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PORTSIDE CULTURE

THE REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA: WHY NATIVE HISTORY IS AMERICAN HISTORY  
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David Smith
May 8, 2023
The Guardian
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_ Historian Ned Blackhawk stresses the importance of telling US
history with a wider and more inclusive lens. _

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_The Rediscovery of America
Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History_
Ned Blackhawk
ISBN: 9780300276671

Four centuries after African captives arrived on the shore of
Virginia, America’s origin story was recast by the 1619 Project
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with slavery and the contribution of African Americans at his heart.
It was a long-overdue corrective to white, Eurocentric narratives. But
it was the not the last word.

“Scholars have recently come to view African American slavery as
central to the making of America, but few have seen Native Americans
in a similar light,” writes Ned Blackhawk
[[link removed]], a
historian at Yale University and member of the Te-Moak Tribe of
Western Shoshone. “Binary, rather than multiracial, visions dominate
studies of the past where slavery represents America’s original sin
or the antithesis of the American idea.

“But can we imagine an American Eden that is not cultivated by its
original caretakers? Exiled from the American origin story, Indigenous
peoples [[link removed]] await
the telling of a continental history that includes them. It was their
garden homelands, after all, that birthed America.”

In his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the
Unmaking of US History
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Blackhawk attempts to tell that continental history over five
centuries, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Indian
self-determination. Native Americans played a foundational role in
shaping America’s constitutional democracy, he contends, even as
they were murdered and dispossessed of their land.
Taken with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, it is a reminder of
the danger of a single story when history is better understood as a
multiverse of perspectives.

Journalist Jonathan Capehart, interviewing Blackhawk for a recent
Washington Post Live event
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observed: “I’m old enough to remember the encyclopaedias or
biology books where you’ve got the main page and then you have these
plastic overlays – you lay one down and you see one set of organs;
you lay another one down, you see more, but you see them altogether.
And in looking at The Rediscovery of America and having looked at 1619
Project, that’s what it felt like to me.”

Blackhawk, 51, who has been teaching Native American history since
1999, makes the case for a paradigm of “encounter” rather than
“discovery” in which Europeans and their settler communities are
not the exclusive subjects of inquiry. He points to a generation of
scholars who have shown that “American Indians were central to every
century of US historical development”, particularly during the era
of the American revolution.

 

A turning point was the fallout from the Seven Years’ War
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between Britain and France, which started as a dispute over North
American land claims in the region around Pittsburgh and ended in 1763
with France ceding Canada to Britain.
Speaking from a book-lined home office in New Haven, Connecticut,
Blackhawk says: “What happens in the summer of 1763? A bunch of
Indians are not happy that the French have been expelled and that the
new British overlords of the interior portions of North America are
imposing unilateral authoritarian regimes essentially.”

Led by Pontiac, an Odawa (Ottawa) chief, Native Americans took up arms
against the British in what became known as Pontiac’s Rebellion
[[link removed]].
A conflict erupted that would enflame tensions between the British
crown and its own subjects and seed the fall of the British empire in
North America.

Blackhawk explains: “The settlers have moved into the interior
following the Seven Years’ War and started building small farms and
orchards and raising cattle and pigs. Throughout the late 1750s and
early 1760s they’re primed to gain more interior land. Native
Americans are resisting this and the British crown decides that
another war is too costly in the interior and so they pass a royal
proclamation of 1763 to keep their settlers from moving into the
interior.

“The settlers defy British authority. One of the ways they do that
is by killing Indians whom they believe are fuelling trade to
Pontiac’s allies in places like Detroit and across a road between
Philadelphia, which is a seaport, and Pittsburgh, which has recently
been settled and renamed after the future British prime minister
William Pitt.

“Along this 300-mile road known as Forbes Road
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essentially start marauding not just Indian communities that they fear
are trading with Pontiac but British supply trains because the British
are trying to make peace with Pontiac. These are not robbers.
They’re rebels. They are insurgents who have a kind of political
psychology aimed at dislodging allegiances with interior Indians.”

The author adds: “That’s where the revolution has some of its most
formative fuel. The idea of a frontier being attacked by ‘merciless
Indian savages’ is written into the United States declaration of
independence. Where does that idea come from? US historians have been
unable sufficiently to explain the origins and genealogy of that
language, that ideology, and essentially that history which will
pervade the early republic.

“It’s not coincidental that there are no federally recognised
tribes in the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania where these conflicts
are most pronounced.”

The perceived threat from Native Americans was crucial, Blackhawk
asserts, to the formation of a central government able to extend its
authority over national concerns. A federal constitution was drawn up
to unite the 13 states and manage their territorial expansion.

“Indian affairs are one of the few areas in which the drafters of
the constitution have general agreement that a federalist system, a
centralised, more powerful political structure, is needed to manage
the new republic’s relationships with Native Americans. The articles
of confederation failed to do that.
“One of those new authorities is to make treaties the supreme law of
the land as they’re not in the constitution. The federal government
signs treaties with Native Americans right away and continues a
practice that dates back to the late British period of bilateral
relationships with recognised Indigenous nations. Those are the first
treaties the US Senate ratifies.”

Blackhawk himself was able to go to college in Canada as a consequence
of the 1794 Jay Treaty, which provided that Native Americans may
travel freely across the international boundary. “These histories
aren’t confined to the past. They have ongoing legacies, realities
and meanings that we as historians of the United States have been
remiss to identify.”

Blackhawk also analyses the neglected role of Native Americans in the
1861-65 civil war. In Oklahoma the Confederacy essentially forced them
to renounce their loyalty to the Union, sign treaties as allies and
form battalions that fought for the south. In California the federal
government was unable to meet its treaty obligations, prompting Native
Americans to take up arms; this brought them into conflict with white
settlers who, funded by the government, killed thousands of Indigenous
people.

“There is this incredible under-told story of the civil war in
Indian country involving the Confederacy. You really can’t
understand the ultimate legacies of the civil war outside of an
understanding of not just the Native conflicts that happened during
the war but the growing power of the federal government thereafter.”

This was on the watch of President Abraham Lincoln, whose speeches are
endlessly quoted, whose monument sits on the National Mall in
Washington and whose legacy is still revered. Blackhawk reflects:
“It’s hard not to see him in the ways we currently do but he is
president of the United States at a time when its armies, military
leaders and politicians are instituting policies and practices that
are extraordinarily harmful against Native Americans.

“Some call these genocide – either stateless genocide in
California or even state-driven initiatives in places like Sand Creek,
Colorado, the Dakota war in Minnesota, the Bear River Massacre of the
Idaho-Utah frontier, and indiscriminate killings of innocent women,
children and the elderly that are famous within the study of Indian
massacres and warfare. Lincoln was aware of this; had no space, time
or energy to potentially remedy it, and just simply would offer
platitudes of guidance that had very limited actual traction to
them.”

 

Blackhawk writes about the uncomfortable juxtaposition of Lincoln’s
efforts to end slavery in late 1862 and early 1863 – at the same
time the territory of Minnesota was essentially ethnic cleansing the
Dakota people along the Minnesota River. Thirty-eight Dakota men were
hanged [[link removed]] in Mankato,
Minnesota, in the wake of a six-week uprising of Dakota people against
white settlers after the government broke its promise to deliver food
and supplies in exchange for the surrender of tribal land. It was the
biggest mass execution in American history.
But this is also a story of fortitude, resilience and creativity.
Chapter 12 of the book is called “From Termination to
Self-Determination”. It tells how, in the 20th century, there was
another attempt to assimilate Native Americans into the body politic
and “terminate” tribal governments. But an ideology known as Red
Power formed in the 1960s and 1970s, improving autonomy and
infrastructure on reservations.

“We are living still in an era known as self-determination that has
seen dramatically resurgent expressions of Native American politics,
economic development, interesting social and cultural movements.”

Blackhawk cites the Smithsonian National Museum of the American Indian
[[link removed]]
on the National Mall, the passage of the United Nations Declaration on
the Rights of Indigenous Peoples and Joe Biden’s appointment of Deb
Haaland as interior secretary, making her the first Native American to
serve as a cabinet secretary.

“This has happened in recent years and it’s not coming out of a
vacuum. To understand the contemporary moment requires this kind of
historical understanding, Most urgently, to understand the threats
that are being marshalled against Native American sovereignty also
requires this kind of historical perspective.

“Questions about race and distinctiveness and sovereignty are daily
questions in the practice of federal Indian law. If we can’t educate
our citizens and our children and our judges and political leaders on
these issues, we will likely face threats that we can’t yet fully
identify.”

* U.S. history
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* Native American History
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* the American Revolution
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* U.S.-Native treaties
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