“The most enduring feature of U.S. history is the presence of Native Americans, yet most histories focus on Europeans and their descendants,” writes the publisher of a new work seeking to change that paradigm. This long practice of ignoring Indigenous history is changing, “with a new generation of scholars insisting that any full American history address the struggle, survival, and resurgence of American Indian nations. Indigenous history is essential to understanding the evolution of modern America.”

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023) by Ned Blackhawk opens with the provocative question, “How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” Winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction, Blackhawk’s important new work seeks to reimagine our history “outside the tropes of discovery.” If history “provides the common soil for a nation’s growth,” he asks his readers to consider a new approach where “Indians no longer remain absent or appear as hostile or passive objects awaiting discovery and domination.” Instead of a New World that conveys a sense of “wonder and possibilities made manifest by discovery,” Blackhawk wants the reader—and ultimately the nation—to recognize the centrality of Native Americans to our history and ongoing story as we appreciate the true extent of Indigenous power and agency. “American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development,” Blackhawk asserts in this significant piece of scholarship to change our perceptions by altering our perspectives.

Blackhawk, the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History at Yale, insists that “Indigenous dispossession facilitated the growth of white male democracy and African American slavery” to, as one reviewer phrased it, “constitute America’s historical trifecta of flaws.” The United States under Blackhawk’s probing eye was built to serve and expand a settler society by limiting full citizenship to white men. It “helped them start new farms on lands taken from Indians; and protected their property rights, including their possession of enslaved people.”

This is not an easy work to digest, and truth be told I have been reading this on-and-off for the better part of the year. Early in his book, Blackhawk’s writing about the three centuries after Columbus sometimes lacks sharpness. There is important information here to be sure, as when he describes the struggle for the interior of the American continent in the first half of the 18th century. But Blackhawk really hits his stride in shaping this narrative when he moves into the Indigenous origins of the American Revolution.

Instead of placing political activity against taxation in 1760s Boston at the forefront of the origins of the Revolution, Blackhawk wants us to look instead at the violence of the French and Indian War, a conflict which never really ended as settler colonists used violence without the consent of British officials to begin to take possession of Native lands. “Interior land concerns as well as the crown’s conciliatory relations with Indians upset settlers just as much if not more than policies of taxation.”

While not all early colonial leaders saw Natives as impairments to manifest destiny, Blackhawk shows how Indian hating—an ideology that holds Native peoples as inferior to whites and therefore “rightfully subject to indiscriminate violence”—became the foundation of an emerging political culture where “negotiations were best conducted between armed parties.” He makes the case that the push to drive Native Americans from their lands came to frame both the Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.

“The United States was founded upon the ideal of universal equality: ‘All men are created equal.’ The Constitutional Convention, Haitian Revolution, and Louisiana Purchase [from France, but made up primarily of Native lands] transformed and restricted that concept, creating forms of social and legal exclusion.”

In this 445-page book, Blackhawk moves through different events from American history to make his point. The building of the Erie Canal, for instance, would forever change the political economy of the Native Inland Sea, as the region became forever connected to the Eastern seaboard. In its first decade alone, more than $100 million in goods circulated via the canal. This change in the economy led the federal government to change the way it handled treaties with Native nations, constantly reneging on promises and changing the terms of agreement. “The influence of tribes upon the federal government’s development,” notes Blackhawk, “is overlooked.”

Blackhawk notes that “like the Declaration of Independence, the Monroe Doctrine also became a declaration of war against America’s Indigenous nations, whose long-standing ability to ally with European powers became further inhibited.” He includes a perceptive look at Russian activity in Alaska and the Pacific Northwest as well as the growth of Spanish missions in California and the Southwest, which devastated the Indigenous population, overextended an already weakened empire, and led to the expansion of the American republic. “In California, more than in any other region, settlers used informal and state-sanctioned violence to shatter Native worlds and legitimate their own.” This continued through the Civil War, where Blackhawk shows that to focus solely on “a conflict between North and South is to miss this settler revolution and its transformative violence. Viewing the era as a conflict defined by ‘slavery’ versus ‘freedom’ also erases multiple campaigns of dispossession, removal and even genocide.” To claim that the abolition of slavery “appears” as the evolution of American freedom obscures “a more complex and less celebratory past.”

With similar insights, Blackhawk moves the reader through the period of taking children and treaty lands, Native activism, the myth of Indian disappearance, and Native American sovereignty in the Cold War era.

The judges’ citation for The Rediscovery of America as the winner of the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction reads:

“Drawing on prodigious scholarship conducted over decades, Ned Blackhawk centers Indigenous people across a sweep of 500 years of United States history, reimagining and retelling familiar historical episodes from a new point of departure. In the process, Blackhawk ‘rediscovers’ America, guiding his readers to a novel understanding of our nation’s past and, hopefully, our collective future. This is an enlightening, transformative, and enduring work.”

More to come . . .

DJB

Navajo Eula M. Atene holds three-month-old Leon Clark on a ridge in the Arizona portion of Monument Valley. Photo from the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division.