Ned Blackhawk

Ned Blackhawk (b. ca. 1971) is an enrolled member of the Te-Moak tribe of the Western Shoshone who is a historian on the faculty of Yale University.

Quotes

• (Would you say that Native nations are, on the whole, gaining a larger role in American society in the last few generations?) NB: I would say that the last few generations have witnessed an incredible rise in the sovereign authority of Native nations in ways that we haven't seen in contemporary American history. It's difficult celebrating these subjects in a kind of simplified way, but if we can understand the rising tide of Indigenous sovereignty that has made Native nations self-governing, economically viable, even, like, attractive as tourist destinations, we can envision a kind of more inclusive and heterogeneous vision of America in which race relations are not mired in a kind of myopic, black-white binary.
  • Interview (2023) with NPR

The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History (2023)

Introduction: Toward a New American History

• How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world's most exemplary democracy? This question haunts America, as it does other settler nations. Among historians, silence, rather than engagement, has been the most common response, together with a continued unwillingness to see America's diversity from the vantage point of those most impacted by the expansion of the United States.

• American democracy arose from the dispossession of American Indians. If history provides the common soil for a nation's growth and a window into its future, it is time to reimagine U.S. history outside the tropes of discovery that have bred exclusion and misunderstanding. Finding answers to the challenges of our time-racial strife, climate crisis, and domestic and global inequities, among others-will require new concepts, approaches, and commitments. It is time to put down the interpretive tools of the previous century and take up new ones.

• Encounter-rather than discovery-must structure America's origins story. For over five hundred years peoples have come from outside of North America to the homelands of Native peoples, whose subsequent transformations and survival provide one potential guide through the story of America.

• Identifying American history as a site of genocide complicates a fundamental premise of the American story. Indeed, histories of Native America provide the starkest contrast to the American ideal. Native American studies scholars often view the conquest of the Americas as an ongoing process marked by mass violence that connects diverse Native nations.

• American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development.