idered America's has really just been the history of European conquest.

Today's guest argues that there is no American history without its first Indigenous inhabitants.

He's historian Ned Blackhawk, this week on "Story in the Public Square."

(upbeat music) (upbeat music continues) (upbeat music continues) Hello, and welcome to "Story in the Public Square," where storytelling meets public affairs.

I'm Jim Ludes from the Pell Center at Salve Regina University.

- And I'm G. Wayne Miller, also with Salve's Pell Center.

- And our guest this week is Dr. Ned Blackhawk, author of the landmark book "The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S.

History."

Ned is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he also coordinates the Yale Group for the Study of Native America, and we should note Ned won the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians for his 2006 book "Violence over the Land."

Ned, congratulations on all of your success and this tremendous accomplishment, and thank you so much for being with us today.

- Thank you for having me.

- Well, so "The Rediscovery of America" is, I think I mentioned to you before we started, I think maybe one of the most important books that we've actually discussed on "Story in the Public Square."

For the audience who maybe has not yet experienced it, could you give us just the broad overview of the book and what it accomplishes?

- Thank you for that kind recognition.

This book reflects two general important developments.

One, and it's conveyed in the title, "The Rediscovery of America," really in the last 25 years or so, the study of American history has taken a really dramatic new turn, and a whole generation of scholars, myself included, have worked to unfashion or refashion central dimensions of American history and brought Native American history really to the center of numerous fields of historical inquiry so deeply that really, you can't think of certain subjects in American history the same way anymore.

So that's the kinda subtitle of the book, how American history has been unmade.

Corresponding with that rediscovery, the second, and a big influence upon this formation of this project is that there hasn't been yet a single-volume interpretive synthesis or overview or an attempt to bring together all of this kinda scholarly profusion.

And so this book was kinda generated by that need for classrooms or for popular reception.

It's an attempt to offer an overview of Native American history, and it's by no means comprehensive, but hopefully points us towards a common future together that includes rather than excludes Native peoples.

- Well, its scope is ambitious, and, you know, my principal takeaway was that you can't really talk about American history without talking about Native American history, that they are completely intertwined.

Why, though, in so many other accounts, is the Native story and the Native experience excluded?

- Well, that's a really important and really vast question, and it goes really to the core of much of American historical practice since the field of American history really was institutionalized shortly after the Civil War.

Some of my chapters kind of explore some of these themes of what we might call U.S. intellectual history when, in the aftermath of the Civil War, numerous American academics and intellectuals started looking for those distinguishing characteristics of North American history that make American history different from Europe.

And in that process, Native peoples became the antithesis of the American subject, the antagonist of the central American protagonist, often seen as a cowboy or individual settler or pioneer.

Indians have always been the obverse of the subject of American historical inquiry, and so it's been hard up until recently for U.S. historians, teachers, educators, popular practitioners to really know this subject in a kinda comprehensive or detailed way.

- So Ned, what do we gain by putting Native populations back into the narrative of the American experience?

- You know, we gain a deeper understanding of not just the facts or the accurate rendering of American history, but I think we gain a closer appreciation of certain American truths, and we really can't continue to live under sets of historical falsehoods that have so long pervaded our understandings of America and American society.

We're stuck with the kinda inherited paradigms of previous generations and now even centuries.

We have in particular, at times, a kinda binary, black/white, myopic binary for understanding American race relations that really has no place for Indigenous peoples at the heart of the American national experiment.

So we get, you know, a more accurate rendering of our continent's deep, deep historical texture and one that forces us to see beyond our received categories.

- We could do a whole show on the question I'm about to ask, and we're not going to, obviously, but maybe you can give a relatively brief answer.

What is the origin of these falsehoods?

I'm guessing it goes back to when Europeans first arrived here, and there were many- - Well you could.

- Go ahead.

- Make that suggestion, and there are a series of popular orientated works kind of in process at the moment that are suggesting that the real origins of American, or the hidden roots of American racism, according to one study, lie with the initial doctrines of discovery that the Spanish develop in concert with the Catholic Church to create sets of legalistic rituals for claiming possession of territories previously, as the doctrines state, outside the ownership of Christian owners or leaders.

So Native peoples are in many ways the sediment upon which conceptions not just of America, but really of the Western hemisphere, have really been established, and to unpack and unravel and really fully reexamine or rediscover these subjects will require an awful lot of energy and labor, but labor and energy that are really worth the effort.

- Ned, you know, if I'm remembering this correctly, at the very start of the book, you set out that encounter is a better paradigm for the initial contact between the white European settlers and the Native populations than is discovery.

Could you help us unpack and understand what those two different paradigms for understanding that moment actually represent?

- You know, it's really hard to maybe make sense of these things in the kinda abstract, so maybe if we kinda think a bit in a certain kind of contemporary or kind of a more lived experiential way, if we think of American history as a history of discovery in which individuals largely or exclusively often of European ancestry are exploring and discovering and naming and claiming possession over and then populating and then governing, if we think of those as the principal actions or chapters or moments of American history, we participate in the erasure and marginalization not only of these actual histories because there were obviously many other peoples present and engaged and a part of these processes that we've called discovery.

So if we think of this as a process of encounter, we can see the, you know, the textures of history much more kind of clearly, and in the kind of sense of the kind of more experiential, we can understand that these are still lessons to kinda understand and deploy in the present.

Because these paradigms and categories of discovery still remain active law.

The doctrines of discovery that I just referenced or alluded to still animates American law and policy, and so we're stuck in a certain way with these inherited not just categories of analysis, but narratives that have often influence upon legal and policy discussions that still are at the heart of this field known as federal Indian law.

- And still in the popular culture as well, I mean, there are still people who look to Columbus as the person who discovered America.

And I remember during my childhood, my education, that was the only narrative that I heard.

Obviously, later, I learned the truth of what happened.

You cannot talk about this history without talking about the impact of disease that Europeans brought to this nation.

Talk about that.

It had a devastating effect from coast to coast on Native populations.

- Right, this is one of the central features of this new generation of scholarship that has made the study of demography and the catastrophe of epidemic encounter at the heart of the early American landscape, and I have just a very short kind of sentence or two in the introduction, kind of, that gestures towards these subjects, in which I realized and was really kinda struck to make a really simple observation that the loss of American Indian life following European contact is the single most tragic and life-costly experience in American history, broadly speaking.

The continent of North America had approximately eight to 10 million people at the time of European contact, 1492.

By the time of the American Revolution, that number has almost halved to four million or so, and that includes, the vast majority of those four are non-Indigenous peoples.

So this kinda staggering historical reality rooted in studies of disease and warfare and captive taking, which are at the heart of some of these early chapters, should be the foundational stories we tell about the origins of America rather than celebratory narratives of individuals of often lost and unknown for them territories.

- So Ned, hand in hand with the devastating impact of epidemic was violence perpetrated against Native populations, and that, as I said, had a devastating effect as well.

Can you talk about that a bit?

- Yes, and there's a kind of a, somewhat of a simplistic narrative that has formed in the aftermath of some of these studies of disease that has kind of held that, well, Native Americans lacked immunity to so many European-based childhood-bearing or influenced diseases that they subsequently vanished or disappeared in large number.

Many tribes and communities actually responded relatively well in the kinda general sense to some of these initial epidemiological encounters, but it was the subsequent challenges of European invasion or captive taking or introduced forms of warfare that kinda registered the continued devastation that the diseases themselves established.

So up in what became British North America or New England, Indigenous populations endured waves of pathogens before as well as after Plymouth, or settlement in 1620.

There were very large epidemics in the 16-teens, in the early 1630s, that were central to the establishment of English colonization across the region.

And so while our national myths many ways celebrate or recognize really exclusively English settlers as the kinda first Americans often, they were engaged in a settlement process that had deeply both epidemiologically destructive but also violent effects because many English settlers, as you may know, began, or it's in chapter three of the books as well, started using the kinda deteriorating conditions of resident Native lives for their own advantages and began a series of campaigns to displace once-powerful Native peoples.

- You know, Ned, I think that a lotta the power of the book is that you're exposing a history that maybe we've caught a whiff of but didn't fully have the full appreciation of it.

So I'd like to get into maybe couple, two specific areas, to talk about how what our popular conception might have been and then how your synthesis of the latest research really draws us into a deeper understanding.

So the first thing is the interrelationships of Native communities and European settler communities, particularly in the British area of North America.

How closely integrated were these communities?

What kind of contact did they actually have?

- We really shouldn't see early America the way it's generally understood, and there have been a range of scholars, as I suggested, who've moved us past some of these paradigms, but it used to be that British North America was synonymous with the early American experience, and within that world, New England was the epicenter.

And so to know New England was in many ways to know America or early America, and then, we're still left with national holidays and sets of kinda metaphors about Puritanism that really are in certain ways unhelpful for understanding the broader, continental-wide history of the early American experience.

Indigenous peoples were so central to the formation of all European settlements and societies in the Americas that we've lost a real appreciation of that kinda historical interaction.

I mean, I pay particular attention in chapters five and six to the centrality of Indigenous peoples during the crisis of empire between France, Britain, and the early republic itself, (finger tapping) and try to highlight what I call the Indigenous origins of the American Revolution that shows that Indigenous populations were central and key variables in the growing crisis between England and its colonial subjects.

- Well, and that was actually the second issue that I wanted to get to.

So the French and Indian War in North America, the Seven Years' War in Europe, you characterize it as "the principal conflict in American history," which I think is a different interpretation than most of us learned in our grade-school understanding of American history, early American history.

Why is it so central in this reinterpretation?

- I'm drawing upon the award-winning study of a very famous Harvard-trained historian by the name of Fred Anderson, who wrote a monumental study of the Seven Years' War called "Crucible of War" that was published, you know, now almost 20 years ago, or roughly 20 years ago.

And Anderson calls the Seven Years' War "the most important conflict of the 18th century," thereby emphasizing the connectedness between the Seven Years' War and the subsequent American Revolution.

And up until that point, I don't think any historian had ever so boldly tried to reperiodize or reconfigure understandings of the Revolution, which, as we may all understand, is the kind of crucible of, if not American history more broadly, certainly of the 18th-century world.

So chapter four ends with this monumental conflict.

Chapter five begins in its aftermath, and chapter six on the Constitution really also kind of continues seeing how the crisis of the interior portions of Eastern North America, which had kind of beguiled both the French and British Empires throughout the early 18th century, really is the defining kind of challenge of much of the early republic's world in developing land policies like the Northwest Ordinance, developing kind of constitutional structures for incorporating Western lands, for developing kinda political forums of dealing with Indigenous nations they're in, as the Constitution also does.

These are central features of American history that we've been insufficiently taught, and they come out of this multi-polar world in which Indigenous peoples first as allies of the French, second as subjects of the British government, third as then allies often with the British against the American settlers are one of the key constituencies fighting in a series of what we should see as kind of connected global conflicts for control of Eastern North America.

(Jim grunting) - So how do some of the giants of American history fare when we consider them through the prism of the history of Indigenous populations?

And I'm thinking I could throw out a number of names, Abraham Lincoln for example.

- I write about Lincoln at some length in my chapter on the Civil War that tries to take a larger perspective of the conflict between the North and the South.

It starts with the Colorado Gold Rush in the 1850s, and with the emphasis, as scholars have seen, with the major transitions that are happening in terms of kind of technological and infrastructural development, the Colorado Gold Rush brings over 100,000 people to Colorado starting in the late 1850s, and they're all brought by horses, or they walk on their feet.

They may have seen trains in their lifetime, but they certainly didn't take 'em to get there.

And that's the world in which Lincoln himself becomes president, and in these kinda famous moments in American kind of histories of infrastructure, Lincoln is on a train.

He's taking four, five trains with different gauges to get to New York City to give his famous address at Cooper Union in 1860, and by the time the Civil War ends, he's on only one train, traveling at five miles an hour back to Springfield for his solemn burial.

And so that history of infrastructure is in many ways, it encapsulates this kinda dramatically transformative moment that the Civil War heralds.

And no one: Lincoln himself, the Native peoples of Colorado, the Gold Rush seekers in the mountains west of Denver, none of them would've anticipated that type of dramatic transformation at the time that the war began.

And so the emphasis in that chapter is not on (paper rustling) trying to, you know, vilify or demonize any individual leaders but to kinda put the policies that unfolded during the Civil War in some perspective.

And there are roughly 100 battles or wars between federal or state-funded federal, or federally funded state militias during the long Civil War era.

That includes conflicts across the West during Reconstruction, and Native peoples are the principal casualties across most of Western North America, aside for a small number of theaters along at Glorieta and other places west of the Mississippi.

The federal government's fighting Indians for the vast majority of the Civil War and its aftermath, and so Indians should not be seen as outside of these narrative conflicts, nor should the leaders of the federal government, including Lincoln, be seen as people not participating in various forms of Indian policy.

And so I contrast the way historians have kind of seen Lincoln's standing as someone who held the Union together, who authored and delivered the Emancipation Proclamation, and I contrast how, as he was doing these things, he and his administration were also doing other things, which included the forced removal of Indigenous peoples from places like the Minnesota River Valley of Southern Minnesota during the Dakota War, including the largest mass execution in American history at Mankato in December 1862.

So we could talk about the Sand Creek Massacre, the forced removal of the Navajo from the Bosque Redondo, or to Bosque Redondo from the Navajo Nation, the Bear River Massacre.

There are series of just incredibly catastrophic moments of military conflict between Indigenous and federal forces that are also part of this larger history.

- You know, Ned, the challenge with a show like this is that it's about 30 minutes long, and we've got about, you know, three years' worth of conversation that we wanna have with you.

- (laughing) Yeah, we do.

- So we've made it barely to the Civil War, and we've got about two minutes left here.

You know, if we jump forward, and again, the scope of this book, it's 500 years of history.

It is rich, and it is textured, but I found myself, I guess, troubled by the end of it in the sense that there's so much violence was inflicted on Native populations.

Have we fully reckoned with that as a nation?

And if not, what more can we do?

- You know, I agree with you, and one of the things that these types of conversations often breed is a sense of, you know, maybe not quite despondency, but a sense of being overwhelmed or burdened by the past in certain ways.

So I think one of the remedies might be seeing how, in the later chapters of the book, Indigenous peoples themselves responded to these incredibly harrowing challenges and developed strategies of organization, strategies of resistance, and strategies of engagement that in many ways are astonishingly underappreciated.

Because in the aftermath of these generations if not at least a century and a half of federal dominion over Indian affairs, throughout much of the mid to late 20th century, Native Americans took to the streets, took to education, and even took to the courts to get agreements upheld and new doctrines established.

And we have lived in the last, you know, throughout my lifetime over the last half century, through an incredible era of Native American political achievements.

The American Indian Sovereignty Movement has become one of the most transformative, particularly and obviously in Indian Country, but incredibly successful kind of broad legal undertakings that have made some of the most marginal, underresourced, and forgotten peoples on the American continent among the most now active, at least within their own regional economies and societies.

- Well- - And you really can't make sense of contemporary, particularly Western North America, without understandings of these subjects.

- Well, Ned, it is an accomplishment, and we are so grateful to you for spending some time with us today.

The book is "The Rediscovery of America."

He's Ned Blackhawk.

That's all the time we have this week.

He's Wayne.

I'm Jim.

We hope you'll join us again next time for more "Story in the Public Square."

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