‘The Rediscovery of America’ Review: A History of Violence

For more than a generation, historians have been researching and writing American Indian history and showing how to incorporate it into U.S. history. The title of a 2015 collection of academic essays explains “Why You Can’t Teach United States History Without American Indians.” And yet most U.S. history teachers do teach their subject without much American Indian history. Most states’ social-studies curricula include American Indians only in the pre-1900 period—and then mostly as generalized objects of U.S. colonization and westward migration. New visions of U.S. history, such as the 1619 Project, continue to be as lacking in American Indians as older triumphalist accounts. History teachers at the K-12 level get little if any training in American Indian history beyond perhaps a few key moments, such as Pocahontas and Jamestown in the early 1600s and Cherokee Removal in the 1830s.

Ned Blackhawk, a professor of history at Yale and a citizen of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians, seeks to change that. “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History” is an eloquent and comprehensive telling of how the history of the United States and that of American Indians since the 1500s are the same story. Mr. Blackhawk points out that those who recently argued for slavery’s centrality to American history juxtapose it to American freedom while continuing to exclude Native Americans from a history that, after all, happened on their homelands. He argues instead that the “histories of Native America provide the starkest contrast to the American ideal.” He makes a persuasive case that we all should “rediscover” how Native Americans interacted with and shaped the United States from the period of European exploration and colonization to today. “Rather than seeing U.S. and Native American history as separate or disaggregated,” Mr. Blackhawk writes, he “envisions them as interrelated.”

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“The Rediscovery of America” follows the standard chronology of U.S. history, while showing how it was intersected by the interactions of Native Americans with Europeans and their North American descendants. By presenting post-1492 history as a series of encounters between the various peoples of the Americas and the peoples from Europe, Africa and Asia—rather than as an account of Europe’s discovery of a new world—Mr. Blackhawk provides a view of that past from multiple perspectives. He draws together hundreds of histories that have been written about specific encounters in particular times and places, including his own “Violence Over the Land” (2006); “Peace Came in the Form of a Woman” (2007), Juliana Barr’s account of colonial Texas; and “These People Have Always Been a Republic” (2019), Maurice Crandall’s history of interactions across what is now the U.S.-Mexico border. But calling these interactions “encounters” does not mean that they were peaceful. Indeed, Mr. Blackhawk argues for seeing violence as being at the heart of U.S. history. “The lethal combination of disease and warfare,” Mr. Blackhawk tells us, “remade the human geography of North America.”

In the book’s sweeping synthesis, standard flashpoints of U.S. history take on new meaning. The taxation power that the Constitution granted allowed the federal government to fund its Western Indian wars. The Monroe Doctrine was designed not only to ward off European powers from meddling in Latin America, but also, and perhaps more immediately, to caution Spain and Britain to cease their longtime military aid to Native Americans fighting the United States. The Union’s mobilization in the West during the Civil War “developed the administrative and military infrastructure that subsequently enabled the federal government to subjugate the West.” The U.S. Indian wars of the late 19th century shaped the strategy and tactics of U.S. wars in the Philippines and beyond. Federal efforts in the 1950s to dissolve tribes reflected a Cold War ideology that distrusted anything that seemed remotely communal.

Although violence runs throughout the book, it is tempered by Mr. Blackhawk’s attention to Native American diversity and how Native nations persisted through these centuries of violence, “emphasizing survival rather than elimination.” The book is full of strong characters who stand out against dehumanization. Mr. Blackhawk draws on “Standing Up to Colonial Power” (2018), by the anthropologist Renya K. Ramirez, to highlight the Ojibwe Progressive Era leader Elizabeth Bender Cloud, who, as a Native teacher, mitigated the assimilationist impulses of Indian boarding schools. In Los Angeles, the Tongva leader Toypurina is remembered for her rising up against California’s Spanish mission San Gabriel in 1785. “By the end of the twentieth century,” Mr. Blackhawk writes, “after five hundred years of contact with Europeans, a new generation of Native leaders had endured the turbulent challenges of the Cold War era and entered the dawn of the new century, positioned to ensure that their communities never again faced elemental threats to their existence.”

Like Pekka Hämäläinen’s “Indigenous Continent” (2022) and Daniel K. Richter’s “Facing East From Indian Country” (2001), the comprehensive coverage of “The Rediscovery of America” makes it a useful book to read alongside or even instead of a textbook, or as a supplement for readers interested in broad overviews of U.S. history. While “The Rediscovery of America” takes its story past the ending points of those two books, it covers the 20th century fairly quickly and stops at the year 2000. David Treuer’s “The Heartbeat of Wounded Knee” (2019) would make a good companion to tell the later parts of this history more fully. In any case, Ned Blackhawk has written a U.S. history that places Indigenous Americans at its heart.

—Ms. DuVal, a professor at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, is the author of “Independence Lost: Lives on the Edge of the American Revolution.”