Historians Ned Blackhawk and Brenda Child join for a conversation on Blackhawk’s national bestseller, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History—a sweeping retelling of American history. They explore five centuries of U.S. history to shed light on the central role Indigenous peoples have played in shaping our nation’s narrative. Jeffrey Rosen, president and CEO of the National Constitution Center, moderates.
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Participants
Ned Blackhawk (Western Shoshone) is the Howard R. Lamar Professor of History and American Studies at Yale University, where he is the faculty coordinator for the Yale Group for the Study of Native America. He is the author of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West and The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.
Brenda Child (Red Lake Ojibwe) is Northrop Professor of American Studies at the University of Minnesota. She is the author of several books including Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940; Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community; and My Grandfather’s Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation.
Additional Resources
- Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History
- The Declaration of Independence
- Pontiac’s War
- Brenda Child, Away From Home: American Indian Boarding School Experiences, 1879-2000
- Brenda Child, Boarding School Seasons: American Indian Families, 1900-1940
- Claudio Saunt, Unworthy Republic: The Dispossession of Native Americans and the Road to Indian Territory
- Jeffrey Ostler, Surviving Genocide: Native Nations and the United States from the American Revolution to Bleeding Kansas
- Articles of Confederation
- Naturalization Act 1790
- Dred Scott v. Sandford (1857)
- Eric Foner, The Second Founding: How the Civil War and Reconstruction Remade the Constitution
- Ned Blackhawk, Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the early American West
- Brenda Child, Holding Our World Together: Ojibwe Women and the Survival of Community
- Brenda Child, My Grandfather's Knocking Sticks: Ojibwe Family Life and Labor on the Reservation
- Brenda Child and Brian Klopotek, Indian Subjects: Hemispheric Perspectives on the History of Indigenous Education
- Michael Witgen, Seeing Red: Indigenous Land, American Expansion, and the Political Economy of Plunder in North America
Excerpt from interview: Brenda Child discusses her family’s history of being forced out of their homeland and into Native American reservations.
Brenda Child: And even into the 20th century, my own grandfather, for example, was removed from central Minnesota in the early 20th century when they were trying to kind of force Ojibwe people out of that region of the country. And so, I like to kind of call him a political refugee, because we don't really think of Native people as having a status, anything like that. But he was forced out of his homeland.
And then, he was moved to a reservation, White Earth, with his immediate family, his brothers and his father. And they kind of had to create a new life for themselves. And even though that was only 150 miles away from where he was dispossessed originally, it's still a big deal, you know, especially how when you think of movement, the circulation of people at that time, that was such a big deal.
So this is what Native people are faced with, the continual kind of threats of dispossession, removal. This is what our leaders are dealing with in our communities. And I think back to my own community, this Ojibwe community way up in Northern Minnesota, in the year, here where I am today in Minneapolis, St. Paul, I teach at the University of Minnesota, we're here in this location because of we're at the confluence of the Mississippi and the Minnesota rivers.
And I always tell students, this is why the big real estate boom happened right here, right? This is one of the big geographic centers here in the Great Lakes. But very soon, after settlers began moving into Minnesota, and there was a huge demographic shift in a short period of time, there was a big war almost immediately, and a lot of what Ned's book is about, even though I think it's a great book and in the end, very optimistic, there's a lot of violence throughout this, throughout this history.
And in Minnesota, we'd like to think of ourselves as nice Midwestern people, and so forth. But I say it was really Minnesota's founded on one of the bloodiest Indian wars in the history of our country. In 1862, we had the largest mass execution in the history of the United States, when Dakota people were, Dakota men were hanged in the aftermath of this war.
So that's 1862. And so, here, my tribe is up in northern Minnesota, and you think, "Oh, we're out in the, you know, we're out in the forest and harvesting wild rice and life is still good." Except, you know, we didn't have news, the internet, but we knew what was going on in southern Minnesota. We didn't want the same things that were happening to Dakota people to happen to our people in northern Minnesota.
And so, our leaders made very difficult decisions in the aftermath of the Dakota war. So in 1863, my tribe negotiated their only treaty with the United States. And I always ask members of our community to think about how tied Dakota and Ojibwe history is here in the upper Midwest, because we have to make political decisions based on what is happening to Dakota people who seem to be in the middle of this big real estate boom.
And so, our leaders got busy and negotiated in 1863 and signed a treaty with the United States. And I was watching the Ken Burns' documentary on the buffalo a couple of weeks ago, and we ceded to the United States land west of us that was actually in the Red River Valley that was thousands of acres of prime agricultural land and buffalo country. And even though we kind of think of ourselves in northern Minnesota as being fishermen and people who live in the lakes and woods, that was our territory as well. We, our communities lived and hunted and get, and gathered and practiced farming in that era, in that area.
And so, imagine what motivated people in 1863, our leaders, we had hereditary chiefs, what motivated them to make a gigantic land session to the United States. And so, this is what tribes are faced with in the 19th century, right? During the treaty era. It's very personal. It's all about your economy. It's about your survival.
And one of the things that I find most moving when I read the documentation and the wording of those treaty negotiations is that our hereditary chiefs, I wanna cry every time I say it, they were thinking about us. They were thinking of future generations, and they always referenced their children's children, their children's grandchildren.
Excerpt from interview: Ned Blackhawk discusses the crucial story of the central role of Native Americans in US history from the revolution on up.
Ned Blackhawk: You're pointing to one of the central features of the first half of this book that opens in the aftermath of a cataclysmic global war known as the Seven Years' War, often referred to in American history as the French and Indian War. And there have been many scholars who've written about that conflict in its aftermath but none has sufficiently carried forward, I feel, some of the implications of these studies to reorient more broadly narratives of the American Revolution.
And as we approach 2026 and get ready for the 250th anniversary of the birth of the republic and the proclamation of the declaration itself, I think it's imperative that we look to this interior history and do so in part to see where the declaration's anti-indigenous ideologies originated.
...
So that language and culminating concern animated the founders inherently and most kind of conventional narratives of American history, political development, and kind of revolutionary formation have not really adequately assessed it. So in chapter five of this new book called Settler Uprisings, I kind of worked through a growing set of studies in this field and make the kind of suggestions that you've identified that there are in, in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War a series of what I termed settler uprisings that occur particularly in Pennsylvania in 1763, 1764.
And perhaps most least known in 1765, when further west from Lancaster with the 1763 uprising first erupts in December, troops known as the Black Boys attack overland, British convoys heading into the interior world of um, Eastern North America to supply and who are anticipating to supply Native American confederations that have formed in the late stages in the aftermath of the Seven Years' War.
We've heard of these wars episodically, but never in kind of larger contextual form. But the summer of 1763 saw the outbreak of something known as Pontiac's War, which engendered such hostility and fear among settler communities in western Pennsylvania, about a thousand of whom were displaced because of the conflicts that they brought with them sets of grievances, fears, and hatreds that ultimately found their way into the declaration.
That concern about frontier inhabitants that I just referenced from the declaration itself is articulated in 1763 and 1764 by these settlers who are concerned that the British crown is enacting sets of appeasements with interior peoples that are diplomatically recognizing they're agreeing to offer trade goods and exchange for peace and other kind of provisions of recognition.
And this becomes a defining element of the revolution era. It's not the only cause of the revolution, but it predates the Stamp Act. It is articulated in Declarations of grievances that individuals and their groups issue. They're condemned by people like Benjamin Franklin in famous publications in the 1764.
And there is a series of conflicts, the civil war, I wouldn't quite say war, but civil grievances that are violent at times around these issues throughout the 1760s. So that's where I locate what I call the indigenous origins of the American Revolution. And I hope that chapter kind of frames the revolution in the kind of broader context and shows how although native peoples themselves were not at the table, so to speak, when the declaration was drafted, concerns about them certainly were.
And that's true of the Constitution as well in 1787, uh, which is chapter six of the book. And it's true throughout the aftermath of the early republic. So that's the kind of central claim of those chapters. And it kind of hopefully reinforces the overall argument of the book that like many, many scholars in the field upon whose work of synthetic interpretation is dependent.
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And so this book, The Rediscovery of America draws its title from a generation or more of scholars, Brenda and myself included, who have been trying to remedy the erasure and omission of Native Americans from narratives of American history. We've come a long way and there have been a lot of kind of milestone achievements and developments along this path. But there's still a lot more work to be done, and particularly outside of the academy in more public and institutional spaces, perhaps such as your own.
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