Francisco de Coronado massacres Pueblo communities during his expedition northward, forcibly incorporating dozens of southwestern villages into the Spanish kingdom.

Popé leads the Pueblo Revolt, successfully expelling Spanish officials and clergy from Pueblo communities and temporarily reclaiming Indigenous autonomy in the Southwest.

Tisquantum is kidnapped by British captain Thomas Hunt and trafficked to Europe, beginning a life as an unwilling cultural go-between.

The Pequot War erupts amid intertribal competition over wampum and fur trades, ending with the enslavement of 200 surviving Pequots by British colonists.

Champlain's wars devastate Mohawk forces, but the Iroquois Confederacy rapidly adapts and emerges as one of North America's most feared military powers.

The Great Peace of Montreal unites French forces and roughly 40 Indigenous tribes, restructuring Native power dynamics across the continent.

Washington's misreading of his Senecan ally Tanaghrisson's motivations leads to a French ensign's murder and retaliatory attacks that open a major colonial war.

Inspired by Neolin's prophetic teachings, Pontiac launches a multi-tribal military campaign that destroys nine British forts across the Great Lakes region.

The US Constitution is ratified, enshrining Native American treaty sovereignty in its language while centralizing Anglo-American colonial authority over Indigenous lands.

Jefferson excludes Indigenous peoples from Louisiana Purchase negotiations, circumventing their legal sovereignty over the vast territory being transferred between European powers.

The General Allotment Act legally divides reservation lands into individual sellable plots, enabling the massive dispossession of Native homelands across the country.

The federal government establishes a boarding school system that forcibly separates Native children from their families to erase Indigenous language and culture.

The Supreme Court rules in United States v. Kagama that only federal and state governments hold sovereign authority over Native peoples.

The Society of American Indians holds its first meeting, launching advocacy that eventually produces the Merriam Report and pressures the Indian New Deal.

Indigenous activists occupy Alcatraz Island, bringing Native American rights into the national spotlight for the first time and galvanizing the Red Power Movement.

This pool traces the major turning points in Native American history as covered in Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America, beginning with Spanish colonial violence against Pueblo communities in the Southwest and moving through the British and French colonial eras. The pivotal political struggles leading to the American Revolution give way to the ratification of the US Constitution, which Blackhawk identifies as the central turning point that codified Anglo-American colonial ambition within federal law. Destructive government programs like the General Allotment Act and the boarding school system then accelerated cultural erasure across the 19th and early 20th centuries. Legal decisions like United States v. Kagama further stripped tribes of independent authority, consolidating federal plenary power over Native affairs. The Society of American Indians emerges as a critical force of resistance, driving advocacy that eventually yields the Indian New Deal. The pool closes with the Alcatraz occupation, representing the culmination of Indigenous resistance movements that brought Native American rights into the national spotlight after centuries of invisibility.

The headline events reshaping US history through a Native lens.

Juan Ponce de León uses attack dogs to kill and subdue Indigenous people in Hispaniola, demonstrating the deliberate violence underlying early Spanish colonial expansion.

Tisquantum organizes the gathering at Plymouth Colony later mythologized as the First Thanksgiving, acting as a diplomatic broker between Wampanoags and Puritan settlers.

Wampum beads become the keystone currency of northeastern colonial trade, placing Native value systems at the center of the growing colonial economy.

The Iroquois Confederacy forges an alliance with Dutch traders who supply advanced guns, enabling dominance over neighboring nations already weakened by European disease.

European leaders commission portraits of Iroquois delegates, demonstrating that Iroquois political authority commands diplomatic recognition on a global scale.

Mandan villages in the Mississippi River Basin constitute the largest urban society on the continent, establishing Indigenous communities as North America's true population center.

Washington's forces are massacred at Great Meadows after the killing of a French ensign, formalizing colonial hostilities in what becomes the French and Indian War.

The Black Boys militia massacres Conestoga Natives and goes unpunished, revealing the violent white supremacist identity consolidating among frontier settlers in the colonial borderlands.

Britain expels French forces from North America, destroying the French-Indigenous hybrid culture that had flourished throughout the Great Lakes and Midwest.

The Revolutionary army attacks Iroquois and Cherokee villages indiscriminately, extending settler violence throughout the war despite prior diplomatic alliances with those tribes.

New York State illegally seizes Iroquois lands, causing national authority to crumble and threatening the fragile stability of the post-Revolutionary Union.

Andrew Jackson enacts removal policies that forcibly displace the Cherokee Nation from their southeastern homelands in a journey known as the Trail of Tears.

Toypurina, a Tongva medicine woman living outside the mission system, organizes a revolt against the San Gabriel Mission alongside other Indigenous communities.

Mining economies in the Civil War-era West devastate intermountain landscapes and destroy natural resources that had sustained Native ways of life for generations.

John Collier's Indian New Deal ends destructive allotment policies and reaffirms Native autonomy, representing the most significant governmental recognition of Indigenous rights in decades.

This pool covers significant moments and figures from Blackhawk's narrative that illuminate the broader context of Indigenous-settler relations across five centuries. From the brutal violence of early Spanish colonialism in the Caribbean to the wampum-centered trade economies of the Northeast, these events reveal how Native peoples shaped colonial societies even as they suffered under them. Figures like Tisquantum and Toypurina show how individuals navigated colonial pressures with ingenuity and courage in the face of overwhelming force. Political betrayals like the Trail of Tears and the illegal seizure of Iroquois lands by New York State illustrate the consistent disregard for Native sovereignty by government authorities at every level. The mining economies that devastated western Native communities during the Civil War era highlight how capitalist expansion compounded colonial damage across the continent's interior. The pool concludes with John Collier's Indian New Deal, a brief but meaningful policy reversal driven directly by decades of persistent Indigenous advocacy.

Key figures and forgotten moments in the wider story of Native resistance.

Blackhawk introduces encounter as the proper framework for US history, arguing it is essential to restoring Native agency in American historical narratives.

Spanish friars prevent their own men from stealing Pueblo livestock, illustrating the fragile recognition of Indigenous legal authority that governed the colonial Southwest.

Spanish authorities capture Popé and convict him of witchcraft, but a delegation of Pueblo leaders successfully demands the prisoners' release.

Iroquois captive-taking practices emerge as a survival strategy, forcibly incorporating Native and European captives to replace community members lost to disease and warfare.

Blackhawk reframes the French and Indian War as the First World War, challenging assumptions that global military conflict is exclusively a modern phenomenon.

Blackhawk argues the US Constitution's creation was driven by federal efforts to centralize control over Indigenous lands amid escalating state-federal power conflicts.

The Haitian Revolution confirms Jefferson's fear of slave revolts, intensifying his drive to build a white supremacist racial order that marginalizes both Black and Native peoples.

Spanish colonizers bring invasive animal and plant species that transform Tongva landscapes, representing a form of environmental colonialism that destroys Indigenous ways of life.

Indigenous resistance along the Pacific Northwest coast highlights the dangers of foreign interference, contributing to the federal government's adoption of the Monroe Doctrine.

Facing Union aggression, many Indigenous tribes including the Cherokee ally with the Confederacy in hopes that a Union defeat might restore their lost autonomy.

The Union army forces the Diné on the Long Walk to government reservations, signaling ethnic cleansing as a formal aim of US military policy.

The Ghost Dance revival movement spreads across Native communities as a defiant assertion of cultural autonomy amid the devastation of the Reservation Era.

World's Fairs depict Native Americans as relics of a vanishing race, but Indigenous performers use these platforms to publicly critique government policies and challenge misconceptions.

Nazi Germany's leaders cite US ethnic cleansing campaigns against Native peoples as a model, revealing how American federal Indigenous policy contributed to the Holocaust.

Vine Deloria Jr. publishes Custer Died for Your Sins, galvanizing Red Power activists and establishing Native American studies as a transformative academic discipline.

This pool focuses on the analytical and narrative turning points that give Blackhawk's revisionist history its distinctive power. Beginning with Blackhawk's foundational argument for encounter over discovery as the framework for US history, it follows key revelations about colonial violence and Indigenous resilience that accumulate across the book. Events like Popé's arrest and release, Iroquois captive-taking practices, and the environmental destruction of Tongva landscapes in California show how colonial pressure produced unexpected forms of resistance and adaptation. Blackhawk's bold reframings of familiar historical events — presenting the French and Indian War as a First World War and identifying the Constitution as a fundamentally colonial document — challenge readers to abandon long-held assumptions about American origins. In the book's later chapters, the Ghost Dance, the calculated exploitation of World's Fairs by Native performers, and Nazi Germany's adoption of US ethnic cleansing policies reveal the global and deeply human stakes of Native American history. The pool concludes with Vine Deloria Jr.'s landmark publication, which paved the way for Blackhawk's own transformative scholarly work.