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

Ned Blackhawk (Te-Moak Western Shoshone) is the author of Rediscovery and a professor of history and American studies at Yale University. Blackhawk was raised as an “urban Indian” in Detroit, Michigan. He received his doctorate in history from the University of Washington. His first book, Violence Over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West (2006), focuses on the history of the Ute tribe, examining how violence has been wielded both by and against them since their earliest encounters with European people. These themes are carried through in Rediscovery, where they are applied to a much wider set of Indigenous groups and geographic regions.

Legal history, particularly the history of Native American status under constitutional law, is another one of Blackhawk’s specialties, providing central pieces of the analysis in both his books. In Rediscovery, case studies of landmark Supreme Court findings such as Ex parte Crow Dog (1883) provide insights into the relationship between legal convention and Indigenous experiences. Blackhawk credits his partner, Maggie Blackhawk (Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe), who is a professor of law at New York University, as being one of his central collaborators in producing Rediscovery (“Ned Blackhawk Accepts the 2023 National Book Award for Nonfiction for The Rediscovery of America.