The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

Historical revisionism is a method of historical analysis that reassesses the accuracy of established scholarly or popular narratives of history. As its title suggests, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History is concerned with deconstructing Eurocentric narratives of US history that ignore the influential role that Native Americans have played in all aspects of North American life since before European arrival. The ethic of historical revisionism was at the heart of Blackhawk’s acceptance speech for the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction:

The subject of American Indian history, while often simultaneously unfamiliar and discomforting, is also a shared experience that touches us all. The currents of the past run deep and inform the topography of the present […] Native America is also a form of our national inheritance. We cannot, nor should not, continue its systematic erasure (“Ned Blackhawk Accepts the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Rediscovery of America.” YouTube, uploaded by National Book Foundation, 17 Nov. 2023).

The book’s revisionist methodology challenges scholars and the American public to adopt a new understanding of US history that more equitably incorporates Native Americans. Historical revisionism is a scholarly method with a broad social purpose; works like Rediscovery are not intended to remain confined within the insular world of academia. Among the pervasive misconceptions that Blackhawk confronts in Rediscovery are the peripherality and passivity of Indigenous Americans throughout US history. These narratives, as Blackhawk outlines throughout the text, have influenced nearly every aspect of American life, from university textbooks to Hollywood movies. Blackhawk hopes that “we can continue to remake […] some of the unhelpful categories of analysis that have often alighted or marginalized this subject from broader understandings of America” (“Ned Blackhawk on The Rediscovery of America.” YouTube, uploaded by Yale Press, 25 April 2023).

Rediscovery builds upon decades of scholarship within the field of Native American studies. This field has its roots in the early 20th century with the work of the Society of American Indians, who are themselves subjects of study in Rediscovery. Early Indigenous thinkers, such as Laura Cornelius Kellogg (1880-1947), advocated for the articulation of a “pan-Indian” identity as a form of solidarity against the destructive forces of American colonialism. By the time of the civil rights era, Indigenous students and scholars like Vine Deloria Jr. (1933-2005) carved out an academic discipline for themselves that countered assimilationist ideology with teachings that illuminated and empowered America’s Native peoples. Deloria Jr.’s essential work Custer Died for Your Sins: An Indian Manifesto (1969) revolutionized how anthropologists and historians considered Native Americans by asserting Indigenous agency in the past and future. Blackhawk recognizes this earlier generation of scholars as “establishing a lot of the findings that have fundamentally unmade or remade conventional paradigms of American historical analysis” (“Ned Blackhawk on The Rediscovery of America”). In his estimation, therefore, historical revisionism and Native American studies are intrinsically linked concepts, as Native scholars work to shatter biased historical narratives that have been weaponized against them.