Your Humble Narrator occasionally still publishes A Thing (other than this blog). Last fall the online journal Cosmos & Taxis included my article "Mr. Manypenny's Millions: Freedom and Sovereignty in the Nineteenth-Century Native American Annuity Conflict." "Freedom" is what Commissioner of Indian Affairs George Manypenny feared Indigenous Americans would lose if they became dependent on U.S. government annuities; "Sovereignty" is what Native American recipients believed these annuities regularly demonstrated. (Also, they were usually payments for past land cessions.) Why some Indigenous American leaders nonetheless agreed to convert their annuities to lump-sum payments forms a significant part of the story.
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| Behold, the very source of one's enslavement. |
