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

In Nahuatl (Aztec) society, altepetls were highly localized polities based on ethnicity. Sometimes referred to as “city-states,” hundreds of altepetls comprised the Aztec Empire, all with their own cultures and political motivations. Blackhawk emphasizes distinctions between these local political units to illustrate that the Indigenous people of Mesoamerica, and indeed Indigenous people everywhere, are not monolithic. When Spanish colonists arrived in Nahuatl territory, they encountered a complex landscape of ethnic groups and leaders. European relations varied vastly between altepetls depending on their preexisting politics.

Assimilation (short for cultural assimilation) is the process by which minority groups conform to the practices and ideals of dominant cultures. Within the context of Rediscovery, assimilation specifically refers to a set of policies by the US federal government that aimed to erase Indigenous cultures across the country. These policies included the kidnapping of thousands of Native children and their nonconsensual enrollment in deadly, Eurocentric boarding schools, resulting in the disappearance of Native languages, religious practices, and other cultural heritage.

An inland sea is a continental body of water typically surrounded by land on all sides. Blackhawk designates the Mississippi River Basin, which covers a vast portion of the North American continent, as the “Native Inland Sea.” He argues that the Native Inland Sea served as the epicenter of Native American life throughout the earliest parts of American history and that it thus exerted an immense influence over the colonized eastern seaboard. Rediscovery draws economic and political focus away from eastern colonial cities, such as New York and Boston, and recenters North America on Indigenous hubs in what is now called the Midwest.

Plenary power is a legal term that refers to an entity’s absolute power in a given domain. In Rediscovery, Blackhawk addresses the US Congress’s claims to plenary power over Native affairs, finding them to be a justification for the government’s violations of its own treaties with Native tribes. In particular, he points to United States v. Kagama, a Supreme Court case that ensured federal jurisdiction over criminal disputes between Indigenous people, even those that occurred on reservations, as solidifying the government’s conception of its own plenary power.

Reservations are tracts of land within the borders of the United States that are controlled by sovereign Native tribes while still being subject to the US federal government. Rediscovery follows the legal status of these lands closely, especially as government policies facilitated their fragmentation and dissolution in the Reservation Era (1879-1934) as part of assimilation campaigns. Already geographically restricted by processes of colonization, Indigenous claims to reservation lands remain one of the key aspects of Native autonomy in the contemporary world. As such, legal threats to these claims jeopardize not only the land’s Indigenous designation but also Indigenous existence as a whole.

Settler colonialism is a form of colonization in which Indigenous populations are displaced by settlers who seek to possess and occupy their homelands. Rediscovery traces the history of settler colonialism in North America, tracking the expansion of Euro-American settlements across the North American continent and the corresponding dispossession of Indigenous lands. As Blackhawk notes, this terminology is used to resist narratives of history that normalize and even celebrate the geographic marginalization of Indigenous populations at the hands of Euro-American settlers.