An Expanding Vision of America

When prospectors in California reported finding gold in 1849, hundreds of thousands of people from across the United States frantically traveled there to stake a claim to fortune. In New York, Rufus Porter, an inventor impatient with what was then the fastest way to get from the East Coast to the West Coast—a tedious thirty-day journey by boat down one side of the continent, across the Isthmus of Panama by land, then back up the Pacific—announced that he had arrived at a fantastical solution. Three years before the French aeronautical engineer Henri Giffard introduced the world to the dirigible, the world’s first steerable airship, Porter entered New York’s Tabernacle Church in March 1849 carrying “an operating model of a flying machine constructed to navigate the air.” The newspaper Niles’ National Register proclaimed, “The possibility of going to California in one of these vessels, in the short space of five days is asserted.”

Nathaniel Currier, the lithographer soon to become famous as one half of the celebrated duo Currier and Ives, created a cartoon lampooning Porter’s invention entitled “The Way They Go to California.” In one corner, a group of white men, dressed in knee boots and frock coats and wielding pickaxes and shovels, push one another off a wharf in their haste to board a ship that is sailing away, while in the opposite corner an airship puffs along, its passengers seated under a balloon bearing the line “Each Passenger must provide a boy to hold his hair on.”

There’s little in Currier’s frolicsome scene that suggests serious violence, which is fitting, since many Americans have regarded the pursuit of prosperity and the westward “expansion” of the United States as simple processes of progress—the gradual rise of civilization on a largely empty continent. Even today leading American history textbooks offer airy chronicles of “the nation’s founding and its expansion through migration, immigration, war, and invention.”¹

Yet “expansion” is a euphemism for imperialism, and “migration” has often meant violent incursion. In California in 1849, some 150,000 Indigenous people—from Miwoks in the north to Chumash people in the south and hundreds of communities in between—lived alongside a limited number of Spanish missionaries. They were the survivors of the first waves of colonialism in the area, tens of thousands of Native people having died in and around Spanish mission towns after their first establishment in 1769. Worse was soon to come. Before the 1849 gold rush, many of those living outside the Spanish presidios still managed to maintain their traditional lifeways largely independent of the nonnative world. By 1870, after some 300,000 US whites had rushed into the region hoping to find gold, about 120,000 more of the original inhabitants had died, leaving just 30,000. Rather than filling a vacuum, settlers aggressively invaded, stole Native lands, and nearly annihilated Native Californians.²

However reluctant white Americans have been to confront the full history of US expansion in North America, Native people have never not known about it. In 1920 the publishers of a book by the Oneida historian Laura Cornelius Kellogg, Our Democracy and the American Indian, admitted that “for four centuries the white man has put off the day of reckoning with the American Indian.” It has now been five centuries. Though academic specialists have started to speak of “American genocide” in monographs published by university presses, popular myth has continued to promote the idea of the US as a benign nation animated by benevolent ideals.

Now, more than a century after Kellogg tried to complicate that story, we may finally be at a historical and moral turning point. Major new books written by eminent scholars for general readers about the peoples who lived in North America for millennia before the arrival of Europeans promise to reshape the history of the continent. They include Kathleen DuVal’s Native Nations: A Millennium in North America, Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent: The Epic Contest for North America, and Ned Blackhawk’s National Book Award–winning The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of US History.

Native Nations is a magisterial overview of a thousand years of Native American history “inspired and informed” by Native scholars, artists, and activists. Starting many sections with descriptions of her visits to contemporary Native American museums, cultural centers, and historic sites, and describing countless conversations she has had with Indigenous experts, DuVal foregrounds Native perspectives, Native purposes, and the enduring strength of Native nations, which maintained control of most of North America until well into the nineteenth century.

DuVal’s title telegraphs her central interpretive claim: Indigenous people live, and have always lived, as nations—sovereign polities that effectively govern communities. Recognizing Native collectives as nations—not as “bands,” or “tribes,” or “clans,” or any of the other anthropological condescensions with which they have often been labeled—means acknowledging the legitimacy of their right to govern their own societies, organize their own economies, and define and defend their own territories according to the traditions and principles they find most fitting.

Take DuVal’s reflections on the rise and fall of Cahokia, the four-thousand-acre site near present-day St. Louis where Mississippian peoples constructed some 120 earthwork “mounds,” or terraced elevated platforms, from the ninth through the fourteenth centuries. By the time Europeans first viewed the city, it had been abandoned for hundreds of years. The newcomers immediately began describing Cahokia as the lost city of a fallen empire, narrating a story of mythic decline and reversion to primitivism.

DuVal rebukes such depictions: “Ruins…tend to conjure images of collapse and a tragic loss of a golden age, but the generations that followed the cities’ fall generally described what came later as better.” Far from evidence of tragedy, the abandoned city of Cahokia demonstrates that after experiencing the effects of centralization—the concentration and polarization of wealth, the imposition of social hierarchy as a means of maintaining order, the crowded conditions and sanitation challenges of urban life—Indigenous people rejected this system and decided to follow a different model. Archaeological records and oral histories alike indicate that although people remained spread across the Mississippi region, they left cities, allowed their fortified palisades to gradually fall into disrepair, and moved over far wider areas into small agricultural communities. DuVal emphasizes that this was a situation not of mass flight amid crisis but rather of slow and deliberate dispersal.

Whereas Europeans regarded cities as the essence of civility—DuVal notes that both words share the Latin root civis—Native peoples of North America more often found urban centers to be places of suffering and hardship. Turning away from cities and choosing to live in smaller communities allowed them to elaborate economic systems based on reciprocity and the sharing of resources, as well as governance structures that promoted democracy and prevented dictatorial leadership. The principle of balance defined Indigenous ideals of political power and material gain alike. DuVal quotes traditional teachings and contemporary Native scholarship from the Tohono O’odham of the Southwest to the Haudenosaunee of the Northeast on these ideals, noting, for example, that the O’odham base their lives on a core value they call himdag, or “relations between people, the land, and all creation.”

Native people’s interest in creating sustainable ways of life stood in stark contrast to the interests of Europeans. DuVal laments that

British colonists could have lived side by side with Native nations, continuing to ally and trade in mutually beneficial ways…. But generally their search for profits combined with their fear of Native power to create a desire to be free of Native nations.

She never loses sight of the fact that time after time, from the Pequot Nation to the Cherokee Nation, the Kiowa Nation, the Comanches, and the Plains Apaches, Europeans and Euro-Americans denied and disregarded Native sovereignty and treated Native peoples not as nations but as disorganized populations subject to domination.

As her story reaches through the twentieth century to the present, DuVal shows the increasingly determined efforts of Native nations to reassert their status and exercise sovereign rights in the modern world, as well as the always intense opposition to Indigenous independence by settler colonists:

While…Europeans for a long time had less power over North America than they claimed…when they ran up against the realities of their own limited power…Europeans often unleashed violence far beyond most societies’ norms, including their own.

Ultimately DuVal’s portrait of Native North America emphasizes “a combination of victimhood and survival,” laying bare the depth and endurance of Native nations and cultures even as she depicts Indigenous history as a perilous story of unrelenting struggle that continues today.

One satisfaction in reading DuVal’s account comes from her effort “to live up to the call of Shawnee Tribe Chief Benjamin J. Barnes for scholars to ‘work with not on indigenous communities.’” Throughout the book, she brings in the voices of contemporary Indigenous researchers, writers, and leaders who give a vivid sense of the vitality of the Native present. DuVal emphasizes that

Native Americans today live with the loss and trauma echoing from nineteenth- and twentieth-century attempts to destroy them, through both physical violence and repeated messages that being Native was backward and wrong.

Nevertheless, she ends the book on a triumphant note with the words of the Comanche scholar Paul Chaat Smith, who affirms that “our survival against desperate odds is worthy of a celebration.”

Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent also foregrounds the Native presence in North America in opposition to the myth of Native absence. Offering a broad overview of North America from the precontact period to the nineteenth century, he aims, like DuVal, to present a vision of the continent’s history that treats Native people as central rather than peripheral and “reveals a world that remained overwhelmingly Indigenous well into the nineteenth century.” Proposing that his book “might be best described as a biography of power,” he asserts that for centuries after the first colonial contacts,

Indians controlled most of North America, and often they did not know about the exploits of the Europeans beyond their borders. And if they did, they did not care. Instead, the Indigenous peoples were interested in the ambitions and experiences of other Indigenous peoples.

This point is too easily lost in traditional portrayals of the rise of the United States as inevitable and unstoppable, or even as a divinely foreordained matter of “Manifest Destiny.”

Hämäläinen’s subtitle signals the distinctive element of his approach: in his muscular version of events, clashes between colonists and Native nations represented an “epic contest” that can best be understood from the perspective of military history. Briskly written chapters describe one armed conflict after another, but although Hämäläinen believes that Indigenous history matters in its own right, he generally narrates it through the eyes of European and Euro-American witnesses as they confront Indigenous antagonists and experience a series of wins and losses. Thus, despite his laudable intention to radically recenter Native history, Hämäläinen’s account hews more closely to traditional history than not.

Furthermore, though he takes great pains to ensure we know where his sympathies lie, Hämäläinen’s insistence on paying respect to Native prowess can have the unintended consequence of underplaying the gravity of Euro-American violations. For example, when describing the Pequot War of 1636–1638, which pitted that Native nation against colonists from New England, he claims that historical accounts that overemphasize “the infamous massacres of Pequots…distort the historical reality” in an “elemental way: they make the colonies seem more powerful than they actually were.” To the contrary, Hämäläinen stresses that “curbed by Indigenous power, the English colonists had spread up and down along the Atlantic coast…managing only fleeting inroads into the continent’s interior.” While it is certainly true that as of 1650, just twenty years after the establishment of Massachusetts Bay, the still-small English population remained clustered along the East Coast (where they had ready access to Atlantic trade), to argue that this fact should somehow lessen the significance of the mass destruction of Pequots at the hands of settler colonists is perplexing, to say the least.

Hämäläinen fails to note that the Pequot Nation comprised some eight thousand people in 1633, but its numbers quickly fell to about four thousand after a settler-borne smallpox epidemic began that year and raged through 1634; the Pequots were then so aggressively attacked by Massachusetts Bay that by 1638 only a few hundred had not been killed or enslaved. Other historians note that the earliest efforts by English colonists to systemize slavery through the creation of formal legal regulations came with the captivity and sale of Pequots, not of Africans. Pequots themselves warned as early as 1636 that “the English were minded to destroy all Indians.” Skipping over those inconvenient truths to celebrate “Indigenous power” obscures more than it reveals.³

Hämäläinen’s overemphasis on Native resilience in the era of the Pequot War exemplifies his basic approach. He consistently recounts confrontations between colonists and Indigenous peoples as exciting “contests” in which the Indigenous side prevailed more often than not. By the time he reaches the late-nineteenth-century reservation era and proclaims that “Native reservations were a sign of American weakness, not strength,” because their establishment proved that “the United States simply lacked the capacity to defeat and domesticate the Indians,” the full impact of his narrative strategy emerges. Hämäläinen means to offer recognition of Native peoples’ achievements in retaining some remnants of territory even after enduring centuries of displacement and eventual confinement to geographical areas only a tiny fraction of the size of their original distant homelands. Yet his approach can lead him to trivialize the vicious hostilities he dramatizes.

In focusing on the spectacle of victories and defeats, we risk losing sight of the asymmetries of these contests. Indigenous nations fought defensively for survival, whereas invaders often sought outright to destroy them. Over time the intensity of white racism could amplify aggression to the point that it became genocidal, a concept captured in the term “settler colonialism,” as employed by the Australian historian Patrick Wolfe.⁴ To be clear, at the book’s end Hämäläinen minces no words in saying that by the Civil War, “the United States had become a genocidal regime” in relation to the Native population. Nevertheless, in the effort to valorize Native peoples and offer an “epic” narrative of their resistance and endurance, he sometimes inadvertently minimizes Indigenous suffering.

Depicting catastrophic conflicts between the Indigenous peoples of North America and the European and Euro-American settler colonists as an epic contest also allows military events to overshadow other aspects of their confrontation. Hämäläinen doesn’t always linger on the underlying motivations or overarching implications of events. In the book’s introduction, he explains that

power is defined as the ability of people and their communities to control space and resources, to influence the actions and perceptions of others, to hold enemies at bay, to muster otherworldly beings, and to initiate and resist change.

In this long list of the elements of power, only the word “resources” even begins to hint at the economic incentives of Euro-American settler colonialism in North America. Hämäläinen does say toward the end of the book that “the United States’ expansionist burst—mightily boosted by rising capitalism—was a dark moment for many Native Americans in the West,” which captures some of the suffering inflicted by US imperialism. Yet it makes it seem as if the capital that funded expansion appeared from nowhere, rather than from strategic and sustained appropriations of Native lands and lives that began at least as far back as the enslavement of the Pequots.

The California gold rush lampooned by Nathaniel Currier was only the most dramatic instance in which US citizens sought to profit from Indigenous riches. To learn in detail about the economics of empire and how violence was integral to the creation of capital, readers must turn to the work of Ned Blackhawk. The Rediscovery of America explicitly aims to present a history of the United States of America as much as a study of Native America. Blackhawk begins from the deceptively simple premise that “focus upon Native American history must be an essential practice of American historical inquiry.” Exasperated by the fact that popular histories continue to describe the nation’s past as a story of black and white, slavery and freedom, without reference to Indigenous experience, he calls for rejecting binary conceptions of American history in favor of a multiracial approach. Moreover he demands that we consider US history over a five-hundred-year span that reaches into the present, the better to understand how hostilities between Native peoples and settler colonists have metastasized over time.

Settler colonists engaged in systematic violence not in an abstract contest over power but rather in concrete and concerted efforts to seize Native lands along with people and natural resources. Blackhawk writes:

Unlike the myths of American history, Indian land transfers and economic challenges occurred at actual times and places…. An archive of both knowledge and documentary power flows from each land cession.

No less than the forced labor and commodification of Africans, thefts of the lands and people of Native America helped to finance the formation of the United States. The force of Blackhawk’s analysis comes through his meticulous demonstration that in every era of American history, both dreams of democratic self-sufficiency for whites and nightmares of enslavement for Africans and African Americans played out on Indigenous homelands.

Blackhawk shows that at each point in the development of the political economy of the British colonies and the United States, exploitation of Native peoples, expropriation of Native land, and extraction of Native resources fueled Euro-American advancement. When Puritans weren’t celebrating the “plagues” that depopulated Native farmlands, they were warring to seize and enslave Native people. Revolutionary patriots including George Washington joined land investment companies and engaged in property speculation schemes on Native territory. Jacksonian-era southern planters decried the supposedly childlike incompetence of Cherokees as they eyed gold mines in Georgia and cotton lands across the Native South. Railroad companies in the antebellum West routed their tracks through Native nations and drained Native waterways to cool their locomotives. By the nuclear era, uranium-mining companies were enriching themselves on lands of the Navajos. Indeed, Blackhawk contends that the Civil War and Reconstruction era must be understood not only as a conflict over slavery but also as a cascading settler revolution against Indigenous territorial rights. Both the Union and the Confederacy marshaled troops against Native nations even as they squared off against each other. Blackhawk concludes:

To claim the Civil War was solely a conflict between the North and South is to miss this settler revolution and its transformative violence. Viewing the era as a conflict defined by “slavery” versus “freedom” also erases multiple campaigns of dispossession, removal, and even genocide.

Blackhawk insists that we not allow the celebration of abolitionism to obscure the endurance of imperialism.

At every turn, violence brought Indigenous immiseration and Euro-American enrichment. Even when the federal government began negotiating treaties with Native nations that paid implicit and even explicit respect to Indigenous sovereignty, states and individual settlers abrogated these agreements with impunity. And yet such egregious violations were never acknowledged as such. From the beginning, Blackhawk explains, racist “ideas of immutable difference” provided “the ideological mortar” for the structures of settler colonialism. From assertions of difference came predictions of imminent disappearance. Whites spread the myth that Indigenous people simply failed to thrive, rather than the reality that whites systematically sought to deprive them of every form of rights.

Against this backdrop, Blackhawk’s account of Natives’ determination to assert their claims to their land and people—from the first efforts of Pequots to arm against colonial Massachusetts; to the diplomatic efforts of eminent Native negotiators in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, from the Six Nations in the Hudson Valley across to the Northwestern Confederacy of the Great Lakes and the Ohio Valley, to retain control of land; to the urgent efforts of early-to-mid-twentieth-century activists to oppose the termination of tribal rights and force the recognition of tribal sovereignty—takes on added significance. The final section of the book, which details Indigenous rights activism in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, provides a revealing examination of the significance of Native sovereignty—the successful insistence of Native people that they be recognized as citizens of Native nations, not merely as inhabitants of reservations.

It is here that he introduces Laura Cornelius Kellogg and makes clear just how long Indigenous intellectuals have been trying to reshape accounts of US political and economic history. In Kellogg’s spirit, Blackhawk never lets us forget that his book is not a work of “Indigenous history” but rather one of American history. He eloquently argues that “the enduring sovereignty of Native communities” must be recognized “as a defining thread of US politics.” Maintaining sovereignty, not simply achieving bare survival on shrunken territory, is the real source of Native power. As an enrolled member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada, Blackhawk brings experience to bear on his account.

In calling for a “rediscovery of America,” Blackhawk draws a through line from the earliest days of colonial contact to our present political moment. The phrase inverts and ultimately refutes the “Doctrine of Discovery” that first set American settler colonialism in motion. Developed within two years of the first voyage of Christopher Columbus in 1492, this doctrine was created by Pope Alexander VI of Spain when he issued a papal bull dividing the newly “discovered” lands of the Americas between the Catholic kingdoms of Portugal and Spain on the theory that there could be no true exercise of sovereignty by people ignorant of Christianity. Not to be outdone, King Henry VII of England issued a royal proclamation in 1496 granting John Cabot the authority “to find, discover and investigate whatsoever islands, countries, regions or provinces of heathens and infidels, in whatsoever part of the world placed, which before this time were unknown to all Christians,” and take them in the name of England.⁵

Before there were armies, there were announcements: ritual proclamations that Europeans regarded as almost supernatural incantations of divine authority to claim America. We might be amused by the absurdity and arrogance of it all, if not for the fact that the US Supreme Court has relied on the Doctrine of Discovery from the early nineteenth century to the present. It was invoked as recently as 2005 to deny the land claims of Native nations bringing suits before the Court. In City of Sherrill v. Oneida Indian Nation of New York (2005), Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg quoted a 1974 decision explaining that, according to the Doctrine of Discovery,

fee title to the lands occupied by Indians when the colonists arrived became vested in the sovereign—first the discovering European nation and later the original States and the United States.

Blackhawk’s book demands that we ask a crucial question: If Europeans and their descendants claimed the continents of America by right of “discovery,” what new rights might emerge from the “rediscovery” of America today?

Europeans sailed to lands they had never seen before, where they encountered peoples they had never known before. The year 1492 marked a transformative era in world history, one that brought a new awareness of the shape and size of the globe and catalyzed a series of novel contacts between cultures and societies on a scale never previously imagined. However, though Europeans named and claimed America, it was not an empty continent waiting to be defined but one teeming with people living in flourishing nations. The only way any European empire could assert that its people were the “first” to find the lands of the Americas was to ignore the reality—the very humanity—of those who were already there.

The expansion of the United States, far from being accomplished by virtuous farmers and liberty-loving patriots somehow able to float above the sordid history of imperialism, relied on remarkable levels of rhetorical and physical violence. Blackhawk insists that we must reckon with the fact that no sooner did Europeans set foot in America than they began systematically despoiling the continent and its peoples. At every critical point in the subsequent political and economic development of the United States, purloined Native resources proved pivotal. Together with the forced labor of enslaved peoples of Africa and the Americas, stolen lands and resources made possible the creation of the world’s first modern constitutional democracy.⁶

Reconciling the reality of mass thievery, enslavement, suffering, and death with more familiar and comfortable stories of the spread of liberty, prosperity, civility, and law is an enormously difficult task. Yet only by confronting the complicated facts of our collective past may the United States today move toward greater truths, toward new forms of redress for Indigenous peoples and descendants of the enslaved, and toward the recuperation of the nation’s finest values—freedom, equality, and opportunity. There are no shortcuts and no fairy-tale flying machines to take us there, but there are strongly researched and written books of history that may help us begin to work toward the realization of America’s most lofty promises.