The literature of Indigenous dispossession has rarely been paired directly with studies of infrastructure, or what those in the early United States called “internal improvements.” It is time to re-entangle those separate historiographies while exploring how such projects of state-backed settler infrastructure directly degraded Indigenous environments and in so doing, threatened Native political ecologies to the point of dispossession. Looking specifically at the Old Northwest, we can see clear examples where U.S. officials knowingly worked to alter landscapes and waterways in efforts to disenfranchise Native polities while promoting canal construction, wetland drainages, river dredging, and harbor improvements. These projects, in turn, undermined Indigenous lifeways and Native peoples’ abilities to resist land cessions and forced Removal by the 1830s. By exploring the interconnectedness of Indigenous dispossession and environmental exploitation during the infrastructure projects of the early United States, we can trace the roots of environmental justice crises that we continue to witness around the world today between governments and Indigenous communities. By exploring the precedent of this two-pronged settler-colonial approach to Native environments in the context of early America, perhaps we can even find tools with which to address environmental injustices on larger scales in the twenty-first century.
Lewis Cass, the long-running territorial governor of Michigan and eventual Secretary of War under Andrew Jackson, served as one of the main architects of what I describe as a two-pronged settler conquest over both the landscapes of the continental interior and the Native people that called the region home. He expressed this connection in explicit terms in various treaties with Native peoples in the Old Northwest. According to Cass and other eventual advocates of Indian Removal, internal improvements stood as one of the major justifications for the policy of Native dispossession on a national level. Meeting with the Potawatomis of Michigan, Illinois, and Indiana in 1821, Cass argued that Indigenous occupation of the land was preventing proper “communication” between various American settlements across the Northwest. Cass made clear this need for a communications network went beyond information transfer and included public roads and other routes that could facilitate commerce and encourage further settlement. In essence, the Native communities he met with were in the way of developing such infrastructure, and as Cass pitched it, the only solution was land cessions and eventual Native removal.