One of the enduring friends I made when I attended the Clarion West science fiction writing workshop in 1973 was the late Russell Bates, a Kiowa Native American who’d already sold several indigenous-themed stories to magazines and anthologies and went on to win an Emmy for the Star Trek Animated Series for the episode he co-wrote with David Wise: “How Sharper Than a Serpent’s Tooth.” Russ and I spent some time in Los Angeles working on a TV script that in the end didn’t sell; when he got fed up with L.A. another Clarion graduate and I drove him home to the rez in Anadarko, Oklahoma, where Russ’s family treated us royally. Decades later, while raising my family in Greece, due to the newfound wonders of email I got back in touch with Russ. I knew that he was very fervent about his advocacy of Native American rights and traditions, and amidst our communications I asked him for a list of books he would recommend by and about indigenous people. He was strict in his appraisal of qualifying literary works, but I’m fairly sure that if it had been around then that The Rediscovery of America would have made the cut.

Ned Blackhawk is an indigenous Western Shoshone author who is also a professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Most histories of the United States tell the story from the perspective of Europeans, but this book focuses on the story from the viewpoint of Native Americans. I hesitated before I plunged into this thick, heavy, seemingly formidable tome, but once I started I found it fascinating, well-written, and startlingly original in its retelling of events that we think we know so well. As Blackhawk says: “To build a new theory of American history will require recognizing that Native peoples simultaneously determined colonial economies, settlements, and politics and were shaped by them.” His work asks “whether there is potential for building an alternate American story that is not trapped in the framework of European discovery and European ‘greatness.'”

The facts are the same in Blackhawk’s history, but it is the perspective that is all-important. In his accounts, Blackhawk moves from the Spanish borderlands in the south, to the northeastern conflicts between Native Americans and the British, to the Inland Sea area where the Iroquois dealt with the French, and to California, the Pacific Northwest, and the Midwest. He progresses through the American Revolution, the westward odyssey of settlers and how it disrupted indigenous life, how the Civil War affected the relationships between settlers and Native Americans in the Midwest and Far West, and how Union victory affected Federal attitudes and policies toward indigenous peoples.

From the beginning of outside contact with Europeans, indigenous populations suffered from diseases, violence, and forced servitude. The Puritans, for instance, in the name of religion, were savagely violent. As Blackhawk writes: “The lethal combination of disease and warfare remade the human geography of North America and defined an entire century of American history. By 1776 there would be fewer living souls on the continent than in 1492.”

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American history as retold by Blackhawk becomes increasingly uncomfortable. He emphasizes that the struggle to build the new nation was predicated upon the concept of white male supremacy. After pointing out that “the generation after 1815 witnessed a growing commitment to excluding all non-whites from the American body politic,” he goes on to stress that “for African Americans, Indians, and other peoples of color, the claim that all men are created equal found immediate counter-assertions.” There were few national histories to counter this, and “nearly all the institutions of higher education were near the Atlantic.” This left much of the national mythology up to the imagination, and as a result “the violence and dispossession that structured American expansion became discounted and erased.” During the Civil War era, animosity toward Native Americans increased, and state militia, especially in the west, took to hunting down and slaughtering entire communities.

After the war, indigenous communities became squeezed onto smaller and smaller parcels of land as Congress shattered and reshaped treaty promises. “With new reservation land policies and a continental-wide system of schools, the United States entered the twentieth century committed to eradicating Native Americans. Officials targeted Indian lands and children in a campaign designed not to exterminate Native peoples but to eliminate their cultures.”

(To be continued)