Shoot the State: Patronage, Markets, and the Arming of Indigenous Independence in the Americas, 1750-1950

NATIVE CULTURES OF THE AMERICAS

SPEAKER: Brian DeLay, UC Berkeley

Generations of Indigenous people resisted settler states with guns in their hands, even though they manufactured no arms or ammunition. Under the right conditions, access to imported weapons empowered military and political independence even into the early twentieth century. This presentation will explore those conditions, how they changed over time, and what those changes meant for independence from state power across the Americas.

About the Speaker

Brian DeLay earned his PhD in History from Harvard University in 2004, and is now Professor and Preston Hotchkis Chair in the History of the United States at UC Berkeley. He is author of War of a Thousand Deserts: Indian Raids and the U.S.-Mexican War. This academic year he is the Lillian Gollay Knafel Fellow at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute. DeLay is finishing a book for W.W. Norton called Aim at Empire that reframes the era of American Revolutions as fifty-year struggle between empires, insurgents, enslaved people, and Indigenous polities over the power conveyed by guns and ammunition.