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

Blackhawk embarks on his sweeping survey of Native American history with an examination of Indigenous-Spanish relations in the Aztec Empire and the Pueblo lands that would eventually become the southwestern United States. Blackhawk begins with the 1776 expedition of Francisco Atanasio Domínguez and Silvestre Vélez de Escalante, two Spanish friars who had been tasked with establishing connections between the imperial colonies in California and New Mexico. Blackhawk asserts that tenuous understandings of mutual sovereignty governed the region. He cites an incident in which the two friars forcefully prevented their men from stealing livestock belonging to Pueblo Natives illustrating Spanish as proof of their recognition of Indigenous authority.

The chapter proceeds to outline how this delicate social order, in which Indigenous people possessed established legal rights alongside their European counterparts, emerged from the brutal violence of early Spanish colonialism. In the 16th century, dozens of southwestern Pueblo villages became incorporated into the Spanish kingdom after Francisco de Coronado’s 1540 expedition up the Colorado River, during which he massacred countless Puebloans. As Blackhawk explains, this expedition was an extension of violent Spanish colonialist projects occurring throughout Central America and the Caribbean. In Hispaniola, for example, Juan Ponce de León used attack dogs to kill and subdue the local Indigenous people. Spanish colonial violence, Blackhawk argues, was both deliberate and a byproduct of Spain’s culture of violent masculinity.

Southwestern Indigenous people responded with culturally defiant preservations of traditional practices in the face of Spanish missionary efforts. These trends culminated in the Pueblo Revolt of 1680, led by the Tewa spiritual leader Popé, where the chapter ends. Popé’s Revolt resulted in the successful expulsion of Spanish officials and clergymen from Pueblo communities, relegating them to the Spanish settlement at Santa Fe. Blackhawk describes the Pueblo Revolt as “the first American Revolution,” treating it as evidence of Indigenous cultural resilience and autonomy in the face of immense colonial pressure (61).

Having examined Spain’s methods of colonialism in the Southwest, Blackhawk turns his attention to the Northeast to understand British relations with the Indigenous populations there. This analysis, he posits, is essential for understanding the history of the United States more broadly since British colonists would eventually initiate revolution and found the country: “To know early America is still to know British America,” he writes, “and to know British America is to know New England” (73). The key difference Blackhawk finds between British settlers in the Northeast and colonial populations in other parts of North America is their Puritan faith, which dictated their understanding of Indigenous peoples.

Puritan belief in divine providence dictated that Native Americans would inevitably be converted to Christianity. This colonialist ideology motivated immense violence in the region; in particular, Blackhawk highlights the enslavement of a million Indigenous people before 1700. He asserts, “Historians have failed to recognize this essential truth: Indigenous dispossession fueled the rise not only of British North America but also of its foundational institution of chattel slavery” (77). Among these trafficked individuals was Tisquantum, born into the Wampanoag Patuxet tribe, who was kidnapped by the British in 1614 and spent the rest of his life sailing between Europe and New England as a cultural liaison between Native Americans and British colonists, most notably those at Plymouth Colony. Tisquantum’s story, Blackhawk argues, is an example of Indigenous survival that has been made palatable to modern audiences.

In addition to explaining the religious ideology that motivated Puritans’ colonial expansion in New England, Chapter 2 describes the trading economy between northeastern Indigenous peoples, the British, and the Dutch. Wampum, traditional beads made of whelk shell, became the keystone currency of this economy because Indigenous tribes ascribed high value to it, and it did not require intensive labor to transport for the Europeans. But despite the trade network being dictated by Native products and value sets, it offered essential colonial opportunities to Europeans, who facilitated increasing Native dependence on European goods such that tribes were forced to use the land to pay their debts. Additionally, the Pequot War (1636-1638) erupted amid intertribal tensions over control of the wampum and fur trades, spreading violence across the region and resulting in the enslavement of 200 surviving Pequots. Blackhawk illustrates how exploitative trade practices and violent colonial warfare enabled the subsequent prosperity of northern colonial port cities such as Boston.

Blackhawk heads westward once more, this time toward the Great Lakes region, where French imperial forces came into contact with the Iroquois Confederacy. After first contact with the French, epidemics and colonial violence led to a steep Indigenous population decline in the region. These early French colonial efforts were led by Samuel de Champlain (1567-1635), who would found the French-Canadian city of Quebec. Blackhawk reports that Champlain’s early wars against the Iroquois resulted in devastating losses for Mohawk forces, who were unprepared for European weapon technologies. The Iroquois Confederacy’s transformation into one of the world’s most feared warring powers is all the more remarkable in light of this beginning.

Various strategies of adaptation to their new colonial world resulted in extreme tribal metamorphosis. Blackhawk writes, “New forms of warfare, new strategies of survival, and new structures in village life characterized Iroquoia in the 1600s. Champlain’s first cracks of fire initiated infernos of transformation” (115). In this new order, violence was an essential tool for achieving both French and Iroquois interests. For example, Blackhawk cites Iroquois captive-taking practices as a method of coping with the loss of community members to disease and warfare; Native and white people kidnapped and held captive by the Iroquois were forcefully incorporated into their new society in a violent form of adoption. In addition, the shock of new weapon technology quickly faded, and the Iroquois became adept at waging war in their new colonial environment.

Beyond violence, the Iroquois Confederacy also began participating in European politics with remarkable success. Pointing to European portraits of Iroquois leaders painted in the 18th century, he writes of the political clout garnered by the Iroquois on a global scale. Furthermore, the Iroquois forged an invaluable alliance with Dutch traders, who provided them with advanced gun technologies. These guns facilitated conflict with their neighboring enemies, the Wendat Nation, which was simultaneously being ravaged by diseases imported from Europe. Iroquois dominance in this deadly landscape led to what Blackhawk terms “an Indigenous remapping of the continent” (137). In this chapter, Blackhawk illustrates that Native-on-Native violence, fueled by colonial pressure, shaped the future of North America just as much as European-on-Native violence did.