Washington Monthly - September/October 2023 - 119

Indian Country
A new history shows how the interactions
between European colonists and
Native peoples helped shape the
foundations of American government.
By Sara Bhatia
I
n September 1862, Confederate forces met Union troops in Sharpsburg, Maryland.
The ensuing Battle of Antietam would prove to be the bloodiest of the Civil
War. Within weeks, President Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation
Proclamation, decreeing that if the Confederate states did not rejoin the Union
by January 1, 1863, enslaved people in the rebellious states would be freed.
Twelve hundred miles away, in the recently admitted state of Minnesota, the U.S.
military was engaged in a different kind of war, a campaign of ethnic cleansing to remove
Native peoples from their lands. This crusade was fueled by a demand for farmland
by white homesteaders. In just 10 years, the population of settlers in Minnesota
had soared from under 5,000 to 150,000.
In a brazen violation of existing treaties, the U.S. government ceased paying promised
annuities, and permitted homesteaders to squat and graze cattle on tribal lands.
Clashes between settlers and Native Americans turned violent, sparking the sixmonth-long
Dakota War, in which 1,000 settlers, Indigenous people, and U.S. soldiers
died. General John Pope, commander of the U.S. forces, wrote, " It is my purpose
utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so ... Destroy everything belonging
to them and force them out to the plains. "
Violence against Native people was justified by racism: " They are to be treated as
maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties and compromises
can be made, " Pope wrote. Three months later, with the express approval of
Lincoln, the military conducted the largest mass execution in U.S. history, hanging
38 Indigenous soldiers in Mankato for their part in the Dakota War, one of more than
a hundred campaigns against Native people fought in the West during the Civil War
and Reconstruction.
These parallel histories-the first, a climactic event in virtually all Civil War narratives,
and the second, a lesser-known story rarely linked to the larger context of the
Civil War and its themes of dispossession and freedom-illustrate the argument at
the heart of Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America, a sweeping, even audacious,
retelling of U.S. history centered on the Native American experience. Blackhawk asserts,
" It is impossible to understand the United States without understanding its
Indigenous history. "
Blackhawk-a professor of history and American studies at Yale University and
a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada-brings
decades of academic bona fides to the task of synthesizing the deluge of recent
scholarship on Indigenous Americans into a single, comprehensive volume. This
achievement alone would make The Rediscovery of America a notable and important
book.
But for those outside academia, Blackhawk's more interesting accomplishment is
not the comprehensiveness of this deeply researched narrative. Rather, this impressive
tome offers a bold new framework for understanding U.S. history.
Washington Monthly 119
The Rediscovery of America:
Native Peoples and the
Unmaking of U.S. History
by Ned Blackhawk
Yale University Press, 616 pp.

Washington Monthly - September/October 2023

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