Amid a growing body of scholarship revealing that Native peoples didn’t simply vanish from their homelands, as the old stereotype suggests, I spoke to Michael John Witgen, a citizen of the Red Cliff Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe and the author of Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America.

Michael is a professor in the Department of History and the Center for the Study of Ethnicity and Race at Columbia. Seeing Red was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in history. In the book, and in conversation, Professor Witgen explores the “political economy of plunder” in the Old Northwest, some ways that the Anishinaabeg (including the Ojibwe, Odawa, Potawatomi, Mississaugas, Nipissing, and Algonquin peoples) resisted it, and the plunder’s legacy today.

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