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

“Encounter—rather than discovery—must structure America’s origins story. For over five hundred years peoples have come from outside of North America to the homelands of Native peoples, whose subsequent transformations and survival provide one potential guide through the story of America.”

This is the first of Blackhawk’s two key arguments, and it sets the revisionist tone of the book. He directly challenges popular terminology and academic methodology for understanding the history of North America. His call to reassess one word, “discovery,” gets at the core of how Americans conceptualize their own racial history and boldly claims agency for Native Americans in a narrative where they previously had none.

“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.”

Blackhawk’s second thesis goes beyond the realm of historical argumentation, serving as a mission statement for academics in the field of US history. As such, he recognizes the ideas put forward in Rediscovery as a communal academic undertaking. Communicating the long history of Tribal Agency Amid Subjugation is not a goal that can be achieved in the span of one volume or by one scholar, hence his use of the future tense in this statement.

“Now European and American empires confronted one another, linking their civilizations, continents, and indeed two hemispheres. The forging of a truly interconnected, global society had now begun.”

Here, Blackhawk links the processes of colonialism and globalization, affirming Native Americans as important agents in the course of world history. The language of “confrontation” positions Europeans and Native Americans as equals, a framework that combats racist understandings of Indigenous societies as less advanced than European ones.