The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“To build a new theory of American history will require recognizing that Native peoples simultaneously determined colonial economies, settlements, and politics and were shaped by them.”

Blackhawk’s second thesis goes beyond the realm of historical argumentation, serving as a mission statement for academics in the field of US history. As such, he recognizes the ideas put forward in Rediscovery as a communal academic undertaking. Communicating the long history of Tribal Agency Amid Subjugation is not a goal that can be achieved in the span of one volume or by one scholar, hence his use of the future tense in this statement.

“Now European and American empires confronted one another, linking their civilizations, continents, and indeed two hemispheres. The forging of a truly interconnected, global society had now begun.”

Here, Blackhawk links the processes of colonialism and globalization, affirming Native Americans as important agents in the course of world history. The language of “confrontation” positions Europeans and Native Americans as equals, a framework that combats racist understandings of Indigenous societies as less advanced than European ones.

“By rejecting Spanish practices, beliefs, and institutions, Pueblo leaders reaffirmed and revitalized their own, performing their traditional dances to celebrate the victorious and memorialize the dead. They had finally obtained their long-desired religious, cultural, and political autonomy.”

Popé’s Revolt is one of the first events that Blackhawk cites as an instance of Native nations claiming Tribal Agency Amid Subjugation. In an environment of cultural warfare between Spanish Catholicism and traditional Pueblo belief systems, Blackhawk understands the preservation of Pueblo cultural heritage, through acts such as dance, to be revolutionary. His analysis also speaks to the emotional experience of the Pueblo people under colonialism, pointing to their yearning for liberation as a painful, decades-long reality.

“Although written out of history, thousands of Native people became captives across the Atlantic world. Indeed, an “Algonquian diaspora” erupted across the seventeenth-century world. From the Great Lakes to London and from Quebec to North Africa, Native captives circulated across a global nexus of enslavement.”

Blackhawk builds upon his vision of historical Indigenous people as members of a global society, highlighting the presence of Algonquian-speaking peoples on multiple continents in the 17th and 18th centuries. These little-known enclaves of Native American culture, in unexpected settings such as London, illustrate the degree of cultural upheaval and displacement wrought by the Atlantic slave trade on Indigenous communities. Once again, Blackhawk’s findings push against binary portrayals of colonial race relations, which have historically ignored non-Black enslaved populations.

“Famous as middlemen in Europe, the Dutch became similarly positioned in the Northeast, ferrying Indigenous resources—wampum and furs—between the Pequot and Iroquois.”

By examining the specific cultural characteristics of each ethnic group present in North America—in this case, the Dutch—Blackhawk supports his argument for Encounter as the Framework for US History. This methodology resists popular narratives of cultural homogeneity within racial groups, not only for Indigenous peoples but for European colonizers as well. Dutch approaches to colonialism were highly distinct in that they prioritized trading relationships; likewise, the specific tribes that they traded with had particular values that shaped the trajectory of their relationships with the Dutch.

“They soon initiated a global form of Indigenous shuttle diplomacy that made them courted guests in colonial and European capitals.”

Blackhawk addresses little-known events in the early colonial history of America to illustrate Tribal Agency Amid Subjugation. Tribal delegations’ presence in European courts, including Versailles, demonstrates that at one point in time, European governments recognized tribal sovereignty. Such insights are key components of Blackhawk’s historical revisionism, providing impactful counterevidence for widespread notions of Native passivity.

“Among the Iroquois, diseases transformed captivity into an essential institution […] Affective ties between family members and duties within clans structured village life across Iroquoia, and captive taking enabled these ties to continue.”

Within his description of the violent landscape of colonial America, Blackhawk takes care to demonstrate that violence was not unidirectionally aimed at Indigenous people by Europeans. Indigenous people also utilized violence against both Europeans and other Indigenous people as a form of tribal agency. Furthermore, the analysis relates the Iroquois use of violence to their particular cultural needs, which were threatened by French colonial pressure.

“The fate of North America increasingly revolved around this interior world, and within this world, French-Indian relations proved decisive.”

Blackhawk recenters the early history of the United States on New France, rather than the British colonies on the East Coast. This geographic recentering corresponds to a cultural recentering, as Blackhawk establishes the Mississippi River Basin as a cultural and political epicenter in the 18th century, though it has been largely omitted from popular discourses about early colonial America.

“Settlers and many soldiers knew little of such shared histories. They understood fear and difference more clearly.”

Blackhawk’s analysis of settler ideology characterizes Euro-Americans living on the frontier of colonial society as profoundly fearful, aiming that fear at the Native people they came into contact with. This characterization serves as a contrast with many members of the colonial ruling class, who understood the political utility of diplomatic partnership with Native tribes. Ignorance of history, according to Blackhawk, fuels racial hatred—an assertion that underscores the necessity of Indigenous historians in the present day.

“The growing allegiances between Indian and British leaders became valuable fodder in colonists’ critiques of their monarch. Through rapidly expanding communication networks, colonists leveled charges against the crown that hinged on colonial fears of Native peoples.”

Just as he works to demonstrate that historical Indigenous populations were not monolithic, Blackhawk is careful to differentiate between the various circumstances and political motivations of Europeans in colonial North America. Here, he distinguishes between the ruling and settling classes of the American colonies, who had different, oftentimes oppositional politics. At the heart of this internal conflict lay Native American people themselves, once again proving the centrality of Indigenous history to US history.

“When directed against Indians, violence cemented social ties between settlers, created experiences that transcended ethnic, class, and religious differences, and linked colonists with imperial policy goals.”

Just as Rediscovery follows the ethnogenesis of various Indigenous groups in the United States, it also tracks the identity formation of white Americans, who were originally comprised of distinct immigrant groups. Blackhawk’s key argument in this regard is that Euro-Americans based their initial camaraderie on common political opposition to Native peoples. Within this process, colonial violence was a tool for the forging of a cohesive identity among white Americans.

“Indian sovereignty helped to clarify when, where, how, and upon whom American laws operated. The sovereignties of Indian nations and of the United States were interrelated.”

The tension between Indigenous sovereignty and the sovereignty of the United States is a dynamic that runs through the duration of the book. Within this scheme, Blackhawk understands the two forces to be both mutually generative and destructive. At times, this dynamic can appear to be self-contradictory, but in fact, it serves to demonstrate that the United States’ identity as a nation is intrinsically dependent on the political identities of Native nations.

“Its framers worked to ensure Anglo-American supremacy over interior lands, Native peoples, and African American slaves. It became, in short, a constitution for colonialism.”

Blackhawk criticizes historical narratives that romanticize the US Constitution and lionize its authors. Black and Native Americans are the targets of an unabashedly white supremacist governing document that aims to curtail their rights. The tagline “constitution for colonialism” is so central to Blackhawk’s narrative that he makes it part of the chapter’s title, highlighting settler colonialism as a core tenet of the American founders’ vision for the future.

“In many ways, frontier societies bred what would become American individualism, and they did so upon recently dispossessed Indian homelands.”

In Rediscovery, the land itself functions as a central historical character. Moreover, the Indigenous nature of American land sits at the heart of conflicts between the Indigenous nations and the federal government, which reimagined these spaces as the birthright of Euro-Americans. As this quote argues, essentially, “American” ideologies were forged out of settlers’ sense of entitlement to tribal land.

“For Native nations, the essential question raised by the US Constitution was whether Native communities held authority over their own lands. Generations of practices and a body of international legal theory suggested that they did.”

Blackhawk reads the Constitution from an Indigenous perspective, placing himself in the shoes of 19th-century tribal leaders who sought legal protections at the federal level from settler colonialism. Once more, Blackhawk connects Indigenous land and Indigenous autonomy, as birthrights to ancestral homelands were called into question by a government whose central document failed to secure them.

“Ceremonies did not mend the wounds inflicted upon them but offered spaces for cleansing and renewal.”

Here, traditional ceremonies serve as one of the many forms of Tribal Agency Amid Subjugation. As with Popé’s Revolt, the preservation of cultural heritage is understood as an inherently defiant act. The “wounds” here are both material and cultural; cultural trauma and societal collapse under colonial pressure warrant as much remedial attention as physical injuries do.

“To claim the Civil War was solely a conflict between the North and South is to miss this settler revolution and its transformative violence.”

The Civil War is a defining moment in US history, long studied by historians who have well-established narratives for understanding the conflict. Blackhawk directly calls these narratives into question by highlighting a front of the war largely unknown to the general population, the western one. Such analysis is a key example of the book’s ethos of historical revisionism.

“With allotment, Congress began a process of land alienation that subdivided reservations. New laws violated treaties, although these remain ‘the supreme law’ of the United States under the US Constitution.”

Blackhawk articulates the hypocrisy of allotment policies in plain terms. The devastating implications of this reversal in policy are a key example of US Policy Shifts and Their Impacts on Indigenous Life. By repeatedly quoting the Constitution—he cites “the supreme law of the land” several times throughout the book—Blackhawk makes the federal government’s duplicity toward Indigenous populations irrefutable.

“Before the Civil War, Congress passed few laws affecting Indian communities. Now it developed new powers that targeted the most intimate forms of Indian life.”

Like the ratification of the Constitution, Rediscovery positions the Civil War as a pivotal moment in Indigenous American history. Plenary power, he argues, was a tool used to ensure the survival of the federal government after the Civil War’s destabilization. Here, Blackhawk contrasts the sweeping new powers of the government with the “intimate” Indigenous lifestyle that it aimed to dismantle.

“The new century was dawning, but Native people still inhabited the twilight of the past.”

In Chapter 11, Blackhawk adopts a poetic tone to describe Indigenous relationships to the passage of time, as seen through the eyes of non-Native Americans. Metaphors of “dawn” and “twilight” evoke beautiful imagery that stands in alarming contrast to the racist ideology that characterized Native Americans as relics of history. The ironic beauty of this language, therefore, serves as a biting critique of romantic racism.

“While performers like Cody and Geronimo attracted attention, many Native participants used their time in these urban spaces to publicize their community’s concerns, to critique governmental policies, and to counteract public misconceptions.”

Working directly with white settlers who enacted violence against them, such as William “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Blackhawk asserts that Indigenous performers still maintained Tribal Agency Amid Subjugation. This analysis reveals how resistance can occur within the confines of colonialist systems, disproving the inevitability of assimilation despite white supremacists’ determined efforts. As always, Blackhawk emphasizes the actions of Native Americans through his use of active verbs, refusing to portray them as passive figures in the way that many historians have.

“While popular culture and scholarly discourses still contributed to the mythology of Indian disappearance, within the federal government, partnerships with tribal communities emerged and in some cases even flourished.”

In acknowledging academia’s contributions to harmful assimilationist ideologies, Blackhawk implicitly challenges contemporary scholars to do better. Historians’ complicity in colonial systems that oppress Native Americans serves to emphasize the necessity of government protections for Indigenous sovereignty. The notion of positive Indigenous-government relations may seem oxymoronic given the problematic history that Blackhawk outlines, but the adoption of protective policies under John Collier only illustrates the tumultuous nature of US Policy Shifts and Their Impacts on Indigenous Life.

“In a period characterized by a war against communism, Native nations that governed themselves and managed their own lands communally posed threats to US interests.”

Here, Blackhawk relates the circumstances of Native peoples to global events, namely the Cold War and the Second Red Scare. In doing so, he contributes to his larger argument that Native history is inextricable from US and global history. This is a key revision of popular narratives of history, which have frequently placed Native Americans in the peripheries of world wars and global geopolitics.