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

Shifting focus away from military conflicts and physical violence, Blackhawk examines a rhetorical war that was waged against Native Americans at the turn of the 20th century. White supremacist mythologies painted Indigenous Americans as a phenomenon of the past, erasing the contemporary struggles of tribes and contributing to a sanitized vision of US history. Blackhawks sums this mythology up as follows: “In a morality play with foregone conclusions, the United States emerged from the conquest of Indian lands and achieved its destiny through continental expansion” (508). These narratives were formulated by academics and promoted performatively in settings such as the Worlds Fairs. Notorious “Indian fighters” such as William “Buffalo Bill” Cody objectified Native Americans as profit-turning displays for white audiences.

Such mythology was not met with silence by Native Americans. Indigenous performers at Worlds Fairs utilized their time with white audiences to “publicize their community’s concerns, to critique governmental policies, and to counteract public misconceptions” (513). Indigenous academics also formed a countermovement. In 1911, the Society of American Indians (SAI) held its first meeting to initiate an Indigenous rights movement throughout the country. Blackhawk highlights the work of female thinkers such as Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Oneida, 1880-1947) and Elizabeth Bender Cloud (Ojibwe, 1887-1965) in the society’s articulations of Pan-Indianism. Despite these contributions, however, the SAI maintained a patriarchal structure. In a country with increasingly solidifying colonial infrastructure, resistance through education was promoted by the Bender Cloud family, which operated the highly influential American Indian Institute as an alternative to assimilationist boarding schools.

US federal Indigenous policy shifted in the aftermath of World War II and once again changed the fortunes of Native communities across the country. The “Indian New Deal,” implemented by John Collier, the Roosevelt administration’s new Commissioner of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, ended destructive government policies such as allotment and reaffirmed Native autonomy. Blackhawk understands Collier’s transformative policies as the direct result of decades of Indigenous advocacy: “For a brief period, a new era of federal Indian affairs had emerged” (564). Though fleeting, the Indian New Deal illustrated a relationship between organized Indigenous movements for autonomy and positive shifts in US policy making. Subsequent Indigenous rights movements, as Blackhawk’s analysis demonstrates, built upon the work of organizations like the SAI that achieved transformative advocacy in an environment of pervasive racism.

Chapter 12 opens with another seismic shift in US policy as the postwar government sought to terminate its obligations to federally recognized tribes. Deceptive tactics were used to push these policies through, as officials marketed termination as a form of tribal liberation from the federal government. But termination ultimately served Euro-American interests, as newly unprotected tribes lost claims to their homelands, and Indigenous resources were devastated by predatory private interests. One tribe that effectively resisted the devastation of termination was the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin, which curbed the private interests of a lumber mill on its land through an advisory council that oversaw operations. Ada Deer (1935-2023), future Assistant Secretary for Indian Affairs, grew up on the Menominee reservation and witnessed how tribal oversight of the mill ensured the community’s prosperity. Elsewhere, as termination policies deprived Native communities of resources, the Indian Adoption Project sought to privatize the economic burden of caring for Indigenous children. Thousands of children were placed with nonnative families in a process of transcultural adoption that facilitated cultural erasure.

Blackhawk describes how the fascist colonialism of World War II’s axis powers frequently found inspiration in the United States’ federal Indigenous policies. In Germany, Hitler likened his campaigns of ethnic cleansing to those waged by the US government against its Native tribes along the Mississippi. In Japan, Torajirō Satō, one of the founders of the ethnonationalist settler organization Dōminkai, learned Western theories of racial hierarchy during his time in the United States and Australia. As Blackhawk works to illustrate, these Indigenous roots of the core ideological conflicts underlying World War II recentralize Native Americans, who are frequently ignored by historians of the global conflict. Contrary to popular narratives, Blackhawk asserts, “In direct and indirect ways, Native Americans shaped the course of the Second World War” (572).

As the SAI had done in the early 20th century, the increasingly popular Red Power Movement galvanized a new generation of Indigenous activists to reclaim autonomy from a colonialist federal government. Centralized in organizations such as the National Indian Youth Council, this movement gained global visibility previously unheard of for Indigenous activists in the United States with their months-long occupation of Alcatraz Island beginning in 1969. Under the guidance of informative works such as Custer Died for Your Sins, Red Power activists formulated a doctrine of Indigenous autonomy that changed the tides of US federal policy. Blackhawk closes the book with Deer’s appointment to federal office in 1993, a hopeful outlook despite the numerous existential threats still facing Native Americans.