What We Are Reading Today: Vested Interests by Emilie Connolly

From the earliest days of its founding, the US set its sights on Native territory. Amid better-known “Indian wars,” the federal government quietly built an empire by treaty, offering payments to Native peoples for their land.

These payments were nonetheless pivotal because federal officials chose not to deliver them as a lump sum.

In “Vested Interests,” Emilie Connolly describes how a system of “fiduciary colonialism” seized a continent from its original inhabitants — and, ironically, furnished Native peoples with financial resources that sustained their nations.