June 7, 2018, Thursday - The Relentless Business of Treaties Author Event at Mill City Museum

Time: 7 – 8:30 pm

Location: Mill City Museum, 704 South 2nd Street

The Relentless Business of Treaties Author Event

Join author Martin Case for a presentation and book signing based on his new book from the Minnesota Historical Society Press, The Relentless Business of Treaties: How Indigenous Land Became U.S. Property. Case argues that land cession treaties were essentially the act of supplanting indigenous kinship relationships to the land with a property relationship. US treaty signers represented the relentless interests that drove treaty making: corporate and individual profit, political ambition and assimilationist assumptions of cultural superiority. The lives of these men illustrate the assumptions inherent in the property system—and the dynamics by which it spread across the continent. In this book, for the first time, Case provides a comprehensive study of the treaty signers, exposing their business ties and multigenerational interrelationships through birth and marriage. Taking Minnesota as a case study, he describes the groups that shaped U.S. treaty-making to further their own interests: interpreters, traders, land speculators, bureaucrats, officeholders, missionaries and mining, timber and transportation companies.

Books will be available for purchase and signing. Doors open at 6 pm, and the event begins at 7 pm. A cash bar will be available from 6 -- 8 pm.