Indian Country: A new history shows how the interactions between European colonists and Native peoples helped shape the foundations of American government.

• Author: Bhatia, Sara
• Position: Ned Blackhawk's "The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History"

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

by Ned Blackhawk

Yale University Press, 616 pp.

In September 1862, Confederate forces met Union troops in Sharpsburg, Maryland. The ensuing Battle of Antietam would prove to be the bloodiest of the Civil War. Within weeks, President Abraham Lincoln issued his preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, decreeing that if the Confederate states did not rejoin the Union by January 1, 1863, enslaved people in the rebellious states would be freed.

Twelve hundred miles away, in the recently admitted state of Minnesota, the U.S. military was engaged in a different kind of war, a campaign of ethnic cleansing to remove Native peoples from their lands. This crusade was fueled by a demand for farmland by white homesteaders. In just 10 years, the population of settlers in Minnesota had soared from under 5,000 to 150,000.

In a brazen violation of existing treaties, the U.S. government ceased paying promised annuities, and permitted homesteaders to squat and graze cattle on tribal lands. Clashes between settlers and Native Americans turned violent, sparking the six-month-long Dakota War, in which 1,000 settlers, Indigenous people, and U.S. soldiers died. General John Pope, commander of the U.S. forces, wrote, "It is my purpose utterly to exterminate the Sioux if I have the power to do so ... Destroy everything belonging to them and force them out to the plains."

Violence against Native people was justified by racism: "They are to be treated as maniacs or wild beasts, and by no means as people with whom treaties and compromises can be made," Pope wrote. Three months later, with the express approval of Lincoln, the military conducted the largest mass execution in U.S. history, hanging 38 Indigenous soldiers in Mankato for their part in the Dakota War, one of more than a hundred campaigns against Native people fought in the West during the Civil War and Reconstruction.

These parallel histories--the first, a climactic event in virtually all Civil War narratives, and the second, a lesser-known story rarely linked to the larger context of the Civil War and its themes of dispossession and freedom--illustrate the argument at the heart of Ned Blackhawk's The Rediscovery of America, a sweeping, even audacious, retelling of U.S. history centered on the Native American experience. Blackhawk asserts, "It is impossible to understand the United States without understanding its Indigenous history."

Blackhawk--a professor of history and American studies at Yale University and a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada--brings decades of academic bona fides to the task of synthesizing the deluge of recent scholarship on Indigenous Americans into a single, comprehensive volume. This achievement alone would make The Rediscovery of America a notable and important book.

But for those outside academia, Blackhawk's more interesting accomplishment is not the comprehensiveness of this deeply researched narrative. Rather, this impressive tome offers a bold new framework for understanding U.S. history.

Since the 1970s, a generation of historians has pushed for the study of "forgotten" Americans. Blackhawk goes beyond a call for inclusion, arguing instead for a whole new paradigm, an "alternate American story that is not trapped in the framework of European discovery and European 'greatness.'" Like The New York Times Magazine's controversial "1619 Project," which places African American slavery at the epicenter of the American story, Blackhawk prods readers to rethink our collective historical narrative, but with Native Americans at the hub. This is not just a question of focus, but also one of empowerment, elevating the continent's Indigenous people from passive victims to actors in a centuries-long struggle over land and sovereignty.

For the armchair historian, the book offers an exciting, even disorienting narrative. The experience is similar to viewing a world map drawn from the so-called Peters projection, which reduces the distortions at the equator and poles to reflect countries' true sizes; the essential facts are the same, but the overall...