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

This is the only chapter in the book that focuses on Indigenous experience on the California coast and in the Pacific Northwest. Blackhawk introduces this theater of Indigenous-European relations with a description of the Spanish missionary system that spanned the length of modern-day California. In particular, he focuses on the San Gabriel Mission, where Spanish soldiers terrorized Tongva women and their families with sexual violence. Environmental colonialism also wreaked havoc on Tongva ways of life, as invasive animal and plant species transformed Indigenous landscapes to suit colonial economic needs. From this profoundly destabilized world emerged Toypurina, a Tongva medicine woman who helped to stage an organized revolt against the San Gabriel Mission. Though ultimately unsuccessful, the revolt at San Gabriel highlights the continued influence of Indigenous women such as Toypurina amid sexually violent forms of colonialism that targeted their bodily integrity.

When the United States acquired Spanish colonial lands under the Treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo (1848), the culture of brutal violence against Native Americans continued in service of American economic advancement. Similarly, in Alaska, Russian imperialists used violence to force local tribes into hard labor. Blackhawk summarizes, “Across the Americas, Indigenous labor fueled the rise and maintenance of colonial society” (356). Blackhawk argues that Indigenous resistance in this region lay at the heart of the federal government’s adoption of the Monroe Doctrine in 1824, which held that foreign interference anywhere in the Americas constituted a potentially hostile act. During the early decades of the 19th century, the US struggled to incorporate the territories held by the resilient tribes of the Pacific Northwest. Northwestern tribes had well-established processes for keeping European settlers at bay, utilizing their maritime military prowess to control European access to their lands. However, colonialism’s silent killer, disease, eventually destabilized and wiped out a huge portion of these populations, making way for new European settlements in the region.

All around the United States, Latin American countries were beginning to gain independence from the Spanish Empire, a process that horrified the white supremacist government of the United States. Meanwhile, internal conflicts over slavery were brewing, as the formation of new states such as Missouri threatened the balance between slave states and free states. Thomas Jefferson’s fear of slave revolts was seemingly confirmed by the multiracial nature of new Latin American republics. On the eve of the Civil War, the sovereignty of non-white nations, such as the Indigenous nations across North America, evoked an immense sense of insecurity for the United States’ leaders.

As he did with the American Revolution, Blackhawk reframes the Civil War as a conflict fueled by Indigenous-settler relations. Drawing focus away from the North-South front of the war, he illuminates the lesser-known western front. In the turmoil of the war, the federal government was increasingly absent from western territories, even as tensions between Native and settler populations intensified. Blackhawk reports that this sensitive dynamic contributed to the expanding scope of the Civil War. As the federal government scrambled to affirm its own authority, it aimed new policies of governance at populations it perceived to be a threat to its sovereignty, including Native Americans. In the aftermath of conflicts such as the Dakota War (1862), “ethnic cleansing became the expressed aim of US military leaders” (404). Threatened by an increasingly violent and overbearing Union government, many Indigenous tribes, including the Cherokee, allied with the Confederacy in the hopes that a Union defeat might regain their lost autonomy.

On the western front, one-off local militias initiated campaigns of terror against local tribes, and no consistent federal policy toward Native Americans mitigated such violence. Military infrastructure and civilian settlements spread westward, encroaching on natural resources that enabled Native ways of life. Once again, treaty making became the federal government’s primary strategy for achieving the incorporation of Native powers, but individual Native Americans became divided on how best to respond to this new legal relationship. Mining economies in the West further destabilized Native communities, as the industry destroyed intermountain landscapes in pursuit of wealth.

At the end of the war, as the Confederacy was defeated, “Colorado’s Indian affairs became the sole theater of opportunity for combat” (447). The Union army unleashed a violent military campaign against the Cheyenne and demanded that Indigenous tribes, most notably the Diné, confine themselves to designated government reservations. This forcible relocation, referred to as “The Long Walk,” was built upon prior US removal policies such as the ethnic cleansing of Cherokees along the Trail of Tears in 1831. In Blackhawk’s estimation, these removal policies signaled a new period in federal Indigenous policy, as the government aimed to affirm its own power to the highest degree possible.