[Thanksgiving is a hugely fraught holiday for us AmericanStudiers, but I also have a ton I’m thankful for. So this year I wanted to combine those two perspectives by highlighting indigenous voices, past and present, for whose contributions to our collective conversations I’m profoundly appreciative!]
On one crucial way a recent book revises our stories, and one small but beautiful way.
Way back in July 2012, I dedicated an entire weeklong blog series to my wonderfully fortuitous rediscovery (in my late grandfather’s library, a moment that now powerfully echoes my time combing through my late father’s books to decide what I want to keep) of the revisionist historian Francis Jennings. As I wrote in the first post in that series, which I’ll ask you to check out if you would (and ideally the rest of the week’s posts as well, but most definitely that first one), Jennings’s groundbreaking book The Invasion of America: Indians, Colonialism, and the Cant of Conquest (1975) had been a game-changer for me back in grad school (both because of its truly revisionist-in-the-best-senses content, but also because it was written by a white man), and I was delighted by the chance to return to and deepen my appreciation for Jennings.
Early in the second chapter of his magisterial, National Book Award-winning The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History(2023), Ned Blackhawk approvingly quotes and expands upon a line from The Invasion of America. Which is very appropriate, because I’d say that’s exactly what Blackhawk’s book does—build on the important work of early revisionist historians like Jennings, but also add so, so much more to the story, to our understanding of our collective histories, than has been the case previously. Partly that’s because there’s so much more that he’s able to research and share than was the case 50 years ago, of course; but mostly it’s because of the breadth and depth of his researches and his storytelling alike. I would similarly link Blackhawk’s book to another about which I’ve written in this space, Ronald Takaki’s A Different Mirror: A History of Multicultural America (1993), but once again Blackhawk is able to go so much further than Takaki could, even in his definition of “America” (which for Blackhawk extends thoughtfully and importantly to all of North America and often well beyond).
That’s the significant revision Blackhawk’s book accomplishes. But it also offers so many smaller but still hugely meaningful reframings of our American stories, and I wanted to share one example here. At the start of that second chapter, Blackhawk quotes an early explorer who described Northeast Native peoples as having the capability (but not the tools) to “erect great buildings” that “may have rivaled the ancients.” Two paragraphs later, he expands that idea into a stunning metaphor I’m going to quote in full to end this series: “In Puritan accounts, this region’s Indigenous history possesses nothing remarkable, certainly nothing comparable to classical Europe. Many histories of the United States have taken this same tack, as the Native Northeast seems to provide a familiar past that is easily understood because of its simplicity. Since Puritan settlement in the 1620s, the superiority of Europeans to this world has been proclaimed, fueling construction of ancient edifices of a different kind. Molded not of the region’s alabaster but from ideas of immutable difference, an ideological mortar undergirds study of the Northeast. It was an idea so pervasive that the insights of the first European to venture ashore, who uttered ‘various cries of wonderment’ at what he encountered, are completely overshadowed.”
Next Guest Post this weekend,
Ben
PS. What do you think? Indigenous voices or texts you’d highlight, or other thanks you’d share?
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