Atrocity and Agency – The Indigenous Impact on American History

A Review of Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University Press, 2023).
By Anthony Earth

Writers of historical fiction attempt to find equipoise between the freedom of imagination and the facts of history. But history is often told through preferences that portray the past as something more than proven facts.

In The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023), Ned Blackhawk challenges narratives about the founding and evolution of the United States that neglect or minimize how indigenous populations shaped what became America. By centering the tale on Native peoples, Blackhawk seeks to remake U.S. history by demonstrating how important such peoples are in the American story.

Blackhawk’s Approach and Provocation

For readers not steeped in the history of indigenous peoples after Europeans arrived in the so-called New World, Blackhawk’s approach is enlightening. It reveals the complexity of relations across the continent between Indian tribes and Spanish, French, and British colonizers developed over hundreds of years before the Declaration of Independence. That backstory informs how the new United States organized itself, including the Constitution’s allocation of authority for managing relations with Native peoples. Blackhawk explores the challenges, controversies, and conflicts that emerged in the U.S. government’s exercise of that authority from the Republic’s formative years through the end of the twentieth century.

The book provides breadth, depth, and texture to the place of indigenous populations in U.S. history. Blackhawk wants the resurrection of that part of America’s past to make the indigenous presence and experience as seminal in the saga of the United States as the nation’s revolutionary founding and its struggle with slavery. His elevation of Native peoples also shows that they were not passive victims of European and then American power, discrimination, and violence but exercised “extraordinary agency” that shaped U.S. history.

Blackhawk intends for his history to force an additional rediscovery—one that reflects on how the American experiment with individual liberty, self-government, capitalism, and technological innovation has mistreated its indigenous populations. He announces that normative purpose by asking a provocative question to begin the book, “How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?”

The Meanings of Dispossession

Answering that question proves difficult based on the history told in The Rediscovery of America and Blackhawk’s interest in indigenous agency. Dispossession of Native peoples from their homelands across the American continent was effectively completed by the 1880s. Thereafter, the United States developed into the world’s most important liberal democracy, most powerful economy, and most technologically innovative society. Its Constitution became influential worldwide. As the twentieth century progressed, America emerged as an indispensable nation during peace and war for many countries because of its material power, technological prowess, and political values.

The dispossession of indigenous populations created a continental nation, the land and resources of which became foundations for American global power and influence in the twentieth century. That trajectory does not justify what happened to Native peoples before or after the United States achieved worldwide importance. However, the scale, prejudice, and violence of the dispossession—and the subsequent transformation of the United States into a global power—raise questions about Native agency that Blackhawk emphasizes in his book. The century following dispossession is hard to understand through Blackhawk’s thesis that “American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development.”

In terms of the centuries before dispossession was completed, Blackhawk illuminates how Native peoples took diplomatic, economic, and military action in response to threats to their lands and cultures from the Spanish, French, British, and Americans. As Blackhawk argues, indigenous agency affected how three empires and the U.S. government behaved on the continent—a dynamic that is an important part of American history.

But, as Blackhawk’s analysis shows, the behavior of the European empires and the U.S. government did not demonstrate that resistance by, resilience of, and reconciliation among Native peoples stopped, stabilized, or reversed the threats to their lands and ways of life. Indeed, the process of dispossession—and its atrocities—intensified and expanded after the Americans threw off British rule and the United States completed the Louisiana Purchase with France, annexed the southwest after defeating Mexico in war, and focused federal power on the west after the Union won the Civil War.

As Blackhawk explores, indigenous agency faced wave after wave of debilitating phenomena. The arrival of European diseases triggered an epidemiological decimation of Native peoples that wreaked long-term damage on the ability of Indian tribes to protect their lands and cultures. Trade with Europeans involving metal tools, guns, and furs changed tribal economics and politics and, over time, made tribes increasingly dependent on, and vulnerable to, European power.

Ruptures among the Europeans in the latter half of the eighteenth century—for example, the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France and the American Revolution—deepened the weaknesses, dependencies, and vulnerabilities of Native peoples. Simultaneously, Europeans entered an age of scientific, technological, and industrial development—transformations that the United States brought to bear against Native peoples in the nineteenth century.

Post-Dispossession Agency

Sustained impact from Native agency becomes more apparent in Blackhawk’s narrative after the U.S. government had completed indigenous dispossession. From the late nineteenth century and across the twentieth century, Native leaders mounted meaningful resistance against efforts to assimilate Indians into American institutions and culture and to terminate the status of tribes as sovereign nations. For example, Blackhawk observes that: “Tribes had reversed the most threatening policies of the Cold War era.”

But that era is when the United States became the most powerful, influential, affluent, and innovative democracy ever seen. The Cold War decades are when the United States emerges, in Blackhawk’s description, as the “world’s most exemplary democracy.” Native agency cannot explain that history-changing transformation of the United States. Blackhawk acknowledges that indigenous agency during the last half of the twentieth century had limited meaning for the rest of the nation: “Few outside Indian Country understood this historic reversal of fortune, while even fewer grasped the hard-fought gains of the modern sovereignty movement.”

New Century, Old Problems

The reckoning forced by Native resistance after dispossession continues today concerning injustices endured by indigenous peoples. Blackhawk concludes his book at the end of the twentieth century, but he warns that Native activism for justice and sovereignty cannot rest: “As the twenty-first century began, continued challenges to those sovereign gains reappeared as congressional law makers, court justices, and other concentrations of power again took aim at Indian lands, jurisdiction, and resources.”

In essence, that ongoing reckoning asks a different question from the one Blackhawk posed, “How can Native peoples persuade the world’s leading democracy to atone for injustices done in dispossessing them of their homelands and ensure that tribal sovereignty supports indigenous self-determination?”

Answering that question confronts serious challenges, especially in a divided America that is struggling to remain a leading democracy. At present, atonement for past injustices against Native peoples lacks political visibility and support, especially compared with campaigns for slavery reparations. What tribal sovereignty and rights mean in the U.S. political and legal order remains contested, as seen in recent Supreme Court cases involving Indian tribes and child custody, criminal jurisdiction, and water rights.

The Native agency prized by Blackhawk invokes a responsibility to imagine a future freed from the facts of history. As such, that responsibility is an act of defiance against the past dictating the future. Thank goodness, then, that sometimes fiction is stronger than fact.