Readers would be forgiven for doubting that there is much more to say about Claudio Saunt’s Bancroft-winning Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory. There is, however, something to be said for weighing in now that the success of the book seems assured, for this success itself holds historiographical relevance. Saunt’s achievement—both the text itself and its enthusiastic reception—suggests that we may at long last be on the cusp of a major shift in the early republic literature, with Indigenous stories and voices finally receiving sustained integration into “mainstream” national history.
Saunt sets out to provide nothing less than a new account of the entirety of what is usually called the United States’ Indian Removal policy, in which the federal government and its allies forcibly evicted eighty thousand Native Americans from their homes east of the Mississippi, resulting in manifold hardship, disease, death,...
