Quaff and Quill: A Book Talk with Emilie Connolly

Join us for a conversation with historian Emilie Connolly (Brandeis University) for a talk about her new Bancroft award-winning book, Vested Interests: Trusteeship and Native Dispossession in the United States (2025).

From the earliest days of its founding, the United States 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. Routinely inadequate, these payments were nonetheless pivotal because federal officials chose not to deliver them as a lump sum. Instead, the government kept the bulk of payments owed to Native nations under its own control as a trustee, and made access to future installments contingent on Native compliance. 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.

Emilie Connolly is assistant professor of history at Brandeis University.

Light refreshments will be served.

For in person registration, click HERE.

Presented in partnership with the Huguenot & New Rochelle Historical Association.

This program is produced with support from the “Common Sense and the Constitution: Civic Engagement in the Spirit of 1776” initiative from the American History and Civics Education – Seminars (AHC-Seminars) Program at the Department of Education.