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

This book seeks to reorient U.S. history by redressing the absence of American Indians within it. Covering five hundred years of history, it builds on the work of many other scholars while recognizing that not all peoples, themes, and places can be held within a single study. American history developed out of the epic encounter between Indians and European empires and out of the struggles for sovereignty between Native peoples and the United States. American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development.

Few history books have the kind of popular cache that Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America does. There have been other big "retellings" of American history through the lens of Indigenous Americans--Roxane Dunbar-Ortiz's comes to mind--but this one appeared to meet the moment of a post-Standing Rock awareness of Indigenous people. It won the National Book Award, and it's not hard to see why: it's a scrupulous, thoughtful telling of history that most readers have never heard before. It begins with the colonization of what's now the American Southwest by Spanish--a colonization effort that predates English and other powers on the east coast of the U.S. by over a century--and moves steadily toward the late 20th century, taking every opportunity to show the ways in which what we think of as American history is also Native American history. The "Rediscovery" in the title cheekily shows what the game is.

In many ways, the broader strokes will be familiar to anyone who has read about Indigenous Americans. I see reflected here the same periodizing that David Treuer talks about in The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee--colonization, frontier, allotment, termination, etc. I attended a seminar with an accomplished historian of Indigenous American history where I overheard her call the book a disappointment--I couldn't really hear much of her complaints, but I caught suggestions of cheap, sloppy errors and, most significantly, a sense that the book covers little ground that a historian wouldn't already know. That said, I'm not a historian, and I found a lot of the material here to be very new to me, if not in the broader strokes, the specific details that Blackhawk chooses to pull. I appreciated the reliance on specific anecdotes and primary sources from Indigenous people who lived through each of this different eras.

So, here are some of the big takeaways for me. I came away with a greater sense of how powerful Native tribes, especially the Iroquois/Haudenosaunee Confederacy, were during the colonial period. Far from being a vassal to great powers, the Iroquois were a powerful union of tribes whose possessions constituted, for Blackhawk, a true Empire. The Iroquois, according to Blackhawk, were both a formidable military foe who frequently got the better of the English and French, but clever diplomats who knew how to forge allies with one power or another to keep the other at bay. Such triangulation might have continued apace, if not for the collapse of the French control of Haiti and the country's swift divestment from North America. Nor did I realize how much of the Revolutionary War was precipitated by hatred and suspicion of Native peoples on the margin of the first colonies. Colonists turned to a strong patriot government to help protect them from the Native nations that they felt threatened them, and to help legitimize a growing sense of racial and ethnic superiority that entitled them to seize interior lands.

These battles for the first frontier--what Blackhawk calls the "Inland Sea," the Great Lakes--make up what felt like the most important and interesting part of the book, for me. It may be that I'm just less familiar with that chapter of American history than any other. The parts that were more familiar--the expansion of American interests across the interior west, then the legacies of allotment and termination in the 20th century--had less interest for me. More than anything, I came away thinking that I'd love to read a more specific and narrowly tailored history about the battles for the Great Lakes and the immediate interior preceding the Civil War.