The perceived threat from Native Americans was crucial, Blackhawk asserts, to the formation of a central government able to extend its authority over national concerns. “It’s not coincidental that there are no federally recognised tribes in the states of Ohio and Pennsylvania where these conflicts are most pronounced.” Where does that idea come from? US historians have been unable sufficiently to explain the origins and genealogy of that language, that ideology, and essentially that history which will pervade the early republic. The idea of a frontier being attacked by ‘merciless Indian savages’ is written into the United States declaration of independence. The author adds: “That’s where the revolution has some of its most formative fuel. They are insurgents who have a kind of political psychology aimed at dislodging allegiances with interior Indians.” “Along this 300-mile road known as Forbes Road, militia groups essentially start marauding not just Indian communities that they fear are trading with Pontiac but British supply trains because the British are trying to make peace with Pontiac. One of the ways they do that is by killing Indians whom they believe are fuelling trade to Pontiac’s allies in places like Detroit and across a road between Philadelphia, which is a seaport, and Pittsburgh, which has recently been settled and renamed after the future British prime minister William Pitt. Native Americans are resisting this and the British crown decides that another war is too costly in the interior and so they pass a royal proclamation of 1763 to keep their settlers from moving into the interior. Throughout the late 1750s and early 1760s they’re primed to gain more interior land. A conflict erupted that would enflame tensions between the British crown and its own subjects and seed the fall of the British empire in North America.īlackhawk explains: “The settlers have moved into the interior following the Seven Years’ War and started building small farms and orchards and raising cattle and pigs. Led by Pontiac, an Odawa (Ottawa) chief, Native Americans took up arms against the British in what became known as Pontiac’s Rebellion. Speaking from a book-lined home office in New Haven, Connecticut, Blackhawk says: “What happens in the summer of 1763? A bunch of Indians are not happy that the French have been expelled and that the new British overlords of the interior portions of North America are imposing unilateral authoritarian regimes essentially.” He points to a generation of scholars who have shown that “American Indians were central to every century of US historical development”, particularly during the era of the American revolution.Ī turning point was the fallout from the Seven Years’ War between Britain and France, which started as a dispute over North American land claims in the region around Pittsburgh and ended in 1763 with France ceding Canada to Britain. And in looking at The Rediscovery of America and having looked at 1619 Project, that’s what it felt like to me.”īlackhawk, 51, who has been teaching Native American history since 1999, makes the case for a paradigm of “encounter” rather than “discovery” in which Europeans and their settler communities are not the exclusive subjects of inquiry. Journalist Jonathan Capehart, interviewing Blackhawk for a recent Washington Post Live event, observed: “I’m old enough to remember the encyclopaedias or biology books where you’ve got the main page and then you have these plastic overlays – you lay one down and you see one set of organs you lay another one down, you see more, but you see them altogether. Taken with Nikole Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project, it is a reminder of the danger of a single story when history is better understood as a multiverse of perspectives. Native Americans played a foundational role in shaping America’s constitutional democracy, he contends, even as they were murdered and dispossessed of their land. In his new book, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History, Blackhawk attempts to tell that continental history over five centuries, from Spanish colonial exploration to the rise of Indian self-determination.
It was their garden homelands, after all, that birthed America.” “But can we imagine an American Eden that is not cultivated by its original caretakers? Exiled from the American origin story, Indigenous peoples await the telling of a continental history that includes them. “Binary, rather than multiracial, visions dominate studies of the past where slavery represents America’s original sin or the antithesis of the American idea. “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,” writes Ned Blackhawk, a historian at Yale University and member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone.
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