The settler colonialism of indeterminate people: Matthew Hill, ‘”Half-breeds”, squatters, land speculators, and settler colonialism in the Des Moines-Mississippi confluence’, MA dissertation, University of Northern Iowa, 2019 | settler colonial studies blog

The settler colonialism of indeterminate people: Matthew Hill, ‘”Half-breeds”, squatters, land speculators, and settler colonialism in the Des Moines-Mississippi confluence’, MA dissertation, University of Northern Iowa, 2019

15May19

Abstract: Americans are accustomed to a standard historical version of American expansion: The United States pushed West, removing Indians in its wake and filled the land with American settlers. This is often seen as a form of settler colonialism. Westward expansion and settler colonialism were much more complicated. They often occurred on the periphery of the American centralized state, proceeding any serious government involvement, and involved a wide mix of culturally indeterminate people. This paper examines westward expansion in the Des Moines-Mississippi Confluence, a 119,000-acre region in what is now southeastern Iowa. At one time or another, Sauk and Meskwaki Indians, mixed-race people then called “half-breeds,” lawless squatters, and manipulative land speculators all claimed the land, fighting over it using an array of tools and without much government interference. This mixing of racially and culturally indeterminate people shows that westward expansion was often more complicated than a meeting of two developed cultures, that we need to rethink the role of extralegal squatters in westward expansion, and the federal government often exercised less power in the American West than we usually believe.

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