Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States by Stephen Kantrowitz (review)

Reviewed by: Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States by Stephen Kantrowitz Rose Stremlau (bio) Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States. By Stephen Kantrowitz. (Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, 2023. Pp. 224. Cloth, 99. 00; paper, 24. 95. ) Stephen Kantrowitz begins his creative, elegant analysis with a paradox: why would a group of Ho-Chunk people petition the United States government to become citizens in 1873 when they had long opposed American settler colonialism and the absorption of their land, resources, and population? What changed? Kantrowitz provides the answer in an introduction, four chapters, and an epilogue that eloquently explain the range of strategies Ho-Chunk people used to assert "their status as self-determining political and territorial bodies" bound by their responsibilities to one another and to their land (4). Kantrowitz begins chapter 1 with a summary of Ho-Chunk social organization through bands and villages, also core units of economic activity and political expression. He then pivots to a concise, legible explanation of settler colonialism as an ideology and practice before explaining how citizens and white immigrants enacted it on the ground, specifically on land in what is today Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Following coercive treaties signed in 1832 and 1837, territorial officials, with the support of federal politicians and their armed forces, repeatedly sought to violently expel Ho-Chunk people from their ancestral homeland. Although some Ho-Chunks tried to reestablish villages west of the Mississippi River, others returned to their traditional homesites in Wisconsin through the 1850s. Some whose families had intermarried and converted to Christianity sought permanent rights to remain as landowners by pointing to their so-called civilized ways of life, but so did a few Ho-Chunks who purchased property to reestablish traditional communities that existed alongside settler farms and towns. In his second chapter, Kantrowitz lays out the dangers of landownership and citizenship, which for most Native people were forcibly extended over End Page 401 them as tools of dispossession. Before the ratification of the Fourteenth Amendment, citizenship did not correlate to equality before the law, and states subjected nonwhites to a range of discriminatory policies. Some Native people nonetheless saw value in it. For example, some Ho-Chunk people on the Blue Earth reservation in Minnesota accepted allotment, or the subdivision and privatization of communal tracts into individual homesteads, to prevent their complete dispossession by accessing the protections of U. S. citizenship for property owners. Although they did not share the federal government's assimilationist agenda, these Ho-Chunks agreed to an 1859 treaty that some of their kin rejected as anathema to their survival and dignity as Ho-Chunk people. In the years immediately following the Civil War, American statesmen motivated to ensure the economic development of the former Confederacy in the free-soil model debated how to expand, clarify, and enforce the boundaries of citizenship. As Kantrowitz points out, most of the scholarship on this topic focuses on freedpeople. The question of Native people's belonging and fitness for participation in the body politic nonetheless prompted significant debate at the state and federal levels, including among congressmen. This is the subject of the third chapter. For Ho-Chunk people, the heart of the matter was how to best maintain their ability to move and access resources and continue their way of life. Despite having been expelled, some Ho-Chunks continued to migrate in their traditional Wisconsin homeland. Others negotiated to remain among relatives in Nebraska Territory. A third approach entailed accepting allotments and U. S. citizenship. Regardless of their strategy, all Ho-Chunks negotiated settler hostility, impoverishment, and increasing generational factionalism in their decision-making. Kantrowitz's final chapter is an innovative reinterpretation of Reconstruction- era debates over citizenship's meanings and boundaries in conversation with Ho-Chunk strategies to avoid expulsion through land-ownership. Ho-Chunks had developed economic ties to settler neighbors and fostered political alliances at the state and federal levels that resulted in an 1881 law recognizing their right to stay in Wisconsin under the 1875 Indian Homestead Act. This book takes on a central conflict. . .