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30 March 2009

Spirling on ``Bargaining Power in Practice: US Treaty-Making with American Indians, 1784--1911"

Please join us this Wednesday when Arthur Spirling, Department of Government, will present ``Bargaining Power in Practice: US Treaty-making with American Indians, 1784--1911". Arthur provided the following overview for his talk:

I will discuss a new data set of treaties signed 1784--1911 between the United States government and American Indian tribes, and comment on some early findings using kernel methods to analyze these texts. I particularly welcome feedback and suggestions from the ASW on the appropriateness of the techniques given the problem at hand.

Arthur also provided the following abstract for a paper that is the basis for his talk:

Native Americans are unique among domestic actors in that their relations with the United States government involve treaty-making, with almost 600 such documents signed between the Revolutionary War and the turn of the twentieth century. We obtain and digitize all of these treaties for textual analysis. In particular, we employ new 'kernel methods' to study the evolution of their nature over time and show that the Indian Removal Act of 1830 represents a systematic shift in language. We relate our findings to a bargaining model with the parties---government and tribes---varying in power according to contemporary political and economic events. With a mind to earlier historical and legal literatures, we also show that the 'broken' treaties do not form their own cluster in the data, and that the post-1871 'agreements' represent a straightforward continuation of earlier treaty policy in both style and substance.

The Applied Statistics Workshop meets each Wednesday at 12 noon in K-354 CGIS-Knafel (1737 Cambridge St). The workshop begins with a light lunch and presentations usually start around 1215 and last until about 130 pm.

Posted by Justin Grimmer at 11:14 AM