Red Codes and Removal: Racial Exclusion and Indigenous Persistence in the Midwest

Abstract

Abstract: The Midwest is typically defined as a site of Indigenous erasure. But citizens of the Miami Tribe of Oklahoma continue to live in their original homeland despite the official removal of their people from the Wabash River Valley in 1846. Myaamia families who stayed behind used fee simple family reserves as a tool to combat ethnic cleansing. Despite their keen understanding of American property law, settlers in the Hoosier state crafted “Red Codes,” laws and enforcement regimes targeting Indigenous peoples, to achieve their dispossession. Red Codes, akin to the more well-known Black Codes, reveal how state and local authorities designed laws to advance white supremacy. The appropriation and performance of Indigeneity grew out of the race-based legal regimes that defined the nineteenth-century Midwest.