An interview with historian Ned Blackhawk on the United States’ contested founding.
The Oneida Nation and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation unveil new dual-language signs in Oneida, Wisconsin, on September 30, 2022.(Courtesy of the Wisconsin Department of Transportation)
If the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has demonstrated anything, it would be that the United States remains profoundly divided over how to narrate its origin story. While some triumphantly celebrate it, others point to the country’s long history of exclusions and violence. Then there is a third perspective: Even as the US has failed to keep its promises, they can still be fulfilled over time. Which of these views is correct? Few scholars are better suited to answer this question than Ned Blackhawk, whose celebrated book The Rediscovery of America has redefined American history by portraying Native peoples not as marginal victims of conquest but as active participants in the continent’s political history. The Nation interviewed Blackhawk to discuss his views of the US founding, his thinking about American constitutional law as it concerns tribal sovereignty, and the reasons why he believes the study of American history needs a new theoretical framework.
—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins
Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: This year marks the United States’ 250th anniversary, yet there is a deep division over how this history should be narrated. Some put forward a triumphalist view that celebrates 1776 as a kind of breakthrough historical moment for the institutionalization of democracy and liberty. Others stress the country’s long track record of historical wrongs and political injustices while nevertheless holding on to the American story as an unfulfilled experiment toward progress. There is also a third perspective, somewhat distinct from this latter one, that sees American democracy as inherently exclusive, racist, sexist, and militarist, and therefore arrives at a judgment of it that is resoundingly negative. As a historian of Native American history in the United States, how do you see things, especially given that we are in a year memorializing its 250 years?
Ned Blackhawk: Obviously, we as a nation arrive at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in a state of deep national reflection and, some might argue, something closer to crisis—about how to characterize the American experiment. Anniversaries of this magnitude are not merely commemorative. They force a country to reflect upon which story of itself it intends to subscribe. Origin stories are integral to these moments of commemoration and redefinition. The account we give of our beginning shapes who we believe belongs, whose claims we are prepared to honor, and what we imagine ourselves capable of becoming.
I honestly never thought that I would be positioned to participate in this year’s commemorative conversations. I wrote a chapter subtitled “The Indigenous Origins of the American Revolution” in my book The Rediscovery of America before Covid, and only afterward did I realize that 2026 was on the horizon. I enjoyed participating in the PBS series The American Revolution, which I think offers us an origin story equal to the seriousness of the historical moment.
In a few pieces on the subject, I have tried to suggest that we as a national community—including our nation’s historians—have never fully grasped the historical origins of the anti-Indigenous ideologies found in the Declaration nor adequately gauged their legacies. The terms “savages” and “frontier” both appear in the last concluding grievance of July 4, 1776, and their histories offer far from celebratory assessments of the revolution.
Taking these terms seriously requires us to move away from the educated elites of Boston and the Atlantic coast and to see the interior world of Native America as a central and, indeed, defining component of the Revolutionary Era. These terms have histories that I explore and emerged only after the expulsion of the French empire in North America. We must be able to see the evolution of American democracy alongside these patterns of racialization, vilification, and dispossession that were also at the heart of the revolution.
DSJ: On this topic there seems to be a tension in The Rediscovery of America concerning your thinking about US constitutional law. You, for instance, explain how the Constitution’s relationship with Native peoples has mainly been one of dispossession and marginalization. However, you also find solace in US constitutional law. Can you explain this?
NB: It is hard to summarize the complex relationships between Native nations and the federal government—both in 1787 and now. There is such a diversity of peoples, polities, interests, and competing visions of the good involved. In a chapter in my book titled “Colonialism’s Constitution,” I do take a critical view of the restructuring of federal authority after 1787. However, it also suggests that this new national formation held inherent powers that we often do not fully recognize. Given the contested struggles that occurred before 1787 and were occurring across eastern America, the founders understood the elemental need to have a national government control, regulate, and determine Indian affairs.
That’s what the Constitution did and still does. States ceded these powers to the federal government, thereby strengthening its administrative capacities and ultimately limiting state jurisdictions over Indian lands, peoples, and governments. While unclear at the time, this relationship evolved and came to recognize the inherent sovereignty of Native nations within the United States. For far too long we have treated the founders’ revolution and the nation’s revolution as one and the same—as if the meaning of the country that the United States would ultimately become was exclusive to the men who first took up the idea. I try in my work to highlight the ability and agency of Native peoples to shape the evolving systems of power and governance around them and, importantly, to reveal the historical inaccuracies of dominant paradigms still too often used to explain US state formation.
DSJ: Are you troubled by the fact that Supreme Court Justice Neil Gorsuch might be considered the champion or enactor of this politics at the national level?
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NB: There may be a bit too much court history here to fully answer this question, which I might reframe as to suggest that all of our politics are all involved in the court and its justices. I do believe that American Indian sovereignty and its everyday, ongoing, inherent recognition by institutions of the US government, such as the Supreme Court, are elemental attributes of American democracy. They should be understood, recognized, and when needed celebrated. They express what the United States has been as well as can better become, and while there are deep and ongoing challenges confronting Native American communities, there are also important histories of resistance, activism, and achievement that inform our current moment.
I have had the privilege of serving as a consultant on several recent media productions, as well as helping to organize research in support of various tribal sovereignty initiatives. In such capacities, we invited Gorsuch to keynote one of our conferences, and while he was unable, he sent along a personal note that was touching. It would be nice to see more justices and judges become known for their support of tribal sovereignty.
DSJ: Which tribes/Native American nations do you think have ended up being the most effective politically?
NB: Much of my scholarship concerns the history of Native peoples confronting the consequences of European conquest and colonization. While I have more recently taught, studied, and now researched contemporary Native American history, I am not always informed on many of the fast-moving currents of modern Native governance.
For 10 years I was on the faculty at UW–Madison, and it amazed me to see several tribes in the state regularly take on and overcome state and local challenges to their sovereignty. The Ho-Chunk Nation of Wisconsin, the Oneida Nation of Wisconsin, the Menominee Nation of Wisconsin, and several of the Ojibwe tribes in the state have each confronted powerful challenges to their sovereign authority. Many have established powerful governments, language programs, economies, fisheries, farms, and other forms of resilient autonomy that are often unknown nationally. I had the fortune to have many Native students in my classes, one of whom, Dr. Doug Kiel (Oneida), wrote a remarkable dissertation, “The Oneida Resurgence,” about his community’s history that was just recently published as a book.
Even a quick survey of the text might astonish some readers. Deeply dispossessed of their homelands by US allotment policies well into the New Deal era, the Oneida developed sets of strategies that inverted US assimilation efforts in many ways, turning, for example, federal urbanization policies for Native youth into processes of migration that had the effect of often bringing tribal members back into reservation governance with new skill sets, economic familiarities, and organizational patterns. By the 1980s and before the rise of Indian gaming, the Oneida had essentially laid the strong foundations of a modern Native nation, one that has become successful in regaining alienated lands and establishing tribally controlled schools, as well as building robust economies, engendered them backlash from nearby non-Native municipalities. This element of tribal success—what Kiel terms “settler backlash”—needs to accompany assessments of the modern American Indian sovereignty movement more broadly.
DSJ: You state the following in The Rediscovery of America: “Scholars have recently come to view African American slavery as central to the making of America, but few have seen Native Americans’ similar light.” What is your explanation for this and, given your work and other more recent scholarship devoted to Native American history, do you think this is starting to change?
NB: If we return to the anniversary upon us, we can see that both before the American Revolution and long after Native nations and enslaved and free Black communities participated in the broad formation of the meanings of American democracy. Many, for example, wrote and signed petitions, and those petitions survive as an extraordinary record of political visions and philosophies from below. They show people at the margins reasoning about liberty, demanding inclusion, and laying claim to the same ideals being proclaimed in more elite circles. The PBS American Revolution series tries to capture some of this and shows how the revolution’s principles were not handed down intact from a chosen few but were contested, expanded, and made real by people the founders never meant to include.
I wish more historians had familiarity with these subjects and could share them in more detailed and analytic form. As I write, a racial “binary” has too often informed the telling of national history. Many of the most utilized paradigms of US history often do not capture such heterogenous and contested processes, especially for Native peoples. In their current formulation, paradigms like “Freedom,” “Liberty,” and “Equality” often lack adequate conceptual space or value for communities who have long questioned US individualism and private property regimes, peoples who have wanted autonomy and power, not rights and incorporation. As we are seeing in the dramatic rise in US expansionary ideologies, there have been many constitutional harms in US history and many forms of violent injustices. No single or original “sin” characterizes US history, as many have suggested. With that said we also must not retreat from telling a history of the United States that reflects America not as a finished idea handed down by statesmen but as an experiment—and an experiment that has belonged to more people than those who are usually credited. Native nations exercised sovereignty and shaped the war’s course, as well as the literal shape of the nation through treaties, diplomacy, and arms. Enslaved and freed Blacks similarly seized the language of liberty and forced the country to confront the distance between its words and its conduct. Ordinary people, soldiers and civilians alike, made the abstraction of independence into something lived and survived. We must be able to grant all of them their place in the story without flattering anyone, and without the easy condescension of hindsight.
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DSJ: Much has been made of the so-called crisis of the history profession–declining tenure track jobs, the nonrenewal of tenure lines, the shrinking admission of PhD students, as well as fewer history majors. Is the way American history is taught part of the problem in your opinion? I mention this because you are calling for a “new theory of American history” that “better explain[s] the course of American history.”
NB: As a Native historian, I know well how fraught the history of the American nation remains and how popular accounts often resolve these tensions by erasing more complicated narratives and sets of actors. At its foundation, a more informed theory of US history must refuse to chart the familiar and work to capture the inescapable and dizzying diversity that has always characterized North America, before as well as after 1492.
Tackling the most difficult causes and consequences of the revolution offers a space to begin to revise these familiar analyses. The relationship between the British colonists and Native nations—and its consequences for the causes and course of the revolution—deserves paramount attention. Academic historians have now recognized the centrality of expansion and Native dispossession to the revolution—rage over the Proclamation Line of 1763 stimulated rebellion against the king. Many efforts are underway to bring this fuller history out of the academy and before a broader public, doing so often for the first time and with vivid and moving detail.
These are some of the lessons that the present moment requires. A democracy in doubt about itself is often tempted to retreat into a smaller, more exclusive story of its founding—to decide that the country belonged only to those who revolted against the crown. We must make an opposite and far more demanding case: The nation has always been larger than those who named it, and its ideals—like American Indian sovereignty—were contested and ultimately achieved by those at the margins as much as the center. I hope that is the origin story that can help to build a new theory of US history. Hopefully new understandings can flow from 2026 to better inform the next generation of students, scholars, and citizens.
Daniel Steinmetz-JenkinsTwitterDaniel Steinmetz-Jenkins runs a regular interview series with The Nation. He is an assistant professor in the College of Social Studies at Wesleyan University and is writing a book for Yale University Press titled Impossible Peace, Improbable War: Raymond Aron and World Order. He is currently a Moynihan Public Scholars Fellow at City College.