Mapping the "White Man's Republic"

Indigenous removal and Black exclusion are the roots of U.S. immigration control. This animated map starts with the Naturalization Act of 1790, which established the first set of uniform rules for granting United States citizenship by naturalization, and ends in 1865, at the end of the U.S. Civil War.

The map overlays Indigenous removal as represented through data compiled by Claudio Saunt’s Invasion of America, which maps every Native American land cession between 1776 and 1887.

Black exclusion is represented through a dark gray hatching fill on U.S. jurisdictions (territories or states) that adopted at least one ban on Black migration prior to the U.S. Civil War. This information came from  Michael A. Schoeppner’s Black Migrants and Border Regulation in the Early United States. 

Indigenous place names are from The Decolonial Atlas’ Turtle Island Decolonized: Mapping Indigenous Names across “North America”. Of note, these names are only a fraction of the place names from Turtle Island Decolonized, in particular, and from the over 1,000 Indigenous nations who have lived in so-called North America since time immemorial. As U.S. territorial expansion marches westward, the place names remain a clear reminder: this land has always been and will always be Indigenous land.