Jamal Awil

← An Indigenous Peoples' History of the United States

Louisiana comprised 828,000 square miles. [fact]

In 1803, the Jefferson administration, without consulting any affected Indigenous nation, purchased the Louisiana Territory from Napoleon Bonaparte. Louisiana comprised 828,000 square miles, and its addition doubled the size of the United States. The territory encompassed all or part of multiple Indigenous nations, including the Sioux, Cheyenne, Arapaho, Crow, Pawnee, Osage, and Comanche, among other peoples of the bison. It also included the area that would soon be designated Indian Territory (Oklahoma), the site of relocation of Indigenous peoples from west of the Mississippi. Fifteen future states would emerge from the taking: all of present-day Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Oklahoma, Kansas, and Nebraska; Minnesota west of the Mississippi; most of North and South Dakota; northeastern New Mexico and North Texas; the portions of Montana, Wyoming, and Colorado east of the Continental Divide; and Louisiana west of the Mississippi River, including the city of New Orleans. The territory pressed against lands occupied by Spain, including Texas and all the territory west of the Continental Divide to the Pacific Ocean. These would soon be next on the US annexation list

Roxanne Dunbar-Ortiz, An Indigenous Peoples' Hist…, loc. 216998