Completing America’s Story: How Native Americans Shaped U.S.

BIANNA GOLODRYGA, HOST: Meantime, in a major victory for Native American rights, the U.S. Supreme Court has upheld key provisions of the Indian Child Welfare Act, giving preference — reference of the adoption of Native American children to their tribes and families. The law was passed 45 years ago to protect tribal sovereignty and to correct past government abuses. Our next guest is retelling the story of America to include Native American history. Historian Ned Blackhawk traces the role tribal nations played in shaping the United States, in his new book. And he’s joining Hari Sreenivasan to explain why indigenous history is essential to understanding modern America.

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HARI SREENIVASAN, INTERNATIONAL CORRESPONDENT: Ned Blackhawk, thanks so much for joining us. You are tackling an enormous task here with this book, which is to try to reframe American history by moving more to the center Native American history. And tell me a little bit about, first of all, why this challenge is necessary.

BLACKHAWK: Thank you for that generous recognition. I am trying to do something that has been a concern of mine for a while, and that is to provide a kind of single volume synthetic overview of Native American history that tries to do so through conventional subjects of American history, and does so by building upon what I call the rediscovery of America, which is a generation of academic and tribal and other scholarly pursuits that have fundamentally realigned how we should think and see American history, but a lot of those studies and findings have yet to be brought together in a single volume.

SREENIVASAN: One of the things you point out is literally just with the word discovery. Because so much of our history is written and framed by the notion that the western explorers, the civilized, were the ones who discovered America. And you are — one of the things you’re advocating for in this book, really, is, let’s change that word, to what?

BLACKHAWK: Well, I say we should think more about encounter as a kind of fundamental paradigm for understanding the origins of our nation’s history rather than discovery. And the book is entitled “The Rediscovery” in part to kind of play off of the kind of conventional understanding of America having been discovered in 1492 by European explorers. And the idea that we are standing now, perhaps for the first time in the relatively still early 21st century at a kind of precipice where we can, in fact, turn anew to our continent’s history and see it in a new way. We can rediscover American history by engaging the subject and drawing upon this generation of scholars that I’ve written about or that I’m referencing.

SREENIVASAN: Give me an example, when we are thinking about American history, how we either sideline, marginalize or forget the people who were already here?

BLACKHAWK: Well, in a few weeks we’ll celebrate our Independence on the 4th of July, and it’s really quite shocking, I think, for many American students, citizens and other kind of concerned community — civic leaders to learn, for example, that the declaration is, in many ways, an incitement of violence against Native Americans. And the last concern that the continental Congress authorizes in the declaration is grievance against the king for inciting merciless Indian savages as their term. And that is the kind of culminating conclusion to chapter five of this book, which is on the American Revolution. So, we’ve been kind of taught the history of the U.S. without really fundamentally recognizing that at really key elemental moments of national formation, the revolution, the constitution, the civil war era, the rise of the administrative or kind of political new American state of the 19th century, Indian affairs and Indian peoples were central concerns to American policymakers, and those words are literally found in our nation’s most cherished and often recited documents.

SREENIVASAN: You’re right, to understand the revolution without American Indians is like a one-handed clap. Walk us through how the relationship between the people who are trying to settle this land and Native Americans was a precursor to their discontent with the British?

BLACKHAWK: You know, it’s a history that is really understudied and really unknown outside of some relatively small academic circles around 18th century American history, but there’s this monumental conflict in the mid – – that erupts in the mid-1750s and spreads literally across not just North America but much of the European, Atlantic and portions of the rest of the world, known as the Seven Years’ War. It begins in the interior of North America and it ends even further in the interior. American settlers in these interior regions are not happy with the British crown because the British crown is attempting diplomatic and trading and various other types of initiatives with native peoples who are not easily conquered — or not easily conquerable and have yet to be conquered. And so, these American settlers, in these backcountry regions that I write about and others do as well, have kind of really — kind of almost virulent anti-indigenous ideologies that are forming around British policies, and that’s how those sentiments essentially find their way into the declaration. But the — you know, I say it’s like a one-handed clap, which means it’s like an excited but empty gesture to really understand an era in which indigenous affairs and peoples and power were central to the concerns of the revolutionary era.

SREENIVASAN: You write a little bit about President Lincoln, but you kind of pull out a moment before he’s writing the Emancipation Proclamation and what’s happening to — what’s happening out in the Dakotas. And tell us a little bit about the context of Lincoln at this time that we don’t hear about very often.

BLACKHAWK: It was one of this kind of a revelatory moments when I was reading, you know, studies and studies of the subject and coming to realize that very few kind of conventional histories of the civil war recognize that the civil war not only had a western theater to it in which tens of thousands of Native Americans either fought and/or were killed, but there is also an incredible legacy of — in the aftermath of the war — of the growth of the federal government over this part of North America. And we really can’t understand the ultimate legacies of the civil war or essentially Lincoln’s presidency outside of these monumental conflicts and transformations that are occurring. So, the Dakota war of — the summer of 1862, which is followed by essentially the ethnic cleansing of many several thousand Dakota peoples from Southern Minnesota and their force relocation eventually to the Dakota territories includes — which includes the largest mass executions in U.S. history in December of 1862, right as the Emancipation Proclamation essentially is being drafted. We can’t really understand — that war is part of a series of, you know, extraordinarily traumatic campaigns between the federal government and native nations that stretches from Northern California across southern — the southwest, includes the forced relocation of nearly 10,000 Navajo peoples during the long walk, sets of, you know, horrific massacres at the Bear River at Sand Creek, these are well-known within the history of Western America, which is one of my fields of specialty, but they’ve yet to be really brought sufficiently into kind of understanding of the civil war era. Because when they do, you start seeing both the civil war and the West very differently. You start seeing that the civil war was, in fact, an incredibly undetermined moment in American history, in which violence became a primary form of social change and kind of power. But if we think of the civil war, essentially, as a continental wide conflict and/or struggle that has an inherently kind of indigenous western dimension to it, we can perhaps begin this kind of larger recalibrations.

SREENIVASAN: We have recently been coming into a reckoning of the role of the slave trade and African Americans and how that is considered one of the original sins of the founding of this nation. And you write in the book that it’s important to identify — you say, identifying American history as a sight of genocide complicates a fundamental premise of the American story. What is it that, I think, you wish was central to that kind of American founding story that’s been overlooked?

BLACKHAWK: I think the real takeaway that I would kind of encourage listeners or readers to the text to kind of consider is, you know, do we have a capacity to see ourselves both differently in a sense, more historically? Because if we do, which I know we do, we can understand that there are multiple, both indigenous as well as imperial subjects upon — particularly the early American landscape.

SREENIVASAN: Yes.

BLACKHAWK: And we, you know, really have too many kind of mythologies in the U.S. about the kind of centrality of anglophone settlers, particularly in New England, that, you know, really discounts the kind of diversity, even of the British subjects themselves, who — you know, there are more people in Barbados in 1650 than all of British North America combined. You know, and so, we — you know, we just lose the kind of heterogeneity of — you know, of the subject and kind of fall upon relatively received and simplified categories of analysis. So, if we have that kind of capacity, it’s not — you know, it’s not going to yield initially the kind of immediate moment of revelation that we may be hoping for, but we can see past them and you can start seeing how numerous monuments have recently come down. The State of Massachusetts finally abandoned its kind of mythologized state flag of an Indian welcoming Puritan settlers from the 1620s. There’s a kind of reckoning happening, not just with the history of African American slavery and its centrality in America, but also with the indigenous peoples of the continent. And I’m hopeful that we can someday bring these two reckonings, essentially, together within a kind of public sphere to discuss our country’s history and it’s present and new forms.

SREENIVASAN: There’s also a chapter in American history for the culture eradication of native peoples, the forced assimilation, the taking of children and putting them into these different boarding schools. Tell us a bit about how large-scale that was, how effective that was, and really, what the goal was?

BLACKHAWK: This is an incredible moment of kind of American political change, and it affects Indians in certain ways more than any other peoples, because these communities are being literally, simultaneously confined and then often subdivided, and their children are being taken from them. And so, this is the kind of dominant theme of the federal government throughout the late 1800s, shortly after reconstruction concludes. There are U.S. army officials who had been out west and stationed among Indians who start realizing that their — you know, their charges, essential the people they’re supervising lack the kind of capacity to become immediately incorporated into the union. There are very few missionaries initially in certain parts of the west, there are very few schools, and military officials start trying to forcibly impose certain types of pedagogies on their — on, essentially, their prisoners. And that becomes the kind of model of pedagogy that forms at the Carlisle Indian Institute in 1879, run by former military captain named Richard Henry Pratt. And so, this military style pedagogy eventually reaches roughly 40 percent of all the nation’s indigenous children, roughly 75,000 American Indian children are sent to these boarding schools, which essentially characterized federal Indian policy about half a century. And we really can’t understand the evolution of the 20th century with the Native America without understanding how extensive, influential and harmful these institutions became because they inspired then a generation, Native American activists, who took aim at changing these policies, which they were successful in doing throughout the ’20s and into the ’30s. So, this kind of anti-assimilation kind of ideology and activism of Native American leaders and a group particularly known as the Society of American Indians helps establish other alternative political philosophies about what Indian country should look like and what it should be doing. And this sets in motion some of the most important reforms in federal Indian affairs during the new deal era known as the Indian New Deal, when tribal governments start forming and adopting constitutions for themselves to be self-governed.

SREENIVASAN: I want to end our conversation maybe with the first words from your book, and how can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy? What do you hope is corrected in the historical account that we all read and hear about this country?

BLACKHAWK: You know, it is sobering kind of query that opens this project, but it’s one with a kind of hopeful, if not optimistic, sentiment, that we do have the capacity, by looking at our nation’s history, differently and more thoroughly, to see within it an alternative understanding of American both democracy and nationhood in which indigenous peoples can be and should be centrally included. Far from being merciless Indian savages, Native American communities have become among the most resilient, adaptive and, in many places, visible social communities within our kind of contemporary national fabric. Can we find a way to think of our democratic practices, our court doctrines and jurisdictional kind of conflicts differently, that understands native nations as distinct, sovereign communities within a larger fabric of American democracy? That would be the kind of hope that I would respond to that question with.

SREENIVASAN: Professor Ned Blackhawk, author of the book, “The Rediscovery of the American: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History,” thanks so much for joining us.

BLACKHAWK: Thank you.