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

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History by Ned Blackhawk is a 2023 scholarly work that reassesses popular narratives of US history by centering Indigenous peoples. In doing so, the book reclaims agency for tribes that have been marginalized within the field of history and encourages readers to reexamine their understanding of American politics and race relations. As a professor of history and American studies at Yale University, and as a member of the Te-Moak Western Shoshone tribe, Blackhawk is one of the world’s leading Indigenous scholars. His areas of expertise include Native American law and violence within colonial settings, both of which Rediscovery deals with in detail. In 2023, Rediscovery was awarded the National Book Award for Nonfiction.

This guide refers to the 2023 Kindle e-book edition of the text, published by Yale University Press.

Content Warning: The source text for this guide addresses issues of colonialism, including colonial violence and ideology, sexual violence, racial violence, political violence, cultural erasure, slavery, kidnapping and human trafficking, ethnic cleansing, and displacement.

Note on Terminology: Blackhawk uses the terms “Indian” and “American Indian.” This guide uses the terms “Native American” and “Indigenous” to refer to Indigenous people when not quoting Blackhawk.

Summary

Rediscovery is divided into two sections, each comprised of six chapters. The first six chapters (Part 1: “Indians and Empires”) address events leading up to the ratification of the US Constitution (1788-1789). The second six chapters (Part 2: “Struggles for Sovereignty”) focus on events that occurred after the formation of the United States. As this division suggests, the codification of the US’s policies toward Native peoples within the Constitution marks a key turning point in North American Indigenous history. Before 1789, Blackhawk observes, tribal sovereignty was recognized even by colonial powers that sought to occupy Indigenous land. Over nearly 250 years, however, US state and federal governments have challenged and disregarded the precedent of Native autonomy. Rediscovery is therefore an account of Tribal Agency Amid Subjugation, as Blackhawk illuminates Native responses to mounting colonial pressures.

The Introduction lays out the book’s central claims and contextualizes its significance in the scholarly field of US History. Blackhawk’s first main thesis argues for Encounter as the Framework for US History rather than the “discovery” narrative that has dominated academic and popular history. By reframing the history of Indigenous and settler-colonists as one of encounter rather than discovery, Blackhawk aims to reclaim the history of tribal agency amid subjugation. These two arguments directly counteract popular narratives of US history that marginalize and discount the significance of Indigenous peoples. Blackhawk restores autonomy to the tribes who first encountered Europeans by elevating them from the status of “discovered” peoples to active members of a new global society. Furthermore, he seeks to carry that sense of autonomy throughout his narrative into the late 20th century, correcting other historians who have viewed Native Americans as a passive, vanishing population. After a summary of the state of Indigenous studies within the field of US history and an overview of the book’s contents, Blackhawk describes the pivotal moment of the first encounter between Indigenous people and European colonists.

The first three chapters address the Spanish, British, and French empires in North America, respectively. To a lesser extent, Dutch colonial efforts are also discussed. Blackhawk examines the particular cultural contexts of each imperial force and the tribes that they encountered. In the Southwest, Spanish explorers violently encountered the Aztec Empire and Pueblo communities. In the Northeast, British Puritans came into contact with Algonquian trading economies. In the Great Lakes region, French colonizers lived in the political realm of the powerful Iroquois Confederacy. Each of these groups had distinct cultural values and political motivations, leading to a complex web of alliances and rivalries as the colonial era progressed.

After establishing the preliminary circumstances of the post-Columbian order of North America, Blackhawk turns his attention to the political struggles between ethnic groups that foregrounded the formation of the American Republic. In what he terms the “borderlands” between European colonies in the East and the Native Inland Sea in the Midwest, increasingly racialized tensions between civilian settlers and tribal members undermined the governmental policies of peace that had become the status quo in New France and even in several of the British colonies. Colonial violence, waged by white supremacist militias against Native Americans, helped to forge a coherent white American identity group defined by a collective fear of racial others. Military conflicts before the American Revolution, such as the French and Indian War (1754-1763) and the Pequot War (1636-1638), illustrate this violent frontier dynamic.

In the second half of Rediscovery, Blackhawk focuses on the frequent US Policy Shifts and Their Impacts on Indigenous Life. These policy shifts stem from everchanging legal interpretations of the US Constitution, a dynamic that Blackhawk is particularly equipped to address as a scholar of Native American legal history. Beginning in the 19th century, widespread assimilationist ideology came into conflict with language in the Constitution that enshrined Native American sovereignty as an aspect of treaty law. Racist policy makers often found workarounds for this conflict, enacting destructive government programs such as Allotment, Termination, and the Indian Adoption Program that facilitated cultural erasure. Native children suffered the most from these policies, being forcibly kidnapped and enrolled in the deadly boarding school system that sought to assimilate young Natives across the continent in both the US and Canada.

During these centuries of political struggle and violent subjugation, activist movements within Native American communities fought the racist paradigms of their times. In the early 20th century, the writings and work of the Society of American Indians gained traction with progressive policy makers, leading to the passing of the “Indian New Deal.” Half a century later, the Red Power Movement gained international attention for the cause of Native American rights as youth activists occupied Alcatraz Island for over a year. In these movements, Blackhawk finds the roots of his own work as a scholar of Native American studies, pointing to Rediscovery itself as a product of Native American history.