Ned Blackhawk’s book, “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History”, is not just another history of the clash between European colonizers and Native peoples. It is a book of relationship, how over time, this country has gained much of its current and evolving form, from the extended conflict between us and native peoples, from their refusal to acquiesce, who have instead demanded that this country recognize native sovereignty and honor the treaties made between us, treaties which, along with our Constitution, are the ‘supreme law of the land’. Some of the most momentous changes to this country, its policies, laws and court decisions, resulted from these ongoing conflicts and this country’s attempts to resolve them. I was unaware of this book, and Blackhawk, until I read a review he wrote of Hamalainen’s, “Indigenous Continent” which I’d just finished.

Blackhawk, himself an academic historian and an indigenous person, has a different ‘take’ on America’s history than does the commonly proffered white European history acknowledged, taught in schools and celebrated. In his book he presents a more complex, nuanced history, not one of white ‘discovery’, of ‘superior’ white culture saving an indigenous, ‘lesser’ people, from their own decline, but a tragic, collision, of cultures, with very different values, in a back and forth, dialectic, each ‘side’ influencing the other continuously through their contact, indigenous peoples having a vital and essential knowledge of place for not just survival, but for a rich and politically stable life, without which, European newcomers would have likely perished altogether. Both disease and indigenous people’s lack of immunity to them, combined with European’s propensity for violence in their various quests for wealth and land, drove the process, each ‘learning’ through their contact with the other, how to adapt and survive. The ruthlessness, so often attributed to indigenous people in our commonly recognized histories, is stood on its head. Violence perpetuates more of the same and as the ‘victors’ we have taken the position of hero for ourselves. Blackhawk’s book tells the story differently, assembling the details, so many ignored or distorted, in a way that presents it in its unfolding in a dialectical pattern, the many players, the multiple tribes, their ‘internal’ conflicts and  confederacies while working with and in conflict with the several different European powers with their own goals and their colonists, adapting to the changes and assaults, be that the adoption of technologies, economics, weaponry and the making of alliances to survive. The ultimate outcome of all of this unknowable, volatile, over the many decades and several centuries of contact, a story that is still unfolding. Standard history tells this as a singular story of strong dominating weak, good over bad, and in its doing so, losing much along the way.

Blackhawk argues that Hamalainen, in his book, the author’s core argument is disproved, that Native Americans controlled and dominated this country during the several hundred years of the continent’s occupation and extended period of dispossession. Hamalainen, Blackhawk says, essentially refutes his own premise in the telling…The real story, Blackhawk argues, lies in the ongoing relationships of native peoples, ‘with’ Europeans and the white colonists, our government and the myths we tell ourselves about our country. I was intrigued so I checked out his book.

Blackhawk is meticulous in thought and writing. His book is heavily footnoted. He is careful to cite original sources as he lays out the ‘story’ and builds his case for a ‘dialectical’ relationship. He emphasizes the substantive interactions throughout and continues the story through the end of the last century with the protests, legal challenges and law making which have made significant strides toward reclaiming Native treaty rights, an issue which is still contested by groups working to deny them. Throughout our history various Presidents, Congresses, Courts, States, local jurisdictions, industries and private citizens have worked to circumvent these using the power they have seized in order to not just deny them, but to legally and effectively erase them, denying responsibility while seizing the land and resources promised through treaties. It has been a seesaw ‘battle’. Where Hamalainen took pains to emphasize the Native story, minimizing the white European story, Blackhawk focuses on the interactions, specifically the ‘promises’ made and their violations, the ‘solutions’ forced on recognized and unrecognized tribes and peoples. He describes the driving forces of the antagonists, the smug, unquestioned, ‘superiority’ of Whites, the violence they often used while the government, stood by, its own position on the issue divided, too weak to do anything effective about or enmeshed in what it saw as greater problems.

A particularly eye opening period was that of the Civil War and the wholesale slaughter of native peoples in the West which occurred then, conducted by militias, locally commanded ‘armies’, which were supported by the fledgling territories, while Congress and Presidents largely ignored these horrific and devastating attacks. Racism was rampant. The South was aggressively laying claim to vast territories in the West in an attempt to gain them as ‘slave’ states, North and South having set up a non-solution leading up to the onset of the Civil War. Native people were aggressively dispossessed, ‘removed’, extirpated. In many cases, huge swaths of their land was given to the railroads to speed transportation  and communications improvements and to aid the further occupation and dispossession of Native peoples. When profitable resources were identified on their treaty lands, the land was removed from the reservation system and its people ‘removed’, and ‘removed’ again, all under protest, native representatives often journeying to Washington D.C. to argue their case and be ignored. Many politicians and administrators grew weary of this and began to work to get rid of the issue in its entirety, dissolving the reservations and denying legal status to Natives and with that the government’s obligations to them.

The native people who remained on shrinking reservations were cheated and starved, their annuities and supports, guaranteed by treaty, ‘diverted’ to enrich those ‘agents’ charged with their dispersal and administration, and their cronies.

As a ‘new’ country, without precedent guiding its policies and relationships with foreign nations, the young government, used Native Americans, and the problems they presented, as a test case, as a ‘blueprint’ for how they would conduct themselves with foreign governments and peoples. The Monroe Doctrine, the idea of Manifest Destiny, underscored our relationship with our own Native People, the myth, the story we told ourselves of our coming together as a nation and our view of ourselves as the dominant white race. This drove us to wars with Mexico, the Philippines and are policies which drove us to dominate the Americas. We designated their inhabitants as inferior as we did our own Native Americans. Their legal status inconsequential or to be ignored. Our history whitewashes and ignores the ugliness of our occupation and journey to dominance, demonizing and diminishing the roles of other peoples.

Blackhawk takes considerable space to describe the period after our ‘conquest’ of the West and the effective ‘disappearance’ of Native Peoples. They did not disappear. In the popular culture they were portrayed as a throwback, primitive people, dying out due to their own inherent inferiority and weakness. Government policy at times did whatever it could to deny Native Americans what they were legally owed, underfunding guaranteed promises and programs, allowing the plundering of resources on reservation lands. Through the ‘allotment’ programs they worked to divide members by promising individuals a better life, dividing reservation lands and selling them off to private buyers, the proceeds distributed to individuals while requiring that the ‘tribe’ renounce its legal status and the governments treaty obligations with it. All of this was done through acts of Congress and the Bureau of Indian Affairs, in direct conflict with treaty law, tribal members often bullied into agreement. 

For many years children by the thousands were removed from native homes and placed in boarding schools, where they were denied family contact and vigorously punished for using their native language and carrying on any behaviors or practices which were Native in an organized attempt to remove the ‘Indian’ from them. What followed was an active program, administered by the States within which the reservations had been located, of adoption. Children were often removed from native homes, without the family’s consent or sometimes even knowledge and placed in foster systems which excluded native families as potential foster parents and denied contact between adoptees and, their birth families and tribes.

Throughout the book Blackhawk brings up many instances describing Native Peoples recognition of a changing world and their attempts to adapt. It was not unusual for colonists and settlers, driven by their own need to survive, their prejudices and greed, to participate in attacks on these ‘successful’ groups and force local and national leaders to ‘remove’ them and take the land for themselves. Native peoples have always clung to their sovereignty, their rights assured them in treaties with the government, often which were made by the government which was uncommitted to their enforcement. 

Much of the last of the book focuses on these moral and legal battles that were conducted throughout the 20th century, often ignored by the media and local governments, their proceedings unknown to the broader public until their results favored native peoples and reservations and the powers that be organized against them. The ability to control the harvest of timber and fish, particularly in the Pacific Northwest and reservation lands around the Great Lakes were argued and decided in the courts, local jurisdictions often refusing to follow those judgements which recognized Native sovereignty. The ability to govern themselves on their own lands within the larger context of Federal Law was often key. Their right to citizenship, long denied, was a hard fought battle that was not decided until the 1920’s, after American women gained the vote. Their ability to permit and regulate business on their own lands, to have their own schools which do not denigrate them as a people, all of these things and more have been expanded upon and more clearly defined, despite cycles in which conservatives have managed to restrict them once again in a legal and political tug-of-war. These legal decisions have served to clarify US law for all people and have a had serious repercussions across the country amongst all peoples of all races.

Time and again, while conservatives have argued for individual liberty, Native peoples have argued for the rights of their people as a whole. Previous efforts to dissolve tribal recognition and treat native member as individuals has lead not just to their grudging assimilation, but to a debilitating list of problems, losses of culture, identity and health. An overemphasis of individual rights alone, undermines individual security and from their can lead to the dissolution of society. Native peoples have always been concerned with ‘we’ while government and private business interests have generally emphasized the individual, while at the same time arguing that the individual may be sacrificed for the good of an abstract whole, the country, the company.

David Graber and David Wengrow write in their book “The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity” about how native societies have over the last 5 centuries or so, emphasized that the individual must retain the ability to disobey authority, to move to and live where ever they choose and be able to make and dissolve whatever relationships they so choose. The majority of native peoples here have also upheld the practice of mutualism, and kinship ties, which work to assure that all members are cared for. Compliance, in their traditional societies has been gained through argument, discussion, through consensus building, which requires reason and a shared system of values. An over emphasis on individualism without the tempering effect of these other key elements, dooms a society. We, as a country, have learned much from them which has improved our society and our treatment of each other, although we still have much more to learn and incorporate if we are to have a healthy and desirable future.