Intervening in populist, Occupy Wall Street discourses about the subprime crisis and its remedies, this talk critically uncovers Manna Hata from Manhattan. Offering a long genealogical view of the militarized dispossession, genocide, and enslavement of Native peoples in order to problematize the subprime crisis as a signifier of racism, this talk focuses on territorial expansion, resource destruction and extraction, labor exploitation, and debt as past and present depredations upon Native nations and their citizens within the United States. In so doing, this talk addresses Native debt in ways left unaccounted for in a proliferation of recent scholarship on debt, including the special issue of American Quarterly, “Race, Empire, and the Crisis of the Subprime.” By tracing current U.S. and global economic formations and their crises to inaugural violence upon Native nations and their citizens, this talk examines the foundational nature of the U.S. military foreclosure of Native lands as part of its territorial homeland and its appropriation of Native bodies into its system of indentured labor relative to the crisis of home mortgages and their speculative securities.

Joanne Barker (Lenape [Delaware Tribe of Indians]) is associate professor of American Indian Studies at San Francisco State University. She received her Ph.D. in the History of Consciousness Department from the University of California, Santa Cruz, in 2000 on the work of identity and identification in indigenous struggles for sovereignty and self-determination. She is author of Native Acts: Law Recognition, and Cultural Authenticity (Duke University Press, 2011) and editor of Sovereignty Matters: Locations of Contestation and Possibility in Indigenous Struggles for Self-Determination (Nebraska, 2005). She is involved in cultural repatriation rights, environmental issues, human rights, and anti-war politics. She has been the recipient of fellowships from the University of California, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Ford Foundation.