THE REDISCOVERY OF AMERICA: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, by Ned Blackhawk“How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” This is the provocative question with which Ned Blackhawk opens his important new book, “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.” A historian at Yale and a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone, Blackhawk rejects the myth that Native Americans fell quick and easy victims to European invaders. Instead, he asserts that “American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development.”More boldly still, he insists that “Indigenous dispossession facilitated the growth of white male democracy and African American slavery” to constitute America’s historical trifecta of flaws. Blackhawk’s introduction identifies only two, one of them dead. In fact, this book benefits from Blackhawk’s wide and savvy reading of the many scholars who, during the last 50 years, have restored Native peoples to their prominent place within a fuller, richer American history. Yes, we still have a triumphalist story of white settlers overcoming a wilderness filled with Indians to make democracy, but that tale persists almost entirely in popular culture and among right-wing corners of politics and the internet, far from academic historians.

---