The “Indian Lid”: Navigating the Legal Uncertainties of Citizenship, Territory, and Jurisdiction in Post-Allotment Minnesota (1905-1916)

• Applicant: Professorin Dr. Sabine Nicole Meyer
• Subject Area: European and American Literary and Cultural Studies ; Modern and Contemporary History
• Term: since 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 544556314

At the center of this project is the controversy about the “Indian lid,” a phrase that emerged from the lexicon of Minnesota’s Progressive temperance reformers in the United States around 1905. It referred to prohibitionist efforts to enforce the anti-liquor provisions contained in the land cession treaties between the federal government and the largest indigenous group in Minnesota, the Anishinaabe (Ojibwe), from the 1850s and 1860s. The “Indian lid” controversy has received scant scholarly attention. In the very few existing studies, it has been framed as a legal strategy and set of efforts pursued by white, Anglo-American Progressive reformers to suppress alcohol among Minnesota’s settlers and Anishinaabeg. In these studies, the latter are portrayed as objects of reform and passive bystanders in a controversy fought among white people.The project sets out to explore the complex ways in which the campaigns and debates about the “Indian lid” in Minnesota between 1905 and 1916 intersected with efforts to work through the massive legal uncertainties the 1887 General Allotment Act and ensuing laws and litigation had produced. These uncertainties largely centered on: 1. the question of “Indian citizenship,” 2. the definition of “Indian country/territory,” 3. issues of jurisdiction: the rights of the state versus the rights of the U.S. government to regulate the sale of intoxicating liquor on the territory covered by the land cession treaties. The “Indian lid” controversy functioned as a burning glass in that it concentrated various strands of opinions held by a multitude of Native and non-Native actors in Minnesota and all over the nation onto a single issue (the sale and consumption of alcohol) in a clearly bounded locale (the area covered by the land cession treaties). The project innovatively contributes to American Studies and related fields engaged in the study of history and its theorization in two ways. First, it unearths the pivotal role of the “Indian lid” for local and national debates about how to incorporate Native lands and lives into settler colonial legal and political frameworks and modes of territoriality. Second, the central objective and particular challenge of this project is the restoring, amplifying, and centering of Native voices in their complexity and heterogeneity. The heuristic value of the project thus lies not only in its production of historical knowledge, but also in its objective to develop a new transdisciplinary apparatus of theories, methods, and research strategies that supports scholars in their efforts to give voice to historical actors who have largely been silenced, or even excluded from, the settler-generated and -dominated archive. Articulating an intensely interdisciplinary approach, the project combines methods and insights from Literary and Cultural Studies (esp. American Studies, Native Studies, Critical Indigenous Studies), Historical Studies, with perspectives from Critical/Cultural Legal Studies.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants
• International Connection: USA
• Cooperation Partners: Professorin Dr. Jill Doerfler; Anne McKeig