Native Land Talk

Histories of rights have too often marginalized Native Americans and African Americans. Correcting this lacuna, Native Land Talk expands our understanding of freedom by examining rights theories that indigenous and African-descended people(s) articulated in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. As settlers began to distrust the entitlements that the English used to justify their rule, the colonized and the enslaved formulated coherent logical narratives of freedom and belonging. By anchoring rights in nativity, they countered settlers’ attempts to confine Indian rights to the past and reduce slaves born in America to property. Drawing on a plethora of texts, including petitions, letters, newspapers, and official records, Yael Ben-zvi analyzes nativity’s unsettling potential and its discursive and geopolitical implications.