Native Recognition

We’re well past the point of accepting the lessons many of us learned as schoolkids about the American origin story. Or we should be. Slavery wasn’t merely an unfortunate chapter in the nation’s history. Settlement wasn’t peaceful interactions with Native populations in the east and hardy pioneers enduring vast open spaces and bravely fighting off savages as the nation grew westward. It’s a little more complicated and less flattering. 

Slavery was woven into the colonial and national fabric for 240 years and jump-started the economy of a fledgling nation that had no guarantee of success. Much of that expansion and economic growth occurred because settlers pushed off, killed and stole land from its original occupants, often with government and official backing. Slavery’s role in U.S. history has received increased attention, due to a wave of scholarly studies and accounts in recent years. The Native American experience in the country’s formation and its role in how and where we are is comparatively light. 

A group of writers and historians aim to change that, arguing that U.S. history that doesn’t include Native or Indian experiences and influences is incomplete at best, negligent and flat-out inaccurate at worst. One addition to the catalogue is “The Rediscovery Of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” winner of the 2023 National Book Award for non-fiction. Author Ned Blackhawk is a Shoshone and history professor at Yale, and his work is exhaustively researched and footnoted. 

The book opens with a fastball, high and tight: “How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” He writes: “For centuries America and the New World have been ideas that convey a sense of wonder and possibility made manifest by discovery, a historical act in which explorers are the protagonists. They are the drama’s actors and subjects. They think and name, conquer and settle, govern and own. They are at the center … just as Native Americans remain absent or appear as hostile or passive objects awaiting discovery and domination.” 

Blackhawk starts with Spanish settlers in the 16th century and works his way through to the end of the 20th century and the Indian sovereignty and power movement. The book includes many developments that people are aware of: diseases brought by European settlers and livestock for which Natives had no immunity and that killed millions; forced movement of tribes away from traditional lands; the staggering number of treaties that government entered into and later broke with Native peoples; state-sanctioned violence against and measures to exterminate Indians, such as troop raids of Indian homesteads and massive bison kill-offs; removal of thousands of children from their homes and placement in government-run Indian boarding schools, many of which had appalling records of abuse. 

But Blackhawk also gets into less trod upon areas such as Native influences on the American Revolution and language of the Constitution. He shows that early treaty-making with Indian tribes was essentially training wheels for the new nation and informed later negotiations with foreign governments. He points out that the country quickly grew beyond its ability to control people and borders, so settlers and local militias in inland areas often took matters into their own hands, either with or without government approval. Government agreements and treaties with various tribes were broken or ignored by settlers. 

Discontent with government by those who lived hundreds or thousands of miles away pre-dates the nation’s founding and was an animating force in our development. He discusses how gold and mineral discoveries in the west and accompanying settler booms, as well as the military ramp-up surrounding the Civil War, accelerated Native death and displacement. 

Blackhawk provides links between the nation’s settler colonialism practices toward Indians with imperialistic measures such as intervention in Latin America and even far-flung examples like U.S. involvement in the Philippines as part of the Spanish-American War at the end of the 19th century. For example, Pres. Theodore Roosevelt said in a speech at Hampton (Va) Institute in 1906: “The reasoning which justifies our having made war against Sitting Bull also justifies our having checked the outbreak of (Emilio) Aguinaldo and his followers.” If the U.S, he said, “were morally bound to abandon the Philippines, we were also morally bound to abandon Arizona to the Apaches.” 

Orville Platt, kind of a racist dick

A thread that runs throughout the book is the nation’s inability to enact or maintain consistent policies toward Native peoples. Sovereign and independent? Paternal wards? Assimilation? Marginalization? Elimination? Always with a side of racism and white supremacy. Blackhawk explains, for instance, that Union soldiers and government-backed militias in California and the West during the Civil War were far more motivated to kill Indians than to defeat the Confederacy. A San Francisco paper wrote in the early 1860s: “While we believe the manner in which the Indians are being exterminated is perfectly horrible, we are disposed to make every possible allowance for our own people.” Connecticut Senator Orville Platt, whose tenure spanned 25 years and bridged the 19th and 20th centuries, once said, “The red man has no rights which the white man is bound to respect, and … no treaty or contract with him is binding."

Blackhawk writes that the romanticized history of the nation took hold after the Civil War and in the period around the centennial celebration and toward the end of the century. The idea of providence as an elemental part of America and Americans dates to the Puritans. The elimination of slavery had atoned for its primary sin, he writes, and the country’s burgeoning wealth and prosperity and place on the world stage validated its actions. Dealings with Native peoples were sanitized, justified or ignored in the telling. 

Blackhawk’s book is a worthy read, though I wouldn’t recommend it for everybody. It’s more textbook than narrative, which is understandable from a historian. There are compelling characters, incidents and descriptions throughout, but they’re often presented without flourish, arguably to the book’s benefit because the message never descends into a polemic. Facts and references tell the tales. Not always an easy read but accounts such as his are necessary ones if we want something more than myth.