“A Great Road Cut”

Abstract

By 1786, the United Indian Nations had developed a clear platform critiquing the pillars of postwar US Indian policy—the right of conquest, the right of preemption, and the idea that Native peoples would choose to alienate any lands at all. Their speeches outlined Indigenous sovereignty, autonomy, and land rights. Decades of war with American migrants convinced Native confederationists that they could only secure the right to remain if firm and clear borders set off Indian country as distinct from the United States. They pushed an antiremoval platform in which Native lands were held in common. These concerns animated the negotiations at the 1795 Treaty of Greenville. There, US officials also promised a permanent border. Even as they promised permanence, however, federal officials presumed that the boundary would eventually be superseded when the threat of war had passed. In the 1790s, they began to redefine borders as the tools of dispossession and removal.