Andrew Szarejko, a Wartburg College assistant professor of political science, has published “American Conquest: The Northwest Indian War and the Making of U.S. Foreign Policy.” The book asks how this 1790-1795 war between the United States and Native American tribes of the Ohio River Valley might cause one to rethink conventional understandings of U.S. foreign policy.
“I use the Northwest Indian War to speak directly to modern-day foreign policy discourse, especially insofar as talk of American isolationism has often elided frequent U.S. uses of force and other forms of global engagement,” Szarejko said. “I hope the book helps the reader better understand early U.S. foreign policy, but I also hope it helps the reader to better understand U.S. foreign policy today.”
Szarejko argues that the origins of the Northwest Indian War complicate theories of war initiation and that the legacies of the war linger in the precedents it set, the perceived lessons it provided and the ongoing contestation its memory provokes. He also contends that that the Northwest Indian War provided U.S. political elites with a template for the effective use of military bases to secure U.S. territorial claims on an expanding frontier. To bring the book into the 21st century, Szarejko studied the ways the memory of the war was recently debated in Fort Wayne, Indiana.
“The city was named for Anthony Wayne, who led the U.S. to victory in the Northwest Indian War,” he said. “In a sort of digital ethnography in which I parse social media debate about whether to commemorate an annual Anthony Wayne Day, I shed light on the ongoing processes by which America’s conquest of Native lands is legitimized.”
Though Szarejko’s book started as a dissertation in 2020, he didn’t complete the book manuscript until summer 2024 after teaching a Wartburg May Term course called Native American History and Politics.
“That class was quite helpful in giving me the chance to think through some central questions of the book, and I thank the students in that class in the book’s acknowledgements,” he said. “Similarly, I will be bringing concerns that motivate my next book project, which will focus on Tecumseh’s War and the role of a Shawnee religious movement therein, into a class I will teach next year.”
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