“Until Indian Title Shall Be… Fairly Extinguished:” The Public Lands, Indigenous Erasure and Early Government Promotion of Infrastructure in the United States

Mary Shi, University of California, Berkeley

This article uses archival and governmental records to demonstrate the recurrent and flexible presence of the public lands in supporting the United States’ early experiments with infrastructure promotion. Despite the fact that the broad swathes of land in the national domain in which title had not been transferred to private owners, or the “public lands,” were still encumbered with the costs of selling and surveying vast territories, pacification on the frontier, and even extinguishing legally recognized Native title, legislators acted as if the public lands were freely—or at least inevitably—available bundles of legal rights and asset streams that could be monetized, traded, pledged, or borrowed against to provide government support to infrastructure projects. This paper argues that by repeatedly calling upon the public lands in this way, legislators institutionalized processes of Indigenous dispossession and erasure in American political and economic development. In making this argument, this article illuminates fiscal negotiations as a site where the symbolic power of the state is enrolled to institutionalize power-laden cultural contexts in expanding states, sheds light on the origins of the governmental rationality of infrastructure-led development, and contributes towards the task of analyzing the United States as a case of settler colonial state formation.

See paper

 Presented in Session 164. Production of Knowledge Regimes: Experts, Political Authority, and Legitimation II