The Rediscovery of America

The colonial period, in Blackhawk's telling, was not a slow European takeover of a passive land. It was a scramble in which small, precarious European outposts survived only by fitting themselves into a political world Native nations already ran. Spain, France, England, and later the Dutch arrived as newcomers into a continent of established powers, and for a very long time they were the weaker party in most encounters that mattered.

The evidence is in the alliances. European empires spent enormous effort courting Native nations, because the fate of a colony often turned on which nations backed it. The French built their whole North American presence on partnerships with peoples of the interior, trading and intermarrying because they lacked the numbers to do anything else. The English colonies leaned on Native military support and, just as often, faced Native coalitions strong enough to threaten their survival. The Haudenosaunee — the Iroquois Confederacy — held the balance of power in the northeast for generations, playing rival empires against each other with a diplomatic sophistication that European officials both feared and studied.

Independence changed the relationship, and not gently. The new republic inherited a continent it did not control and set about acquiring it — through treaties it signed and broke, through purchase, and increasingly through force. Blackhawk traces how the young United States built its institutions around this acquisition, so that the taking of Native land was not a side effect of national growth but one of its central engines.

The government treated Native nations, at first, as sovereign entities to be dealt with by treaty, which is itself an admission of their standing as powers rather than subjects. Hundreds of treaties were negotiated, ratified, and then violated as settlers pressed westward and the state chose to follow them. The pattern hardened into policy with the Indian Removal Act of 1830, under which the Cherokee, Choctaw, Chickasaw, Creek, and Seminole nations were driven from their homelands in the southeast — the forced march the Cherokee remember as the Trail of Tears, on which thousands died.

To write American history this way is to make an argument about the present, not only the past. If Native nations were agents throughout — signing treaties, winning court cases, forcing the state to negotiate — then their political standing did not dissolve when the wars ended. It persisted, in law and in fact, as a claim the United States has never fully extinguished. Blackhawk's reframing turns sovereignty from a historical curiosity into a live question.

This is why the treaties matter so much to his account. A treaty is an agreement between nations, and the hundreds the United States signed with Native peoples are still, formally, the supreme law of the land under the Constitution. They did not expire because they were ignored. Native nations today are not ethnic minorities within the American population; they are, in a specific legal sense, distinct sovereigns with a government-to-government relationship to Washington — a status that descends directly from the diplomacy Blackhawk spends his book restoring to view.

Blackhawk set out to rediscover something that was never actually lost — only left out. The continent Europeans reached was full of nations, and those nations did not stop shaping events when the textbooks stopped mentioning them. From the alliances that kept fragile colonies alive, to the pressures that helped push a revolution, to the wars and treaties through which the United States built itself, Native peoples were among the decisive actors at every turn. Reading American history without them is not a neutral simplification. It is a distortion that made conquest look like destiny.