Washington Monthly - September/October 2023 - 121
on political books
government. Indian leaders complained
that settlers were " like a plague of locusts. "
Eager to expand their borders
and their states' relative size and influence,
governors from Kentucky, Pennsylvania,
and South Carolina encouraged
settlement and condoned violence, offering
$100 bounties for Indian scalps.
Blackhawk argues that the British
inability to control viogovernment's
lence
in the interior helped shape antimonarchical
attitudes among settlers,
contributing to the Revolution. Indeed,
the Declaration of Independence listed
the Crown's failure to protect frontier
settlers from " merciless Indian Savages "
among their grievances.
The ripple effect of the Seven Years'
War and the ensuing instability of the
interior continued after independence.
Blackhawk asserts that the Articles of
Confederation failed in part because the
weak national government couldn't raise
an army or staff military forts and confront
Indigenous tribes on the frontier.
Lacking a strong national defense, settlers
in Kentucky and Ohio called for citizen
militias, birthing a political culture
of skepticism toward national authority
that echoes today. And border states, including
Virginia, Pennsylvania, and New
York, seized Indian lands for themselves
in violation of existing treaties, provoking
Native Americans and undercutting
the weak national government.
The call for a single, coordinated diplomatic
and military response to the Native
nations and for a centralized authority
to regulate and tax interior lands
helped, in turn, to make the case for a
strong federal government embodied in
the Constitution. And it was with the Indigenous
people, Blackhawk argues, that
the new republic honed its expertise
with the tools of government and diplomacy,
signing nearly 400 treaties with
Native nations in the years between independence
and the Civil War.
The book's timeline is, appropriately,
heavily weighted toward the colonial
era. However, it is difficult to argue
that events of the 20th and 21st centuries
conform with Blackhawk's thesis
concerning the centrality of Indigenous
history.
Native Americans are largely absent
from post-World War II narratives, despite
their ubiquity in mid-century popular
culture. That's no surprise-600
years of violence have pushed the lives
(and stories) of Native people into the
margins. But Blackhawk makes the provocative
point that their absence became
a self-fulfilling prophecy, not only shaping
our understanding of American history
but also " inform[ing] policies toward
Native nations aimed to assimilate
them into American society. "
Blackhawk's final chapter includes a
disturbing section on cultural erasure-
a pattern of post-World War
II policies
that included the forcible removal
of one-third of Indigenous children
into white foster care or adoption, along
with housing, job, and education incentives
intended to encourage Native peoples
to urbanize and abandon reservations.
Additionally, he outlines a series
of U.S. " termination " policies in the decades
following the war, aimed at ending
tribal recognition, privatizing tribal
lands through claims settlements, and
eliminating federal responsibility for Native
Americans. Blackhawk makes the
compelling argument that these policies
should be understood within the cultural
context of Cold War ideology, the clash
between Indigenous ideologies of communal
governance and land ownership,
and American individualism. As one Cold
War-era South Dakota congressman
fumed, " Socialist Democrats are making
much ado about fighting Communists
and Communism throughout the world,
and yet the same Administration ... [is]
bringing it right to America and Communizing
the Indians just as thoroughly as if
they were citizens of Russia. "
T
he Rediscovery of America is a dense
narrative, brimming with unfamiliar
histories and big, expansive themes.
Among the book's most interesting contributions
is its legal history. For 250
years, the courts have struggled to define
what it means to be a nation (or,
more accurately, nations) within a nation,
and its myriad implications, including
land ownership and legal jurisdiction for
civil and criminal cases.
Blackhawk traces the Supreme Court's
narrowing interpretation of Native sovereignty,
beginning with the earliest
days of the republic, when Indigenous
tribes were treated as separate nations
accorded legal rights and diplomatic status,
to the 1830s, when the Court redefined
Indian tribes' relationship to the
United States as a domestic dependent,
resembling " that of a ward to his guardian. "
By the late 19th century, the Court
had given Congress power to supersede
existing treaties, with full administrative
power over tribal lands. Blackhawk
places each of these judicial shifts in historical
context, explaining how changes
in the interpretation of Native nations'
legal status served as pretexts for changes
in policy intended to buttress corporations'
and white Americans' rapacious
demands for Indian lands.
Twentieth-century policies encouraging
Native American assimilation
were based on a contrary assumption-
that Indigenous people are a race, not
a nation. Race-based policies aimed to
weaken or eradicate reservations by
providing socioeconomic benefits to
Indigenous people individually rather
than collectively. Throughout the book,
Blackhawk explores the idea of racial
identity, contrasting depictions of Native
Americans with those of Black
Americans and other ethnic groups,
and exploring how racial ideologies justified
policy shifts.
Today, the question of whether Native
Americans are a nation or an ethnic
group remains unsettled, in both policy
and law. On one hand, there is a general
legal consensus supporting a narrow
notion of Native sovereignty-for example,
tribes have the right to sell water
and mineral rights and to build casinos
on their reservations. However,
it is also implicit that Native American
sovereignty is not the same as the sovereignty
attached to other countries-
in other words, the U.S. government
treats the Iroquois differently than it
treats France. On the other hand, Native
Americans are listed among racial
groups on the census, and are at times
beneficiaries of race-based policies like
affirmative action.
Washington Monthly
121
Washington Monthly - September/October 2023
Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Washington Monthly - September/October 2023
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