretty much remain on at least a part of their native lands because of strong leaders and resistance. My reading is that they got a bit lucky because of political turmoil in the U. S. federal government in the antebellum era. Other examples of tribal survival on their native lands are the Navajo and the Pueblo indigenous peoples, which he doesn't talk about. So all this feeds into the current interest in indigenous survival, as opposed to the increasingly dubious extinction concept. My problem with it as a theory-oriented political scientist is that he never really clarifies the institutional and cultural systems involved in PEP and how they were created, changed, and eventually crested. A systems approach to this might allow for a more coherent narrative by providing a systematic and systemic framework around which he could have hung the personal narratives he develops from the reports and journals he extensively uses. His book, his methods, though.
The other strand of analysis in the book addresses the whole concept of mixed-race individuals and the impact of indigenous women on the whole process. There are brief (very brief) comparisons to the Black mixed-race concepts, but the history of indigenous mixed-race people is much more complex and economically fascinating, particularly in the French-dominated areas of the country. The ability of these individuals to maintain status (political and economic) is fascinating, while at the same time variable in the extreme as different political and economic winds blow through the region. This is, unfortunately, where the book kind of bogs down in writing, losing the strong narrative qualities of the earlier part of the book. Still, fascinating. I would have liked to see more emphasis on the women, but that's always difficult in 200-year-old history due to lack of historical records for women (particularly lack of oral histories).
So I had to take away one star, but I think this book will be a classic in the developing history of the region and period. Regional indigenous history (California, the Southwest, etc.) is becoming the most interesting writing in this area, especially because each region has a completely different system at work. There is no such thing as general history of the indigenous peoples of North America (or South America, or Australia); that's a misconception based on current geopolitical reality, not actual history. At least, that's my take. Historians need to own this complexity and start delving more deeply into the regional systems instead of trying to prove things from the U. S. political history side. That just doesn't work, and it short-changes the actual history of the indigenous peoples involved.
The title misleads a bit, as this history focuses almost entirely on the Anishinaabeg doodemag (clans) in the "Old Northwest" around the Great Lakes, and on the first part of the nineteenth century. It does include some material on Canada, but not much, and very little about the even bigger plunders of other indigenous peoples (California's development, for example, does not appear at all).
I would also argue that the term "political economy of plunder," which Witgen uses so extensively that it really ought to be an acronym (PEP :) ) is not well defined. I infer he means something like what we're now calling "systemic racism" and related to "critical race theory" as a coherent analysis of the sociopolitical causes and impacts of racism. He never uses these terms, to be clear. The overall drift of Witgen's arguments is that the U. S. government and its representatives and institutions are examples of "settler colonialism," a strand of political economy very popular these days. I found his evidence and explanation of this aspect totally convincing. The other drift is that the Anishinaabeg were able to pretty much remain on at least a part of their native lands because of strong leaders and resistance. My reading is that they got a bit lucky because of political turmoil in the U. S. federal government in the antebellum era. Other examples of tribal survival on their native lands are the Navajo and the Pueblo indigenous peoples, which he doesn't talk about. So all this feeds into the current interest in indigenous survival, as opposed to the increasingly dubious extinction concept. My problem with it as a theory-oriented political scientist is that he never really clarifies the institutional and cultural systems involved in PEP and how they were created, changed, and eventually crested. A systems approach to this might allow for a more coherent narrative by providing a systematic and systemic framework around which he could have hung the personal narratives he develops from the reports and journals he extensively uses. His book, his methods, though.
The other strand of analysis in the book addresses the whole concept of mixed-race individuals and the impact of indigenous women on the whole process. There are brief (very brief) comparisons to the Black mixed-race concepts, but the history of indigenous mixed-race people is much more complex and economically fascinating, particularly in the French-dominated areas of the country. The ability of these individuals to maintain status (political and economic) is fascinating, while at the same time variable in the extreme as different political and economic winds blow through the region. This is, unfortunately, where the book kind of bogs down in writing, losing the strong narrative qualities of the earlier part of the book. Still, fascinating. I would have liked to see more emphasis on the women, but that's always difficult in 200-year-old history due to lack of historical records for women (particularly lack of oral histories).
So I had to take away one star, but I think this book will be a classic in the developing history of the region and period. Regional indigenous history (California, the Southwest, etc.) is becoming the most interesting writing in this area, especially because each region has a completely different system at work. There is no such thing as general history of the indigenous peoples of North America (or South America, or Australia); that's a misconception based on current geopolitical reality, not actual history. At least, that's my take. Historians need to own this complexity and start delving more deeply into the regional systems instead of trying to prove things from the U. S. political history side. That just doesn't work, and it short-changes the actual history of the indigenous peoples involved.
February 15, 2024
I live in a part of what was deemed The Northwest Territories and am especially interested in history about the area.
Seeing Red is a good broad overview of treaties, scams and violence the U.S used to encroach on Anishinaabe land focusing mostly on what is now Northern Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin. The author gives a lot of primary source evidence of how desperate the white settlers were to declare that the idea of the "vanishing Indian" was a fact.
In part because of geography and the type of white settlers that came to the area the various groups that make up the Anishinaabe not only didn't vanish, they were not quiet and continuously forced the white settlers and government officials to acknowledge and reckon with that fact.
Personally, the last two chapters were of most interest to me because I knew the least about the fight . They focus on the the attempts by some U.S. officials to "force" groups of the Anishinaabe to stay out of the part of Wisconsin they wanted by changing where the location for payment of the annuities could be collected. It was a disaster.
A leader in the Anishnaabe traveled to D.C. (even as officials tried to stop him along the way) and managed to get an audience with the President even after he had been first turned away. Because of that and a great deal of lobbying his group of Anishnaabe were not relocated and the reservations were on the traditional land that his people had occupied for a long time.
The author goes to some length to show how the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and its abolition on slavery might have kept large scale chattel slavery out of the territory but not slavery itself. The book refuses to silo the government's Native American policy away from the rest of U.S. history. It should be impossible to talk about black and white relations without reckoning with Native American history. It was all happening at once; it is like trying to put a puzzle together without the box and pieces missing.
I need to read more and this book (especially the end of the book) helped point me in a direction to focus on.
Seeing Red is a good broad overview of treaties, scams and violence the U.S used to encroach on Anishinaabe land focusing mostly on what is now Northern Indiana, Michigan and Wisconsin. The author gives a lot of primary source evidence of how desperate the white settlers were to declare that the idea of the "vanishing Indian" was a fact.
In part because of geography and the type of white settlers that came to the area the various groups that make up the Anishinaabe not only didn't vanish, they were not quiet and continuously forced the white settlers and government officials to acknowledge and reckon with that fact.
Personally, the last two chapters were of most interest to me because I knew the least about the fight . They focus on the the attempts by some U.S. officials to "force" groups of the Anishinaabe to stay out of the part of Wisconsin they wanted by changing where the location for payment of the annuities could be collected. It was a disaster.
A leader in the Anishnaabe traveled to D.C. (even as officials tried to stop him along the way) and managed to get an audience with the President even after he had been first turned away. Because of that and a great deal of lobbying his group of Anishnaabe were not relocated and the reservations were on the traditional land that his people had occupied for a long time.
The author goes to some length to show how the Northwest Ordinance of 1787 and its abolition on slavery might have kept large scale chattel slavery out of the territory but not slavery itself. The book refuses to silo the government's Native American policy away from the rest of U.S. history. It should be impossible to talk about black and white relations without reckoning with Native American history. It was all happening at once; it is like trying to put a puzzle together without the box and pieces missing.
I need to read more and this book (especially the end of the book) helped point me in a direction to focus on.
March 10, 2025
extremely informative, a little dry at times, but a very important book
February 10, 2024
Super important. Can be a little dense at times but essential reading for understanding some of the historical context for the socio-political climate today
September 27, 2025
I haven’t read many arguments as beautifully and meticulously crafted as the argument presented here by Michael John Witgen.
I have never read such a beautiful and sorrowful argument as this one.
If you are like me, you have read many treatments of the now, generally accepted claim that the United States was founded on the logic of theft, genocide, and settler colonialism. There are many such arguments written by many incredibly sharp, well-read, scholarly juggernauts. But Witgen made me see this argument anew.
Witgen’s claim is that the United States, understood as that vast experiment in democracy and mass literacy, was only possible because of the triad of slavery, plunder, and a complex fantasy about the native peoples already in the ‘untouched’ wilderness of the land. This argument is beautifully made in the form of a case that moves from the topos of the smaller to the larger. Witgen selects one case from the archive – a story of a young white man raised by a community of native people; a murder trial in American territory between people of “mixed race,” and several treaty negotiations reconstructed via journals of those present and the official reports to the Department of the Interior or the Secretary of War at the time. The book focuses on the acquisition and settlement of what was called the Northwest territory, currently the states of Michigan and Wisconsin.
It's an amazing way to make the case from the ground up how rhetorically and materially the argument that the United States was destined to occupy and settle native land. This argument is made exquisitely to convey that Americans in the 18th and 19th century held simultaneously the belief that the forests of the Northwest Territory were pristine and uninhabited, that native people lived in those forests organized into political units termed ‘tribes,’ those political units were not using the land because they were not mining it/clear cutting it/using it for grazing and farming, and the native American was “naturally” vanishing from these places as a part of the evolution or progress of society.
These are complex beliefs to simultaneously hold. Witgen does them justice through the stories of individuals who, simultaneously traded and exploited the native settlements, was close with them, intermarried with them, and sometimes moved between settler colonial borders and the less rigorously defined wilderness of the first peoples. Witgen’s command of the archive brings to us the voices of the people of many perspectives living and working in the Northwest Territory, often at cross purposes, expressing to us how the ideology of conquest, plunder, slavery, exploitation, and ethnic cleansing worked to make the story true, that the native way of life was evaporating in the face of inevitable civilization.
Witgen connects large swaths of American history with eloquence, grace, and compelling argument. He moves from the era of fur trading posts, French, British, and American all the way to the 1920s and the revision of treaties to allow the sale of “Indian Land” to settlers willing to make the land “productive” as farmers. The presence of native people, even in the narrative that they are vanishing, never fades from view in the narratives, even of those who deeply believe that colonialism is a positive good, such as Lewis Cass, Michigan territorial governor and Indian liaison who figures large in the narrative. To see how his reasoning, expressed in his letters and in accounts of his speech in journals, was both distant from and directly linked to a politics of eradication and exploitation illuminated just how easy it is to support a logic of ethnic cleansing while believing you are working in the name and spirit of an objectively good progress. Terrifying, and a case any of us could be embroiled in, given a certain context.
This book is essential reading for all Americans, all interested in the history of American republicanism, and for those who are interested in how the material evidence in the archive can be expertly used to create arguments about contemporary settler colonialism or genocide that are persuasive and overwhelming. I believe that this historical investigation is on par with the best out there. It’s undeniable, horrifying, and, in the end, is something all of us living in the United States have to contend with. We are here not because native people aren’t here; it is because they were systematically removed either from the land or from existence through a very easy to believe set of ideas that appeared natural, good, and progressive at the time. This book will give you pause.
I have never read such a beautiful and sorrowful argument as this one.
If you are like me, you have read many treatments of the now, generally accepted claim that the United States was founded on the logic of theft, genocide, and settler colonialism. There are many such arguments written by many incredibly sharp, well-read, scholarly juggernauts. But Witgen made me see this argument anew.
Witgen’s claim is that the United States, understood as that vast experiment in democracy and mass literacy, was only possible because of the triad of slavery, plunder, and a complex fantasy about the native peoples already in the ‘untouched’ wilderness of the land. This argument is beautifully made in the form of a case that moves from the topos of the smaller to the larger. Witgen selects one case from the archive – a story of a young white man raised by a community of native people; a murder trial in American territory between people of “mixed race,” and several treaty negotiations reconstructed via journals of those present and the official reports to the Department of the Interior or the Secretary of War at the time. The book focuses on the acquisition and settlement of what was called the Northwest territory, currently the states of Michigan and Wisconsin.
It's an amazing way to make the case from the ground up how rhetorically and materially the argument that the United States was destined to occupy and settle native land. This argument is made exquisitely to convey that Americans in the 18th and 19th century held simultaneously the belief that the forests of the Northwest Territory were pristine and uninhabited, that native people lived in those forests organized into political units termed ‘tribes,’ those political units were not using the land because they were not mining it/clear cutting it/using it for grazing and farming, and the native American was “naturally” vanishing from these places as a part of the evolution or progress of society.
These are complex beliefs to simultaneously hold. Witgen does them justice through the stories of individuals who, simultaneously traded and exploited the native settlements, was close with them, intermarried with them, and sometimes moved between settler colonial borders and the less rigorously defined wilderness of the first peoples. Witgen’s command of the archive brings to us the voices of the people of many perspectives living and working in the Northwest Territory, often at cross purposes, expressing to us how the ideology of conquest, plunder, slavery, exploitation, and ethnic cleansing worked to make the story true, that the native way of life was evaporating in the face of inevitable civilization.
Witgen connects large swaths of American history with eloquence, grace, and compelling argument. He moves from the era of fur trading posts, French, British, and American all the way to the 1920s and the revision of treaties to allow the sale of “Indian Land” to settlers willing to make the land “productive” as farmers. The presence of native people, even in the narrative that they are vanishing, never fades from view in the narratives, even of those who deeply believe that colonialism is a positive good, such as Lewis Cass, Michigan territorial governor and Indian liaison who figures large in the narrative. To see how his reasoning, expressed in his letters and in accounts of his speech in journals, was both distant from and directly linked to a politics of eradication and exploitation illuminated just how easy it is to support a logic of ethnic cleansing while believing you are working in the name and spirit of an objectively good progress. Terrifying, and a case any of us could be embroiled in, given a certain context.
This book is essential reading for all Americans, all interested in the history of American republicanism, and for those who are interested in how the material evidence in the archive can be expertly used to create arguments about contemporary settler colonialism or genocide that are persuasive and overwhelming. I believe that this historical investigation is on par with the best out there. It’s undeniable, horrifying, and, in the end, is something all of us living in the United States have to contend with. We are here not because native people aren’t here; it is because they were systematically removed either from the land or from existence through a very easy to believe set of ideas that appeared natural, good, and progressive at the time. This book will give you pause.
February 17, 2024
As attempts are made to pull aside the curtain of systemic racism, this fabulous book pulls the curtain entirely down. This is the history we should have learned ---the history of America and Plunder Economics, because that is where our national wealth started: plunder economics, slave economics, indentured servant economics, and the current struggle to maintain a wealth that was based on false labor and colonial conquest of land. The author writes brilliantly about how we built in racism regarding native people and black people and details the laws and documents that make his case. Witgen focuses on the beginning of European conquest and the Northwest Territory, the area lying west of Pennsylvania, north of the Ohio River, east of the Mississippi River, and south of the Great Lakes.
I wish I could write more eloquently about how this book impacted my knowledge and give it the words it deserves to put it on everyone's shelves. It is one of the three most important books I have read in the last three months.
Read it.
I wish I could write more eloquently about how this book impacted my knowledge and give it the words it deserves to put it on everyone's shelves. It is one of the three most important books I have read in the last three months.
Read it.
February 4, 2025
In this book, Witgen analyzes events of the early 19t century in the Great Lakes region of the U.S. through the prism of the Anishinaabeg tribe and the treaties they negotiated with the federal government. He argues that these coercive treaties dispossessed the Anishinaabegs of their land and was the mechanism the government used for a strategy the author calls “the political economy of plunder.” He further asserts that the U.S. stole the land from Native people and that these acts are on a par with slavery and racism.
A crux of the historiographical argument is whether or not Native Americans “owned” the land and thus had it “stolen” from them. Witgen does not engage in this debate and just treats Native ownership as presuppositional. He uses the term “plunder,” obviously as a pejorative, but his argument is undermined by the fact that the treaties provided trusts and annuities for the Natives. This is a decent book as “history for history’s sake,” but misses the mark in supporting his argument.
A crux of the historiographical argument is whether or not Native Americans “owned” the land and thus had it “stolen” from them. Witgen does not engage in this debate and just treats Native ownership as presuppositional. He uses the term “plunder,” obviously as a pejorative, but his argument is undermined by the fact that the treaties provided trusts and annuities for the Natives. This is a decent book as “history for history’s sake,” but misses the mark in supporting his argument.
November 12, 2025
I really am torn how to rate this book, because I do believe that the topic is important and needs to be discussed, because no one has a guarantee that tomorrow the land that they call their own can be taken from them. It is devastating how this atrocity came to be, only because of new settlers and their greed for more land and workforce. Taking advantage of well-meaning people who are ready to share their birthplace with you, and you decide that you have to swindle them and thing of them as lesser human beings is truly aggravating.
This book follows the Anishinaabeg tribes, who in midst of all this chaos managed to fight back this unjust system, and through savvy decisions manage to negotiate their way into keeping their land in the Great Lakes region.
I liked the topic, but the book itself is a bit too dense sometimes, and although I went with the audiobook, it was difficult to concentrate at times.
This book follows the Anishinaabeg tribes, who in midst of all this chaos managed to fight back this unjust system, and through savvy decisions manage to negotiate their way into keeping their land in the Great Lakes region.
I liked the topic, but the book itself is a bit too dense sometimes, and although I went with the audiobook, it was difficult to concentrate at times.
January 27, 2025
It’s just so much easier to call people racist, imperialist pigs than to painstakingly detail the realities of history in language that is accurate, academic, and irrefutable. Unfortunately, both methods of communicating are largely destined to be ineffective – given the cultural resistance to truth that seems intrinsic to our society. Library shelves groan under the weight of books like this; books that will go unread by those most deprived of their knowledge. That said, I appreciated the deep dive that Seeing Red takes into accounting for the resilience of the Anishinaabe people to the sustained attempt to remove them from their land. Witgen carefully explains the economic intentions and realities of various treaties and annuity payments in a way that fully exposes the maliciousness of government policy. This isn’t a fast or an easy read, but it’s clear and definitive.
January 23, 2024
There is a lot here and it can be a bit off-putting, but there are very human stories as well as the context for how it happens.
In the epilogue there is a picture of a poster from 1920 offering Indian lands for sale, even that recently, in twelve states (including Oregon).
The phrase that repeats is "the political economy of plunder" and it is apt, and it still has its fans, but it is poison. It is easy to see a lack of choices on one side and a lack of will on the other then, and we can't do anything about that, but we surely should be able to do something now.
In the epilogue there is a picture of a poster from 1920 offering Indian lands for sale, even that recently, in twelve states (including Oregon).
The phrase that repeats is "the political economy of plunder" and it is apt, and it still has its fans, but it is poison. It is easy to see a lack of choices on one side and a lack of will on the other then, and we can't do anything about that, but we surely should be able to do something now.
July 6, 2024
Excellent read on the "settlement" of the Northwest Territory; so it included the way the US took Indigenous lands in OH, IL, IN, MI and WI. "Plunder" is the key word here. I learned so much about the horrible things we did. We caused a "Wisconsin Death March" when the Ojibwa from WI were forced to travel to MN for they annual annuities in October; they were given spoiled rations and many died on their way back to Wisconsin. It was a very difficult read because of the amount of detail but very enlightening.
August 10, 2023
Interesting untold history of American Western expansion and its economy of plunder of Indigenous land to build its empire. It goes into a very deep and detailed account of how the Anishanaabe and other Indigenous people were essentially swindled into ceding almost all of their land to the United States for almost nothing. The avarice of this country is unfortunate.
July 9, 2024
Interesting construction of early American settlement, yet political economy feels almost incidental. Its treatment of the death of the middle-ground, for example, feels somewhat undone, as though Witgen has an argument of crushing insight on the tip of his tongue, but without the exact words to express it.
February 3, 2023
The political economy of plunder framing Witgen explores works really well at explaining the history of this region, particularly around treaty negotiations and management of Indian policy in the Early Republic period.
October 27, 2023
Witgen does very well at using primary sources to explain and provide the context around early plundering of America from the indigenous people. The behavior of the Americans is well explained, however, there could have been more detail on the indigenous perspectives.
December 1, 2023
Another perspective of the greed and exploitation of colonial America. Witgen's detail of the progression of land grabs in the upper Midwest is well documented. Helps with the understanding of treaty rights as they exist today.
May 24, 2024
An important book to read for a greater understanding of the intentional steps taken to get us to where we are. A good companion to James Daschuk's Clearing the Plains to encompass Canadian and American colonial experiences.
June 24, 2025
a bit unoriginal. wish he would’ve spent more time on black and indigenous experiences as promised in his introduction. but good regardless. political economy of plunder is not particularly innovative but it does put a term to a very specific aspect of american settler colonialism!
February 17, 2023
KSKS
This entire review has been hidden because of spoilers.
Want to read
December 22, 20232023 Pulitzer Prize for history finalist
January 5, 2024
A meticulously researched and needed history about the systematic takeover of Native lands in the Northwest Territories during the late 1700's and early 1800's. The book focuses on Ohio, Michigan and Wisconsin showing a variety of forces colluding such as bad treaties and how tribes were strong armed into signing them. There is much focus on mixed race "half breeds" who played a key role in these territories. To a lesser extent Witgen shows the differences in how natives were treated in the South and the role slavery played in all this. A great study.
Read
February 24, 2024Note to self, interesting and important but too dense to follow as an audiobook, return to it in print
December 10, 2024
Read for a class in graduate school. Not my favorite, not my least favorite. Interesting, but boring at some parts.
dnf
August 13, 2025Auto-returned before I got far. The audiobook was well narrated, but I kept zoning out and repeating the dry sections. Important information! But drier than tired brain could handle.
September 23, 2025
4.25 Stars
October 31, 2025
this sure is a book
December 7, 2025
A very important book.
December 20, 2025
read for my dissertation.
January 14, 2026
Very informative book, I heavily recommend
Displaying 1 - 29 of 29 reviews