The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk (review)

Abstract

Reviewed by: The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History by Ned Blackhawk David A. Nichols (bio) The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. By Ned Blackhawk. (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2023. Pp. 616. $35.00 cloth) After armed insurgents stormed the U.S. Capitol building on January 6, 2021, historian Jill Lepore told National Public Radio that “We are off the grid of the trajectory of American history.” Students of Native American history found Lepore’s remark puzzling. European-Americans built the United States, after all, with stolen labor on stolen land, and white settlers did sometimes direct the violence underlying those thefts against their governments (e.g. Bacon’s Rebellion, the Paxton riots, the Civil War). Ned Blackhawk, who begins his magisterial new history of Native North America with a critique of Lepore’s work (specifically her 2018 book These Truths), would prefer that his readers find in the insurrection of January 6th the shock of the familiar. From an Indigenous perspective the arc of American history bends not toward justice but toward violence. The title of Blackhawk’s first book, Violence over the Land (2006), could also summarize The Rediscovery of America’s account of early American history. Eastern Algonquians experienced subjugation and enslavement at the hands of Virginians and Puritans. In the eighteenth century violence toward Native peoples unified white settlers and mobilized them politically. The Revolution, Blackhawk argues, actually began with the outbreak of settler violence in 1760s Pennsylvania. The framers of the American Constitution abhorred frontier chaos, but their new nation-state planned to build its wealth from Native lands, and social order took a back seat to that imperative. A policy [End Page 183] based on treaties gave way to one of coercion, outsourced to aggressive state governments, and finally to one of ethnic cleansing, perpetrated by settler militias. After the Civil War, the national government enacted its “Peace Policy,” replacing the overt violence of the Plains Wars with the institutional violence of the reservation. The Interior Department used hunger and parental incarceration to force Indigenous children into boarding schools, where teachers stripped them of their language and identity. The Dawes Act (1887) broke up communally held lands into allotments, clearing the way for another round of land sales. The efficiency with which the U.S. government dispossessed and subju-gated Native Americans impressed its future adversaries, Imperial Japan and Nazi Germany. Even after fighting an apocalyptic war with those admirers, the United States gave Native peoples no relief. In the 1950s Congress and the BIA “terminated” the sovereignty of one hundred Indigenous nations, and until 1978, state welfare agencies offset the cost of aiding impoverished Native communities by seizing children, over 25 percent of all Indigenous children in the United States, and placing them with white foster families. The temporary restoration of tribal sovereignty in the 1970s was curtailed by the Supreme Court’s Suquamish decision (1978), and economic development stymied by the budget cuts of the 1980s. Blackhawk has no wish to make his magisterial history a “victimology.” Amidst the blood and trauma of the last four centuries, Native North Americans retained agency and resisted total defeat. In the Midwest and in the Pacific Northwest, Indigenous people defended their autonomy for generations with skillful diplomacy and the wealth they accumulated through trade. In the early twentieth century Native activists like Louise Kellogg helped found legal-rights organizations such as the Society of American Indians, and reformers like the Cloud family established institutes to preserve Indigenous stories and languages. What the author does not want to do is downplay the severe stress that colonization placed on all Indigenous peoples, nor suggest that Native American history had a “trajectory” [End Page 184] that propelled it toward recovery. By the start of the new millennium the Indigenous American struggle for land and sovereignty had proven inconclusive, and Native Americans had learned they could not rely on laws and policies that one president or Supreme Court decision could eliminate. Non-white Americans’ political gains have usually only come after a dispiritingly long struggle and have proven vulnerable to counteraction by the greedy and...