He applied the "Page 99 Test" to his new book, Citizens of a Stolen Land: A Ho-Chunk History of the Nineteenth-Century United States, and reported the following:
Page 99 of Citizens of a Stolen Land recounts how a Native American leader, a Ho-Chunk man named Coming Thunder Winneshiek, responded to the arrival of United States troops sent to expel him and his people from their treaty lands in southern Minnesota in May 1863. It explores the strategies he employed to delay or halt his people’s exile: he claimed to be a longstanding friend to the United States; he underscored his people’s attachment to their home region; and he described an agreement he claimed to have made many years before with a leader of another Native nation that granted the Ho-Chunk land along the Mississippi River. Coming Thunder’s bid failed, and that spring U.S. forces deported two thousand Ho-Chunk people to a poorly provisioned camp far out on the Missouri River, in the Dakota Territory. Hundreds died of hunger and disease on the journey or shortly after arrival, and others were robbed, assaulted, raped, or murdered.Learn more about Citizens of a Stolen Land at the University of North Carolina Press website.
Page 99 conveys one of the essential stories of Citizens of a Stolen Land: the determination and creativity of Ho-Chunk people as they tried to remain in their ancestral homelands in the western Great Lakes (including much of what is now southern Wisconsin), and the official and unofficial violence that the United States and its settlers used to strip them of their lands. But page 99 does not convey the broader implications of this story. Citizens of a Stolen Land brings together two stories we normally tell separately: the crisis of the United States during the Civil War era, and the actions of Native people and Native nations during that era. It does this by exploring how the Ho-Chunk encountered the American idea and policy “citizenship,” deduced the threat it posed to their integrity and autonomy as a people, and finally turned it to their advantage as a way to remain in their ancestral homeland despite laws and policies that demanded their exile. Citizens of a Stolen Land asks readers to reconsider the relationship between Native American history and U.S. history, and to think about the ways that citizenship, an idea we are used to thinking of in egalitarian, aspirational, and heroic terms, could also be a coercive and destructive force.
--Marshal Zeringue
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