PIPE Book Talk: Emilie Connolly (Yale University)

Emilie Connolly (Yale University) will present her recent book, Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States. 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 contr…