PIPE Workshop: Emilie Connolly (Yale University)

Emilie Connolly (Yale University) will present her recent paper. Her talk title and abstract appear below:

Evading Citizenship: The Shawnees' Struggle against Taxation in the Age of Emancipation

This paper examines the entanglement of taxation, citizenship, and Indigenous sovereignty in the mid-nineteenth-century United States through a legal struggle Shawnees waged against the state of Kansas. As the United States’ Civil War loomed on the horizon, Kansas began asserting the authority to tax Shawnees who held personal tracts of land, or allotments. When Shawnees could not pay, the state initiated tax foreclosure proceedings on hundreds of Shawnees, eventually placing these lands for sale at auction. At stake was not merely land, but the meaning of citizenship: Kansas claimed that these Shawnees were state citizens by virtue of owning taxable property, a designation that Shawnees rejected in light of their sovereignty and treaty-protected land tenure. By tracing Shawnee resistance to Kansas’s tax regime, this paper ultimately reveals how Indigenous actors used law strategically to evade unwanted citizenship and defend their sovereignty.