Poured Over: Ned Blackhawk on The Rediscovery of America

By Jenna Seery / December 12, 2023 at 6:00 am

Winner of the National Book Award for Nonfiction, The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk puts Indigenous history at the center to create a fuller and more accurate depiction of America’s past and future. Blackhawk joins us to talk about the erasure of Indigenous peoples from American history, retelling narratives from new perspectives, the surprises he found in his research and more with Miwa Messer, host of Poured Over.

This episode of Poured Over was hosted by Executive Producer Miwa Messer and mixed by Harry Liang.             

New episodes land Tuesdays and Thursdays (with occasional Saturdays) here and on your favorite podcast app.         

Featured Books (Episode):
The Rediscovery of America by Ned Blackhawk

Full Episode Transcript
Miwa Messer

I’m Miwa Messer, I’m the producer and host of Poured Over and Ned Blackhawk is a professor of history and American Studies at Yale University. He is also the most recent winner of the National Book Award for The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History. And Ned very nicely cleared out some time on his calendar for us, because he won the National Book Award two weeks ago. And now we’re taping. So Ned, thank you so much for making the time. It’s great to see you.

Ned Blackhawk

I’m really happy to be with you.

So I have a question for you. And I want to start with native peoples in the subtitle of the book, because we’ve heard American Indian, Native American indigenous peoples, you use native peoples, not only in the subtitle, but throughout the book. And I just want to make sure I’m using the right nomenclature. As we go forward. Yes,

These are somewhat interchangeable, and the political and social categories used to describe the indigenous peoples of the United States, broadly speaking, in North America, as well, native peoples has come into particular fashion and parlance with the rise of contemporary Native nations, you could have used the term Native nations and the unmaking of US history, and there was some kind of stylistic questions about having the term American, twice in the title and in the subtitle. So American Indians, native nations and native peoples and indigenous Americans are commonly interchangeable, sometimes terms for describing what historically and even legally are often called Indians.

500 years of American history, you start with the Spaniards coming in, and you know, 1500s, and we get up to what we call the American century. And you and I are just going to hit some of the really big points, there’s a piece about the civil war that’s driving a large part of your narrative that I hadn’t actually thought about. I mean, when I think about the mythology of the opening of the American West, right, like, obviously, terrible, terrible things happen. This is a big piece of the book. But the Civil War puts an interesting context, to Native Peoples History in the US. I know, it sounds like I’m jumping in right into the middle of the book, and I kind of am. But I do want to start there, because I feel like the Civil War is a piece of American history that a lot of us have feelings about, or at least have been taught, have some experience of and it just seems like, okay, let’s use that as context.

Yeah, and you know, for a lot of academic historians, myself included, we’re often either on a semester system or kind of organizational, yearly calendar, where American history might be taught in two halves at many school. So at UC Berkeley, or University of Wisconsin Madison, where I used to teach, you know, history 101 is American history to the Civil War and the history 102 is American history since the Civil War. And that demarcation is illustrative of the centrality this subject in this history has on the making of America more broadly. We all kind of, I think, note that as kind of American citizens on some level, Ken Burns did a great deal to bring kind of larger national attention to the Civil War as the kind of defining crucible of America, but with our understandings of early America, and the challenges around the early republic, there are other social constituents, there are other populations, there are other peoples in in my field nations who are impacted by this field who have been relegated to the margins. And so my civil war chapter in the book does try to broaden our frame of analysis to look at these other central dimensions to a war that had just in essence, the most influence upon the American continent.

History was my thing in college, but obviously, you’re the trained historian, I’m the bookseller. So bear with me as I sort of noodle around this conversation. But it feels fair to say that really westward expansion as we were taught, and as we know, it now really was kicked off in sort of the wake of the Civil War. Am I right about that, that land grabs sort of really took off in a way in the late 1800s That maybe previously had not…

The Civil War made the expansion of the United States a more political, legal and kind of jurisdictionally legible process. 1860, 1858. Even in the Civil War era itself. The presence of the federal government is negligible across most of the trans Mississippi West. And part of the reason there’s so many battles and wars with Native nations is many Indians or Native leaders don’t believe that the white settlers and their leaders are as powerful as they say they are. Because they’ve watched conflicts among settlers, they’ve watched Confederate leaders leave Western posts, they hear that this battle or this war is kind of coming, they don’t see the evidentiary examples that we think of as modern America, there are no continental railroad, the US military is, you know, 20,000 soldiers in 1860, you know, a fraction of what it would be just two years later, let alone five years later, there are very limited forts and other kinds of well institutionalized centers of essentially state power. Civil War changes all of that very quickly and very dramatically. And so, even though the United States had claimed, obviously, California and 1850 are incorporated, much of the northern half of Mexico during the US was Mexico, much of the American West and places like, you know, Wyoming, Nevada, Arizona, are hardly incorporated into the body politic of the Republic.

So when you accepted your National Book Award for nonfiction, you opened your remarks with a really great line. And it’s from the introduction to the book. I love this line. So I’m just going to quote you for a second. “How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy.” And part of why I love that line is I grew up outside of Boston. So the whole city on the hill, Plymouth Plantation first Thanksgiving, hi. That was something that was sort of drilled into me from the time I was very small. And every fall, we would take a school trip to Plymouth Plantation, every single at one point there was even an animatronic Squanto. It was Massachusetts a very long time ago. And I have no idea if there’s still an animatronic Hall of anything. But it’s a fundamental myth of the founding of America, right? Like, here we are, we are the city on the hill. And we’ve left out an entire population, and you’re rectifying it. In a way with this book, you’re starting to at least right.

I am part of a generation or two of academic and tribal scholars who have been making lots of inroads. And so this book would not have been possible without the vast work of countless others whom, whom I built upon. And so the title The Rediscovery of America, really, is a recognition that scholars and tribal members and allies and others are in a process of rediscovering this missing piece, if you if we want to call, there’s a lot that remains to be done. But a lot has been achieved to the point where when we can begin to ask that type of question. There’s a lot of what I call calcified resistance or sedimented forms of knowledge that limit engagement with these subjects. And it is a lot easier to just kind of inhabit kind of prior kind of received wisdom on certain subjects and to live and work and teach in ways that are more familiar and perhaps, comforting. And the reason that story of American democracy in the kind of triumphalist way is so institutionalized is because of the comfort it provides. There’s kind of a safety and a kind of intellectual home essentially, particularly for the sending communities, particularly Euro American immigrant societies who have found you know, often sanction and various forms of sanctuary and other types of mobilities liberties and opportunities that have made the American dream and not just for your Americans, but for countless millions of others. A reality that many project upon an understanding of history. That is not, I think, super helpful, right?

You have been a professor for 20 years now. 25th year of teaching, did your undergrad work at McGill in Canada? Then where did you do your grad work? There was some time in California, right?

Right. I started graduate school with a master’s degree at the University of California, Los Angeles. what I consider to be one of the most kind of advanced intellectual communities are American historical subjects. And then I didn’t have I kind of sufficient mentoring kind of relationship with an academic advisor and ended up at the University of Washington.

So when you were coming up, starting your career in academia was Native American studies defined? Did you have to cobble together your program from American Studies and American history? Or were you able to work in the way you wanted to work with the material you wanted to work with, because it feels like this is almost an emerging discipline, even though you’ve been teaching for 25 years, right.

And I’ve witnessed the rise of this disciplinary formation, and there are now like professional organizations that didn’t exist 15 years ago, there are journals that weren’t there. And perhaps most excitingly, there are lots of colleagues, graduate students and undergraduates doing fantastic work in this. And I’m really fortunate to remember in a sense, these earlier worlds and periods when it was very difficult to find, course, materials even that’s why one of the imperatives behind this book was to offer a robust overview of US history with a particular indigenous theme or valence. And it’s also explained part of its organization, so that you can’t ignore native peoples from either the contemporary period or the 19th century or the 20th. And so it makes this kind of early rhetorical claim that every century of American history is an indigenous history as well. And I’m kind of committed to that argumentation. And I have yet to have anyone tried to disabuse me of that subject. But the 20th century is the field that most consistently has failed to see Native peoples in as part of the mosaic of multicultural America. But the discipline of Native American studies and the people within it are really rectifying and kind of reenergizing conversations about democracy, dispossession, colonialism and other themes of indigeneity that are starting to become particularly resonant. And one of the kind of surprising developments of the last 20 years is this paradigm of settler colonialism come part of the parlance of kind of contemporary social and cultural affairs in ways that, you know, academics never see their work kind of translated into public forum, in the end those ways.

And also, I do want to bring up the evolution of history and how we teach it and how we tell the stories. If you think about, for instance, narratives that Francis Parkman was writing, you know, back in the day, and the way he interpreted events in the American West. And when we look back now, and well, it’s impossibly dated. And the idea that, you know, history is a static thing, right, that we know what our history is, well, actually, no history reflects who we are, right? I mean, it’s its own discipline.

And I kind of stumbled upon some of these insights in the post-Civil War chapters of this, I was just kind of shocked, I knew as a kind of professionally trained historian, that American history as a field didn’t really exist until the late 19th century. That even into the early 20th century, most academic institutions, such as Yale, where I now teach, would not have sullied themselves with a vision of American history and the kind of way that we would think of it and it was these kind of field leaders in the late 19th and early 20th century, who helped kind of initiate themes of analysis like the frontier or immigration theses, later, more scholars like Perry Miller, who had the vision of American exceptionalism from his studies of the Puritan world, those kinds of paradigms have kind of often clouded their own histories and Parkman who is a Brahmin, you know, from Boston? You know, he, he and so many others are writing about an earlier free national world because of the effects of the civil war upon the nation. They’re trying to understand what are the defining elements or kind of attributes of an American identity or society or history in the aftermath of so much suffering and destruction and loss of life. And so they go back and they create these myths of French colonialism and Parkman’s case, or Puritanism in the subsequent histories of others. And it’s in that period when national holidays like Thanksgiving and Columbus Day and others start emerging, that have kind of clouded really the actual histories of these periods, and simplified in my field or for my interests, native peoples within them.

One of the points that you’re making throughout Rediscovery, too, is, and I’m just again, I’m just going to quote you here because for historian you have really great style. This is just fun to read this book, encounter rather than discovery must structure America’s origin story. I mean, that’s essentially what you’re saying is we’re not even using the right language to describe what’s happened to us, like we have to change at a very, very basic level and I do I want to parse the definition of encounter and put that up against discovery because this is the story of America, right? Like we were discovered by Europeans, and they civilized us and blah, blah, blah, all of this kind of thing, but encounter actually changes the playing field entirely.

It does and because in part because discovery has inherently a kind of action of either arrival or consciousness or some kind of signatory beginning, and you know, it could be a Columbian encounter. It could be Vespucci, it could be Verrazzano, it could be Henry Hudson, it could be Jacques Cartier, or Samuel de Champlain, it could be any of these kinds of moments, you know, it could be the Plymouth colonists, doing their Mayflower compact off the, you know, off the coast of Cape Cod, it could be any of these moments become the beginning, essentially of a process of formation, that then extends into a seemingly absence or wilderness or some kind of an ahistorical landscape. Encounter requires us to see beyond that periodization, beyond that kind of simplified focus, beyond an exclusionary vision, essentially. And hopefully invites us to name these exclusions to understand these kind of formations, to not abandon them, but at least understand that when we say, America, we’re not describing a landscape that was named as such at the time of European arrival, right, that there were other names for the region, that there were other peoples here, the practices, and it puts American history less on a kind of teleological process of expansion and or celebration, and puts it in just a more kind of complex and undetermined narrative.

It’s so interesting to me that there are people who when they encounter a sort of historical narrative, and they want it to stay, sort of what their perception of the narrative is, and not give it space to evolve and not give it space to change as our understanding of society and culture changes with it. You use—the Constitution sort of is the midpoint of the book, the writing of the US Constitution, and it’s very deliberate. It’s, you know, that marks sort of the start of the Republic, right, the Republic, our nation as we know it. And the two pieces of this book hang together really well, but it is it’s a really sharp division. And I’m wondering if you could take a minute and talk about that a little bit.

Most Americans, myself included, received very kind of partial understandings of the chronology and development of the US nation state. Even in those kinds of surveys that I referenced earlier, the revolution receives far more generally, analysis and attention than does its aftermath. Right? Because the aftermath of the revolution is so uncertain. And I don’t want say mismanaged, but there are just inescapable problems that plague the United States at the time of its independence.

Can you give an example because we, we focus so much on the taxation piece, and actually come out and say it? And it’s like, well, actually, that wasn’t the only driving force. And yet, that really has become the metaphor, right, for events leading up to the American Revolution. It’s like, well, you know, that’s not all of it.

I mean, in the revolution, the examples that I point to are interior struggles between native peoples and British and settlers, as well as the British Crown, the post-revolutionary period, the Articles of Confederation, which govern the Continental Congress during the revolution. And then the early years of the Republic just lacks the kind of capacity for military organization, essentially any form of kind of interstate or national political activities. And so the Constitution really begins our kind of modern American political system. And I think we all know that, but we’ve never really sufficiently I think, spent enough time in that space and native peoples who are mentioned, both in the Declaration and in the Constitution, these are obviously extremely determinative periods, right. One can get a kind of clear understanding, I think of this constitutional period in the sixth chapter, which concludes part one and also prepares one for the subsequent half of the book in which the law of American governance for Indian peoples becomes a particularly signature feature of 19th and 20th century American history, it’s very complicated, but incredibly important, particularly because so many lawyers are taught American legal history and law without these subjects in them. And so many, like Supreme Court Justice, you know, have just simply never really encountered some of these subjects, despite going to the best academic schools in the country, because it’s not taught there. And so I think someone could kind of come into an understanding of American kind of legal and political history through this realm quite sufficiently, or kind of at least introductorily in ways that might be helpful or, and or surprising.

I felt like I learned so much from the second half of the book, I mean, the way I was taught American history, in high school, and my specialty ended up being East Asian history. So I really did sort of got through AP European History, did American history, and then never felt fully grounded in sort of the minutia of it, because that felt like the minutia, a lot of what we now know, was sort of reserved for college level coursework. And I really, I needed to take some time. I didn’t quite realize that say, you talk about the development of social groups, and advocacy in the 1920s. And I didn’t realize that that had been happening at quite that level, or that the US government early on was using treaties with Indian nations to sort of practice writing treaties with the English and the French. And about how we really have created our country as we know it, through our interactions with native peoples. And it’s a whole new way to think about things.

The argument for that claim is stronger for the antebellum period. But I tried to extend it throughout the 19^th and even into 20th century, seeing things like essentially how the United States treats its most vulnerable citizens reflects broadly on the nation as a whole. And if we can’t see that as a kind of elemental kind of commitment of American democracy and justice, then we’re not really understanding those subjects either. And so the treaty thing is really interesting, because there’s a lot of evidence that the founders really were struggling to make sense of their authority. And there were very, like limited constitutional precedents for doing the things they needed to do very early, like, purchase Louisiana. And it’s not just for Indians there. But there were 1000s of non-Anglophone settlers, there are people who are from the French Empire previously of the Spanish Empire. And the US, you know, wasn’t in the US constitutional system wasn’t organized to incorporate new peoples in this form. Jefferson thought an amendment might be needed, but he was against, like centralized federal authority before that, before he was President that is, and so his evolution and thinking on these matters is like, super transformative, from his initial entry into national politics to his eventual, you know, to term presidency. And so he’s living through this era of evolution, in which international affairs, slave uprisings like in Haiti, Napoleon’s invasions of Spain that lead to the kind of eventual purchase of Louisiana are all kind of happening so quickly. And native peoples are at the heart of all of these Imperial developments, if not in Europe, certainly. And not just North America, but even the Caribbean because Haiti is rebelling against its French masters. And Napoleon is essentially starting to diminish what had once been the prospects of black liberation for former slaves. Because he wants to turn north america back into a French breadbasket, or kind of an imperial hinterland for their Haitian plantations, which he envisions will regain French and Imperial authority, which had lost during the seven years war so there’s a lot of things happening, that we’ve kind of, we lose sight of if we focus exclusively on small geographic areas or sets of individual leaders and or their publications.

You’ve been working in this field. You know, again, as you said earlier, this is your 25th year teaching. You’ve been studying this material for much longer than as long as you possibly have been able to but are you still in a place where you can surprise yourself. I mean, is that where the new research and the new work is helping?

All the time. And that’s why I’m so delighted to be having this conversation with you and to be in this space, because a lot of the insights from that from the book weren’t particularly revelatory. I have been teaching at or I’ve been a faculty member for 25 years, Native American history, almost all of those years I was in graduate school. But in the academy, we’re trained to be specialists and examine new subjects or materials. And I’ve been largely a kind of Western American historian of recent years, but this project has kind of forced me to be kind of become a generalist. And so I’ve kind of had to learn things about American history that I wouldn’t otherwise have learned. And at every stage, it’s just been fascinating to see this subject which is so consistently been, you know, shoved aside or ignored or not included, at the heart of, you know, so many kinds of elemental moments. And so we were you started with the Civil War, and I was just astounded that Lincoln was literally drafting the Emancipation Proclamation as the largest mass execution in US history with being conducted under his jurisdiction, and with his moderate level of consent in December of 1862. I mean, we’ve never seen those subjects together, and the most hits us political historians of that moment. And of that, of those eras, have a fairly exclusive focus on eastern North America or on the north and the south or on black, white racial relations, and have yet to been able to really see the West and indigenous peoples as also participants in the American crucible. So those are surprising. You know, at times, there’s a kind of disappointment that it’s so under studied or under recognized. But if you see this as an invitation or an opportunity, rediscovery, can become a great process of engagement, that really can be very fulfilling,

We don’t lose anything by becoming more inclusive. In the way we tell our stories, especially about our nation, we just, we don’t lose anything, it just adds another layer. I mean, I didn’t know that the 1890 census had said the frontier is officially closed, I was like, Well, how can you say that the frontier is closed. And I realize it’s a technical designation, but the way we hold on to that idea right at the American West, and the freedom and all the things that represents and, you know, I’m gonna go build my fortune, all of these Second Sons, right, who left the east coast because they had nothing to inherit and went west. And they were like, well, I’m going to make my fortune. And the Huntington Museum out here in California, you know, has this entire sort of wing filled with art from upstate New York and New England and whatnot. And I’m like, you know, I thought I didn’t have to see that necessarily anymore. And it’s a certain kind of art that works for a certain kind of person and that’s great. But it’s amazing to me, sometimes when I think about it, that all of that followed us out kind of thing. And even in that context of I’m going to build a new thing, I’m going to escape my past, and yet, I’m going to bring the portraits long, I’m going to bring all of this kind of art that represents everything that I left behind, and I still even now I sort of wrestle with that a little bit. But for me, that’s also the fun of reading history. Right? Especially something that I’m not particularly well-versed in. So to hear a historian say, Well, yes, I can still surprise myself, because there are stories to be discovered is pretty exciting.

I think, you know, most academic historians don’t become academic historians for clear objectives. It’s kind of a process of engagement, that comes from a hunger or kind of a calling or some kind of impetus. You know, it is challenging. Like, you know, my mom was a public school teacher for many decades. And it’d be you know, there are challenges to these vocations that are often unanticipated or unforeseen, but the spark one gets from inquiry or the excitement you get sharing ideas in classes or with students or at conferences, those are k incredibly generative things. I would say there is a kind of potential challenge in that we are both in the academy but also now because of social media outside of educational institutions, we’re saturated with knowledge. And often kind of presented in somewhat of an argumentative or kind of imperative form, like we must know this now and we must kind of reeducate ourselves on these subjects. And that challenge is a kind of bewildering one and fatiguing one and I don’t think I have any like real remedies, but I would kind of just say that one of my worries is that we’ve become so specialized, we’ve that we’re losing sight of the forest from the trees, that we’re learning more and more about less and less sometimes as scholars and historians. So I’m not going to say that this book is doing anything that different from others, but in attempt to bring synthesis and argumentative interpretive conclusions or interpretations more broadly into form, I think we can kind of come to see a new kind of common paradigms or common understandings emerge that not necessarily replace others, but the limit their influence. So puritanism has kind of fallen from the mantle of early American history, slavery kind of challenged it in the 70s and 80s, and 90s, that New England used to be the exclusive center of early America. And now something called Borderlands history has kind of replaced a focus on British North America. And so you can see in this book, those kinds of recognitions and indebtedness, but there still is an entire chapter on essentially British settlement in New England, and kind of understanding that you can’t talk about the history United States without talking about the revolution and the constitution. So it’s not like an alternative history of the United States, perhaps just as you said, maybe more expanded.

You grew up in Detroit. And wait, you went to Catholic High School too?

I did, yeah.

So you’re Western Shoshone? Do I have that right? Okay. So how do you end up in Detroit? How did your parents leave the West and bring you to the Midwest?

My parents met in Detroit. And my dad is from Nevada, and our tribe and family are kind of rooted there. So it is kind of, I do have a kind of uncommon biography, like many of us, my life is like many American Indians of my age, whose parents either migrated, it was the policy United States to urbanize Indians throughout the Cold War era. My dad did not formally go through that. But I was in and around like urban Indian communities in Michigan, where I’m from. So it’s not uncommon as it might seem. But we just have yet to kind of really think through kind of modern America from these communities perspectives often.

Yeah. Can you just explain for listeners who might not know what the urbanization policy was about? Can we just talk about that for a second? Because I think it’s really important. I think we do in a way need to figure out how to have that not right, the second but how to have that conversation because it does. When you look at US policy towards Native peoples, and reservations and systemic issues, and you know, the Bureau of Indian Affairs and all these kinds of things, the idea that urbanization was policy is, I think, unique for your community.

Yeah, I think I haven’t thought a lot comparatively about this particular subject, but it relates to, obviously, the kind of constitutional and political distinctiveness that Native nations and reservation lands have historically. And so when the United States, you know, there’s a joke in Indian country that when Congress sneezes, Indians end up in the hospital. And so every time Congress does something new to solve a problem with Indian Affairs, it usually is done with either economic austerity minds or kind of ideological ones. And either way, Indians end up the suffering because the tribes and until only recently had relatively kind of precarious kind of forms of self-sufficiency, following the establishment of the reservation era, dependency on federal funding, dependency on federal foods, dependency on federal medical and educational facilities, some of which were used to either sterilized Native Americans and or get their children to other institutional settings. So this is an incredibly, not necessarily exclusively bleak, but at least it’s a counter narrative to American political history that emphasizes the expansion of liberty or the kind of the growth of, you know, opportunities and freedoms for individual citizens. Indians aren’t citizens until the 20s. And even afterwards are kind of subject to federal policies that change regularly that include things like urbanization after the war, when the federal policymakers thought that Indian Affairs shouldn’t really essentially be part of the federal government’s commitments anymore. Despite two centuries almost those types of relationships haven’t been built. So this is kind of the reality of Indian country in the Cold War era and more recently, you I’m kind of not necessarily returned migration, but there’s large numbers of urbanized Native Americans who have returned back to and or become a part of tribal reservation communities bringing with them their educational and professional trainings and using it in the service now of sovereign native governance.

It’s so important to for people who are not on the reservation or near the reservations to understand that the systemic poverty is pretty significant. And I think that has been left out of a lot of the conversations. And certainly, like, I spend a lot of time in California, we have a lot of casinos, there are a lot of casinos on the East Coast too. And that has changed the equation for some people, but it’s not consistent. And it’s not across the board. It’s only certain communities, you know, we see the buses, and I hope everyone has a good time doing their thing. But it’s really interesting to me the way that we just keep holding on to what are calcified, these ideas that are calcified.

Gaming is a relatively recent historical phenomenon. You know, you and I probably have lived through in ways that we remember pretty quickly this not having been present in our communities or lives, or regions. It’s not well known, but part of its origins lie with the federal government’s defunding of Indian Affairs. Throughout the early Reagan era, Reagan and David Stockman and other economic advisers decided to radically reduce the federal government’s commitments outside of Military Affairs to federal initiatives of various kinds. And tribes at that point, had become incredibly active in securing multiple forms of federal funding outside of the Bureau of Indian Affairs, kind of historic kind of single party governing systems. The Johnson and Nixon and Carter administrations had opened up all kinds of divisions of federal funding for tribes that subsequently got reduced heavily. And there’s some sociological studies that suggest that Native Americans per capita income declined throughout the 1980s from the 1970s, which would be a radically distinction from other American social communities, radically distinct given our understandings of the boom of the 80s more broadly. But because of these dependencies on federal funding, many tribal communities had outstanding loans or underdeveloped projects, and were then seeking other forms of revenue, many of which were from either black market or kind of economically risky types of ventures. And Congress essentially, had to begin regulating this. And so the Indian American Indian Gaming Regulatory Act, which is discussed in the end of chapter 12, kind of is this kind of, yet again, new kind of congressional an effort to resolve a problem that came out of a Supreme Court case, and had no one had any idea at the time of its passage in 1988, that this 100 million dollar industry would become multibillion thereafter.

500 years is a lot of territory to cover in a single book, I’m gonna go back to something you say early in the introduction, which is, you know, where does the history, where does the story of America start? Where does it start? Obviously, you pick a time in a period where, you know, the Spaniards are first arriving and everything else, but has your idea of where our history starts shifted, because of this book.

I would say, in part, and it’s partly a reflection of my own kind of professional commitments and training, given the fact that Native American history was not well institutionalized when I started becoming a professional historian. And given the fact that I’ve had to kind of teach the subject often, without like, well, institutionalized textbooks and things. There is a kind of difficulty bringing the pre-Columbian archaeological world into conversation with the early American counter narrative and world. And so I was unable to satisfy my own commitments early on in this project to give more than kind of lip service to the pre Columbian experience. So I do have the maps I do have kind of references throughout early chapters, but this is not a book about the settlement of North America before European encounter. And so in a sense, I might say, Where does the history of America begin? It begins in some portion and some large portion with encounter and maybe that paradigm can be expanded, expanded back, you know, several Millennium you know, at various times, maybe it can be rehabilitated, maybe it can be rejected, others can kind of move into this space, as some have already. I’ve reviewed and read and taught enough in this field to see that even when scholars make a commitment to doing pre Columbian Native American history, it is usually just a very, very brief kind of prologue or kind of incident or beginning to some other subject. And I think we lose a kind of focus by diminishing several millennia long subjects to short paragraphs, it just feels insufficient as a kind of narrative and or methodological approach. And so I’m comfortable with this project in formation, but I understand that limitation.

For me as a reader, as a lay person, it was really helpful to have guardrails I needed a sort of structure that helped me sort of challenge my memories of what I was taught, and also my experience of American history simply based on geography. I mean, I grew up in Massachusetts, I, you know, live in New York most of the time now, I spent a lot of time in Los Angeles. So if you think of how those cities sort of come out of the American narrative, right, like New York kind of exists because of French trade, and the British and everything, like, and the Dutch, obviously, but of all the places that we’ve left out, you know, a large piece of native story. I mean, that’s, that’s a city and certainly Los Angeles. I mean, how many tribes does California have, 100 plus?

That’s correct. San Diego County has more federally recognized tribes than any other county in the United States.

I did not know that, right.

And so very few people, even in California know that the I mean, they’re relatively small compared to states, like, you know, New Mexico or others, but there aren’t, you know, that’s why I like the map so much in this book, I even met them, I was just like, I can’t believe it. Here we are. And thank you so much, people who helped me.

Having that visual asset, though, I mean, I spent a lot of time with those maps, I spent a lot of it. And I will say having the illustrations was very helpful, and the paintings and everything else, hugely helpful to sort of orient me in time and space in a different way. But the maps, I needed to sit with those for a while. And I think there’s also a map to where you’re literally shooting down across the globe, and then the way the continents appear.

Right, that map is taken from another study, I did modify it a bit. We did, our team. But those maps are really important to me, the first real history book I ever read as a college student, was a supplemental text to a year long course on the Second World War. And I didn’t, for some reason, like the books that were assigned for that. And I just felt like I needed something else. And I was extremely fortunate to take this class at that time of my life and career. And so I found a copy of a book called The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich by William Shire, okay, which is considered like the journalistic classic account of the rise and fall of the Third Reich from an American journalist stationed in Berlin. I mean, it had this kind of dramatic narrative and kind of set of like, informed biographies. And it was heavily east, you know, it may clouded my understanding of the Second World War as a global subject matter, because it was largely rooted in, you know, the Reich and Nazi expansion. But that book had in its front and in papers in the hardback these incredible maps that just showed the extent of European of Nazi rule that, you know, were literally stretched from Iberia to, you know, the Arctic Circle, you know, across continents of Europe, and all the way almost to the Volga, it just kind of brought like the reality of that subject to mind visually, at a time when, you know, there was no internet and there was no real media to turn to for history. And I just have always valued maps for those types of reasons and tried, in my own ways to bring them into my own work.

You definitely did. And I’m really looking forward to more readers getting their hands on The Rediscovery of America. But where do we go from here? Where do you go from here as a historian, but also where do we go as Americans with a collective story?

Well, you know, I didn’t anticipate this when I was writing this project, because it took me many years and came various forums. But we’re about to begin a pretty sustained engagement with the nation’s founding in a way that we haven’t seen since I was five when the Bicentennial was like on quarters and, you know, fireworks were happening. In 2026, we will return to a 250th commemoration of the birth of the American Republic. And I started seeing that the declaration in a kind of broader context and my more talks and research and publications because it doesn’t seem as central as it should be to this narrative. And so I think I’m I’d spend some time in the next few years talking about the declaration, we’ll be, you know, looking at the Constitution, and I don’t know where I’ll be in 2037. But you know, that will be the 50th anniversary of the Constitution. I think we need to prepare ourselves to essentially move forward in the 21st century with more kind of informed and kind of shared kind of common understandings of our nation in ways that are not combative or polarized or polarizing. But that are kind of work rooted in an ambition to work towards collaboration and shared futures, because you know, the crises of our times are going to need, you know, informed, reasoned, analytical and patient diagnose the analysts. So if we can’t be those people in our own work and lives, we’re certainly not going to be it in our national phases, either.

And that seems like a really good place to end this interview. But at the same time, before I let you go, is there anything you really want to talk about and in terms of The Rediscovery of America that somehow we didn’t, we are leaving out some bits so people can discover on their own when they read, there’s quite a lot of fantastic material and great storytelling in this book and won the National Book Award for obvious reasons. But just in case, before I let you go…

I think we did cover a lot of ground. I appreciate, you know, the inquiry around, you know, my own background and training. I will say just if anyone has some modest additional interest and or adventurous kind of perhaps, predilections, I did work on not just the West, but my own tribe, and kind of a family’s kind of homelands in my first work. And so there’s a lot less of me in a sense, or my biography in ways that might, others might be interested in learning about because how did a kid from Detroit, who’s half Shoshone and half white ended up writing this book about Native Americans, some of that might be found in my first book, which is called violence over the land, about the Great Basin, the region east of California and west of Colorado that I also spent many, many years trying to make sense of, and

That’s the beauty of story. And that’s the beauty of history, we get to make sense of stuff. And story is how we organize all of that information. And it’s really great to have access to it’s really, really great. Ned Blackhawk, thank you so much for joining us on Poured Over this was terrific. I cannot wait for other people to get their hands on The Rediscovery of America. Thanks again.

It’s been my real distinct pleasure to talk with you