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

Popé (1630-1692) was a Tewa spiritual leader who lived in the Ohkay Owingeh Pueblo community in what is now northern New Mexico. In 1680, after nearly a century of colonial rule, he led the successful Pueblo Revolt against the Spanish. Blackhawk describes this revolt as “the first American Revolution”: “By rejecting Spanish practices, beliefs, and institutions, Pueblo leaders reaffirmed and revitalized their own, performing their traditional dances to celebrate the victorious and memorialize the dead” (61-62). This interpretation highlights how cultural heritage is a site of Native agency and how colonial powers sought to erase Native American culture even in the earliest stages of their invasion of the continent.

Five years before the revolt, Popé was captured alongside 46 other religious leaders and convicted of witchcraft by the Spanish colonial government. Before he could be sold into slavery or executed, a delegation of Pueblo leaders demanded that the surviving prisoners be freed. Popé’s subsequent release laid the groundwork for a successful Pueblo Revolt. Although Pueblo independence was brief, Popé’s resistance remains revered in the 21st century. Blackhawk highlights a statue of Popé displayed in the US Capitol’s National Statuary Hall to represent New Mexico.

Tisquantum (c.1580-1622), more commonly known by the Anglicized name “Squanto,” was a Wampanoag Patuxet man who was kidnapped by Captain Thomas Hunt in 1614, was trafficked to Spain and England, and spent the rest of his life traveling between Europe and North America as a cultural liaison. Blackhawk envisions Tisquantum’s life as a window into the multicultural world of the 17th century, writing that he learned to navigate European culture “after arriving into what must have seemed a babel of Mediterranean, African, and other Indigenous tongues within Iberian slave markets” (86). Furthermore, the book treats Squanto’s survival and return as a testament to Indigenous longing for their homelands.

Most famously, Tisquantum served as a cultural liaison between the pilgrims at Plymouth Colony and the Wampanoags they encountered, leading to what is now known as the “First Thanksgiving” in the United States. Traditional narratives have romanticized his presence at the feast as evidence of a friendly relationship between European settlers and Native Americans. Blackhawk challenges this storyline: “As always, ‘Squanto’ remains a go-between, perpetually stuck in-between nations even at an event that he organized” (89). This portrayal of Tisquantum reclaims agency for him in the world of early New England, framing his diplomatic efforts as the survival tactics of a victim of human trafficking and de-sanitizing pilgrim-Native relations leading up to the mythologized 1621 feast.

The Iroquois Confederacy was a political union of Iroquoian-speaking Native nations in the Great Lakes region and Northeast of what is now the United States. Comprised of six core nations, the Mohawk, Oneida, Cayuga, Seneca, Onondaga, and Tuscarora, the Confederacy controlled a vast swath of northeastern North America. Predating European arrival, likely by hundreds of years, the Iroquois alliance encountered Frenchmen such as Samuel de Champlain with longstanding cultural values and political motivations. The Confederacy’s importance was so enduring that Blackhawk’s analysis of it stretches across multiple chapters.

Blackhawk highlights the Iroquois Confederacy’s prominent position in the geopolitics of the 17th and 18th centuries. He uses art historical analysis to illustrate this dynamic, citing European-commissioned portraits of Iroquois delegates as evidence that “Iroquois affairs concerned European leaders so much that Iroquois leaders, not New France’s founder, would be invited to sit for portraiture” (113). In these early stages of the book, the Iroquois are characterized as the Indigenous group most adept at navigating European colonial politics, thereby refuting racist portrayals of Indigenous governments as less sophisticated than European ones.

Pontiac (1714-1769) and Neolin (birth and death dates unknown) were two leaders of the Indigenous cultural revival movements that characterized the mid-18th century. Neolin was a Lenape religious visionary whose prophecies became highly influential throughout the Native Inland Sea in the years leading up to the American Revolution. Blackhawk says his teachings offered “a millennialist vision of a bountiful future” to Indigenous populations who were increasingly antagonized by invasive British settlers (211). These teachings encouraged various tribes to see themselves as allies in the face of colonial cultural erasure and to struggle for an Indigenous future independent of European influence.

Pontiac, a chief of the Odawa tribe, was inspired by Neolin’s visions of Native unity to initiate military action against British incursions. Pontiac’s War (1763-1766) was a multi-tribal effort to expel British settlers from the Great Lakes region. Indigenous forces targeted colonial forts, eventually destroying nine of them. Blackhawk highlights Pontiac’s military prowess in his account of the war, emphasizing how much coordination was necessary to achieve such unlikely successes. Despite these successes, however, Neolin and Pontiac’s resistance catalyzed a vengeful counterresponse by British settlers who harbored violent anti-Native sentiments. In the dangerous landscape of 18th-century middle America, Pontiac’s militaristic expression of agency would trigger a violent backlash that reverberated across generations of Indigenous Americans.

Toypurina (1760-1799) was a Kizh medicine woman who organized an attempted revolt against the Spanish mission at San Gabriel in California in 1785. Unlike many Tongva people, who had been forced to live within the confines of the San Gabriel Mission, Toypurina lived in the Jachivit village. Her involvement in the San Gabriel revolt was the result of collaborations between Indigenous communities divided by colonial boundaries. Blackhawk presents her participation as a key example of female Indigenous agency in the face of violent colonial systems that “targeted women’s bodies and also their authority” (353). In a social landscape characterized by sexual violence, Toypurina reaffirmed her bodily autonomy through political resistance.

When the revolt failed, Toypurina was exiled by Spanish authorities to the area near Mission San Juan Bautista, over 300 miles north of her home village. During her exile, she married a Spanish soldier, with whom she had three children before passing away at the age of 39. Unable to provide a satisfying resolution to her story, Blackhawk ends his account of Toypurina’s life with a sliver of optimism, writing that she “died likely content that they had attempted to preserve their community’s autonomy against the tides of colonialism” (354).

The Society of American Indians (SAI, 1911-1923) was an organization of Native American thinkers in the early 20th century that aimed to promote Pan-Indian unity among the continent’s tribal groups as a front against federal legal infringements on Native American rights. Members of the society, sometimes called “Red Progressives,” came from a wide variety of fields and understood the cause of Native Americans as being related to the wider progressive movement of the day. Annual conferences and a quarterly journal, later entitled American Indian Magazine, comprised the society’s primary academic outputs. These efforts led to significant legislative change, including the eventual publication of the Merriam Report in 1928, an assessment that outlined the extensive failings of the federal government in its treatment of Native Americans.

Among the society members most closely followed by Blackhawk are Henry Roe Cloud (Ho-Chunk, 1884-1950), who helped to author the Merriam Report, and Laura Cornelius Kellogg (Oneida, 1880-1947), who was the society’s only female founding member. Blackhawk pays particular attention to the contributions of female thinkers to this movement since their efforts are obscured by some of the society’s more patriarchal writings. Blackhawk notes that the field of Native American studies is indebted to the SAI.