The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

Rediscovery’s Introduction establishes its main claims as well as the text’s place within the field of Indigenous studies and, more broadly, US history. Blackhawk’s two key theses, Encounter as the Framework for US History and Tribal Agency Amid Subjugation, challenge the status quo of academic attitudes toward Native peoples. In particular, Blackhawk addresses contemporary historians such as Jill Lepore, whose work he claims ignores the American dynamics of settler colonialism and dispossession.

One of the key paradigms that Blackhawk identifies and challenges in the Introduction is the oftentimes binary treatment of US racial history, which acknowledges Black and white experiences but not those of other ethnic and racial groups. He writes, “Scholars have recently come to view African American slavery as central to the making of America, but few have seen Native Americans in a similar light” (15), clarifying the interrelated history of all oppressed minorities in the United States. The inclusion of Native Americans in popular understandings of US history, he argues, will be beneficial to all who study the field, not just Indigenous people themselves. Furthermore, he emphasizes the history of the field of Native American studies itself as a key site of Indigenous agency, one which has made the production of Rediscovery possible.