The long history of the United States’ efforts to enforce Native ‘removal’ has seen a number of tactical shifts, accompanied by policy: from the Indian Removal Act, to the Dawes and Curtis Acts, to the 1934 Indian Reorganization Act. Confining historical understanding to Federal policy, however, serves to obscure Native resistance and agency within and against removal, as well as the fact that removal was, more often than not, not as neat, nor as final as legislative history implies. While policy offered Federal agents and commissioners tasked with carrying out Native removal a template for action ‘in the field,’ the reality of removal often encompassed more informal tactics and strategies. Bribes, coercion, and extortion often were the silent guests at the treaty table, in the hearing chamber, and on the battlefield. Embracing work employing Native American and Indigenous Studies (NAIS) methods, this session highlights the messy contingency of removal, highlighting the strategies of undermining and resistance employed by Native populations from the immediate post-Revolutionary War days and into the twentieth century. The papers presented in this panel investigate Native responses to removal from a range of new perspectives. Shifting the focus from law and legislation to land, cosmologies, religion, and economics, these works chart how Native nations capitalized on the ambiguities in policy and employed unlikely coalitions to derive a more suitable outcomes in the face of threats to social and cultural resilience.

This session aims to expand traditional readings of both Native removal and resistance, and challenges narratives of the ‘inevitability’ of Native removal as presented within dominant historiographies. Presentations for this panel will each examine underexplored aspects of removal from the nineteenth century to the present day, and are intended to provoke discussion on removal as whole, not just as a federal policy, but for its cultural aspects. These presentations do not take ‘removal’ for granted and instead explore consequences and outcomes, in a way which will be welcome for scholars of federal policy as well as those of Native nations and societies.