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

As he will do with several other conflicts throughout the book, Blackhawk reframes the American Revolution as a war with its roots in European-Indigenous relations. This chapter follows the proliferation of settler violence against Native Americans in the western borderlands of the British colonies, particularly Pennsylvania. In 1763, the British Empire expelled French forces from North America, upending the French-Indigenous hybrid culture that had previously flourished in what is now the Midwest. With their French adversaries out of the way, Native Americans posed the most significant political threat to British control of the land. Frontier regions like western Pennsylvania, frequently ignored in narratives of the American Revolution, became essential breeding grounds for discontent with the British government.

Violent Pennsylvanian militia groups, such as the Black Boys, unleashed their resentment on innocent Indigenous groups without shame. Historical alliances between colonial governments and tribes became “valuable fodder in colonists’ critiques of their monarch” (196), thereby motivating a growing revolutionary movement amongst British settlers. Despite Benjamin Franklin’s vocal opposition to racial violence aimed at Native Americans, the Black Boys went unpunished for their massacre of Conestoga Natives in 1763. The unpopularity of Franklin’s stance illustrates the disconnect and discord between the governing and working classes in the British colonies. Vitriolic animosity toward Native Americans “distanced colonists from their British kinsmen” (196). As such, the colonial American identity formed around the premise of white supremacy; civilian attacks on Native settlements became synonymous with attacks on British sovereignty itself.

Amid this hostile environment, anti-British sentiments bred Native American cultural revival movements. Two of the most famous Indigenous leaders of this era are Pontiac and Neolin, whose political and religious teachings Blackhawk analyzes closely. Neolin, a Lenape religious visionary, delivered prophecies that warned against infighting amongst Native groups, positing the British as a common enemy for all Indigenous people. Such teachings inspired the Odawa chief Pontiac (1714-1769) to initiate military action against the British, laying siege to several British forts in the early 1760s. Settler responses to Pontiac’s War, including the 1763 Conestoga Massacre, “cemented social ties between settlers, created experiences that transcended ethnic, class, and religious differences, and linked colonists with imperial policy goals” (221). Drawing attention away from colonists’ grievances about taxation, this chapter points to Indigenous policy as a key issue that motivated the Revolution in its infancy.

As Blackhawk outlines throughout this chapter, the United States did not emerge from the Revolutionary War on stable political footing, despite their victory over British forces. The war placed immense financial strain on the population as the government failed to pay soldiers their promised stipends. Congress seemed to be an incompetent governing body as several states failed to send delegations. Meanwhile, settlers continued to move westward toward the Native Inland Sea. Blackhawk asserts that the US Founders’ decision to replace the Articles of Confederation with a new US Constitution “originated from struggles to centralize power over the interior and expanded processes of colonialism thereafter” (249). Once again, Rediscovery understands Native America as being central to the formation of the United States’ political identity, as evidenced by its sacred governing document.

Blackhawk turns his analysis to the devastating consequences of the American Revolution for Indigenous communities. During the war, the Revolutionary army targeted the Iroquois and Cherokee nations, killing and raping Indigenous villagers indiscriminately. Despite this continuation of settler violence within the colonies, most North American tribes resided outside of the realm of the United States and maintained their sovereignty. The desperate US government began to see Indigenous landholdings as a resource that could provide financial compensation for the soldiers who were clamoring to be paid. As state governments vied for political control with the federal government, the new Constitution used the acquisition of such Indigenous lands as an opportunity to consolidate and centralize power.

When the state of New York illegally took possession of Iroquois lands in 1784, Blackhawk writes, “national authority crumbled […] threatening Native villages as well as weakening the Union” (270). Just as they had in the pre-Revolutionary period, the interests of the American ruling and working classes diverged: Blackhawk recounts how George Washington’s interior landholdings were threatened by squatters who sought to take possession. Counterintuitively, the interests of the federal government and Native nations became increasingly aligned when it came to defining sovereignty over the land, as leaders such as Washington feared that frontier settlers would eventually break away from the union. Thus, Blackhawk argues, the federal protections of Indigenous sovereignty enshrined by the Constitution’s treaty-making language are at the heart of the nation’s formative struggle between state and federal power. Despite these common interests, however, Blackhawk asserts that the Constitution exclusively serves the colonialist purposes of the US federal government with no concern for the “just” treatment of Native Americans. He names the document “Colonialism’s Constitution.”