The Rediscovery of America

Native American nations have been integral to the history of the United States from the very beginning, from the “merciless Indian savages” referenced in the Declaration of Independence to treaties and, later, tribal sovereignty. Some American Indians have even quoted the Declaration of Independence in their fights for recognition and self-government. 

Tracing a history that spans over 500 years, more than twice the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence this year, Dr. Ned Blackhawk centralizes American Indians in his award-winning book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History. Connecting American democracy to the dispossession of Native nations, Blackhawk reflects on recent scholarly publications and partnerships between tribal communities and non-tribal institutions to illuminate these ties to American history. Indigenous people, Blackhawk argues, shaped the origins of the American Revolution and the United States itself. 

Excerpt

Historians have long focused on other moments of revolutionary formation. In the process, they have erased the centrality of Native peoples to the Revolution and, ultimately, the course of American history. To understand the Revolution —its origins, course, and legacies—without American Indians is like a one-handed clap, an empty if excited gesture that perpetuates long-standing traditions of assessing only the rivalries and eventual dominance among Euro-Americans. Focus upon the colonies' "ordinary people" misses the power of Native peoples and their influence in fostering new political identities. As many have suggested, the Revolution became both a war for a new political order – for independence – and a struggle for the future of eastern North America. 

The ramifications spilled into the decades that followed. By the 1780s, the settler "sons" that Nathaniel Ames anticipated were children in a new national community. In this Republic, land remained the cornerstone of a new political system, one still rooted around "life and property" but now applicable only to men of European ancestry. Race, gender, and property converged to determine – to constitute – the new union's political subjects, upending previously established norms, including diplomatic practices between Indians and Europeans. The Republic did continue long-standing customary practice of treaty negotiations with Native leaders but did so in ways that sought land cessions from, and eventual authority over, Native peoples. 

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Like autumn leaves, the origins of the American Revolution are debated in seasonal and colorful ways. Boston remains prominent in such assessments. For generations, it has been seen as the site of the first organized urban “riots” in August 1765, when colonists organized to protest sugar and then stamp taxes. A long-recognized crucible of the Revolution, the Boston Massacre of March 1770 remains a signature beginning, the sine qua non of the Revolution itself. 

When Indians and interior rebellions occasionally appear in such histories, neither has dislodged the proprietary hold of these more familiar assessments of the origins of the American Revolution. The Revolution, in nearly all narratives, originated in seaports, and the Enlightenment ideas of liberty, virtue, and self-representation continue to be seen as the principal forces motivating independence. Indeed, as Bernard Bailyn has suggested, “Ideas may be understood to have lain at the heart of the Revolutionary outbreak and to have shaped its outcomes and consequences...The outbreak of the Revolution was not the result of social discontent, or of economic disturbances in the colonies, or of rising misery.” 

Numerous ironies surround such genealogies, the legacies of which continue to misconstrue the place of American Indians in the United States. For example, on July 15, 1776, eleven days after issuing the Declaration of Independence, Pennsylvanians continued the revolutionary processes that the interior vigilantes had started. As a state, they wrote their first constitution. 

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From Indian resistance to the enforcement of new national laws and policies, struggles over interior lands shaped the contours and eventual structures of the new American government.  

The colonization of the interior devastated the everyday lives of Native peoples and also contributed to the concentration of American political power. These interrelated processes of Indigenous dispossession and state formation originated in the aftermath of the Revolution. They continued for generations thereafter, laying the foundations of the early Republic. 

Although unclear in 1783, the federal government’s ultimate power, authority, and sovereignty over Native peoples (and of the American continent) became enshrined in the U.S. Constitution. Partly due to irresolvable struggles over interior lands and with Native Nations, America’s Founding Fathers abandoned the first government of the United States—the Articles of Confederation—and adopted a new constitutional government in 1787. This originated from struggles to centralize power over the interior and expanded processes of colonialism thereafter.

Blackhawk, Ned, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (Yale University Press, 2023). pp. 144-178