State of the Field for Busy Teachers: Native American History

Daniel Story
I’m Daniel Story, and this is History in Focus—a podcast by the American Historical Review. You’re listening to one of our four-part miniseries titled “State of the Field for Busy Teachers,” where we deliver to you one expert’s overview of their field of history, including how it has evolved over recent decades and where it’s at now in terms of recent advances, debates within the field, and where you can go to learn more. You’ll find other episodes in the series and links to resources at historians.org/ahr. Now, to the episode.

Ned Blackhawk
My name is Ned Blackhawk, I’m a professor of history at Yale University, and this is the state of the field for the study of Native America. Native American history has come a long ways in the last generation, and it no longer resembles the state of the field that it looked like 25 or 30 years ago. In fact, one might argue that this field has both changed more than any other field of U.S. historical inquiry, and potentially also impacted U.S. historical inquiry as much as any other field during that period. I do teach Native American history and have seen its rise and development, and would encourage people to not be intimidated by a field that can be disorienting and challenging. Part of that challenge and disorientation comes from the fact that so many professional historians, educators and American citizens more broadly, had not really ever encountered this subject in a serious or sustained way. And so Native Americans are inarguably among the most simple or one-dimensional subjects of American historical inquiry. And that is not a recent but a long-standing pattern that really is as old as the study of American history as a field. So in the last 25 or 30 years, academic historians, tribal community members, and other kind of interested public and civic leaders have reformed these really bankrupt and ahistorical images of native peoples. A vast mosaic of subjects and insights and kind of interpretive findings have generated a world of inquiry that really is present in the field of Native American history, making it a particularly kind of vibrant and at times contentious subject matter. I did recently complete an overview of the field called the Rediscovery of America, that chronicles several centuries of Native American history and draws upon this incredible generation of scholarship. And the title The Rediscovery of America is, in fact, a kind of recognition of how so many hundreds and indeed thousands of scholars and participants in this reorientation have worked steadily to reform essentially outdated and or broken models of American history. The findings are perhaps too vast to kind of summarize, but basically at every juncture of American historical development, Native Americans have been centrally involved, and the excavating and analyzing and kind of exposing that centrality is one of the central features both of this recent book of mine, as well as the field more broadly. So, where can we really see this kind of transformation? Where can we see the rediscovery of America kind of unfolding in some of its clearest ways. We’re about to, for example, approach the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence and the establishment of the United States of America, right? So we’re at this kind of really critical moment in our kind of nation’s history, and only until recently have historians really understood the place and presence of native peoples during that revolutionary process. One might be surprised to hear that the most important grievance in the Declaration itself is the last grievance that Jefferson and the colonial leaders drafted against the King of England for inciting merciless Indian savages to attack our frontier inhabitants. That grievance is a real evidentiary finding that has been essentially sitting on the nation’s most important kind of chartering document for nearly 250 years, and historians have not really sufficiently understood the kind of anti-indigenous or kind of anti-Indian consciousness and strategy that the founders were utilizing. The term “frontier” is also used in the declaration, and it’s not coincidental that those two are paired together because colonial grievance is against the crown for its policies of appeasement, diplomacy, trade and various other forms of diplomacy with native peoples deeply and at times violently upset colonial settlers throughout the particularly the trans Appalachian frontier or west. And you can’t Understand that anti- both monarchical, and anti-indigenous sentiment in the absence of, for example, the evolution of British North America. And so scholars like myself and others in the field have worked really hard to expose the centrality of Indian politics and military practices and other diplomatic development to the formation of British North America’s expanding sovereignty, particularly after what used to be called the French and Indian War, or the Seven Years War, which ends formally in 1763 but militarily in North America or in 1760. So the French are expelled from eastern North America, and the British are joyous and exuberant, but many British settlers anticipate and essentially are frustrated by their inability to settle further west into what are still recognized as Indian lands, and so the British Crown’s policy with Indian peoples in the 1760s and 1770s are key determinants in the kind of revolutionary struggle. Sadly, the study of early American history has not made those elements until recently, kind of identifiable markers, but as we move towards this 250th anniversary moment, hopefully we can have a more informed, inclusive and perhaps sobering kind of understanding of what was really happening in the 1770s. I spent a lot of time in this book, writing also about the federal government’s evolving policies of Indian Affairs, something that is very obviously central to the field of Native American history and also to the practice of what is known as Federal Indian Law. And very few constitutional historians or American legal historians have really sufficiently exposed the foundational role that treaty-making had, not only on the nation’s relationship or the Republic’s relationship with Native nations, but also on its own administrative development. The US Senate ratified treaties long before it signed international agreements, and in the process of ratifying treaties and learning how to enter into essentially bilateral relationships with other sovereign nations. The American foreign offices became adept at drafting treaties more broadly, and so Jay’s Treaty in 1795 is considered the first treaty the United States signed. And it’s not inconsidential that Indians are mentioned there as well. So if you look at the Declaration, if you look at the Constitution, if you look at the first treaty signed by the United States, you know Indians are all over them. And so this subject matter is not a sub-field or a kind of minor element of the formation of United States and its expansion, but a central one. Some scholars have seen Native American history as a kind of small dimension of American multiculturalism more broadly, and given the demographic history of the United States, especially over the last 150 years or so, it’s understandable that the experiences of others essentially have dominated the attention of academic historians, but native peoples still remain a vibrant social communities across the American landscape. Few understand, for example, that the oldest continuously inhabited places on the American landscape are homes of native peoples. Those would be the Pueblo Indians of New Mexico and Arizona, whose communities predate the arrival of Europeans by multiple centuries. The oldest politically confederated community in North America, still to this day, is the Iroquois Confederacy of Six Nations across eastern United States, Canada, the American Midwest, and to a lesser extent, in Oklahoma. And so these native nations are a part of the kind of contemporary mosaic of not just American kind of multicultural discourses, but of American politics, of American jurisprudence and kind of legal practices they have autonomous sovereign authority over their homelands and often upon those who pass through them. So these are everyday questions that really necessitate a historical appreciation and or kind of perspective, and the field of Native American history offers a kind of entryway into those subjects. One of the hardest challenges that awaits someone teaching or kind of trying to make sense of Native American history is how to recognize the temporality of the subject and so many try to make sense of Native American history understandably through a much larger kind of time frame and perspective. Many scholars have drawn heavily upon archeological findings and various kind of anthropological understandings of what used to be called the peopling of the Americas, to try to fill in essentially the multiple millennium before European arrivals that constitute Native American history of the pre-colonial era. That tendency does have limits to it, and it kind of is something that contemporary Native American community members often find a little jarring, because it sometimes relies upon somewhat facile or simplistic understanding. It’s very hard to summarize so many long centuries of human development in such short, shifted ways. Sometimes academics write non-fiction and kind of historical narratives, sometimes those become very simplistic or over determined, and some of the influence of Native Americans upon the landscape, upon themselves, and eventually upon Europeans, gets kind of less emphasized. So one of the kind of striking features of recent scholarship in Native American history is the kind of emphasis on what we might call the agency of Native Americans to resist, survive, and reorientate the kind of impositions upon them. And so contemporary Native American history has grown prodigiously in the last 20 years or so, to the extent that you really can’t teach 20th century U.S. history or 20 now 21st century history adequately, without some understanding of the place of Native nations in the contemporary American polity or the distinctiveness of that subject matter, in part because Native American political activism and agency don’t resemble sometimes other forms of social protest, or what we might call Civil Rights activisms. Native American community members have not been historically so concerned over the individual rights of native peoples as U.S. citizens. They’re much more concerned about the enforcement of historic agreements, about the protection of sacred lands and communities. Actually, many Native nations have fought really diligently to keep federal laws targeting their communities outside of or away from some of their most vulnerable members, particularly children. So these are not kind of familiar narratives of community struggles for the advancements of particular forms of liberties or individual freedoms. One of the perhaps best pedagogical steps that one can take when entering this field is to really try to ground one’s understanding of this subject matter in particular places, times, and in relationship to particular communities. Most Americans would be surprised to hear that many major American metropolitan environments are in relative close proximity to nearby Native nations. That’s true of Midwestern cities like Minneapolis, Chicago, or Milwaukee. It’s true of western cities like Seattle, San Francisco, or Denver. It’s even true in the northeast, in places like Boston or New York City, within like an hour and a half’s car ride from those cities, one could find oneself in close proximity to a federally recognized American Indian nation whose history, whose cultures, whose essentially historical struggles really necessitate engagement. And I think teachers, in particular in regional communities, can turn to those types of examples for really understanding this large subject, but from what kind of localized or kind of regional perspective. So I’d encourage people to consider learning more about their nearby native neighbors, finding curriculum documentaries, perhaps even having guest speakers visit classrooms. Those are the type of partnerships and collaborations that really help bring this field into focus. It is a kind of challenging subject because it is so unfamiliar to most American educators and citizens. So to begin, one has to know that there’s no incorrect question, right? If you have a question about something, asking scholars or community members is often a healthy step, but some of the most kind of frequently asked questions or misunderstandings do revolve around not just kind of terminology, but what might be termed “experiential presumption”. There are many Native people whose lives are very both familiar to other Americans, but different from them. You can’t really collapse any person or community or history of this kind of extent and into kind of a simplified form. So knowing that native peoples have fought in every major U.S. military conflict, have struggled to protect their homelands and community members from external influences, have suffered tremendous kind of cultural dislocations and hardships associated with assimilation programs. To really begin to kind of move into this field requires a certain abandonment of the kind of familiarity of the received category “Indian” that has such a kind of simplistic and almost like playful, often, association with it something that is very prevalent across American children’s media, literature and other kind of amusements. So it’s not a comfortable subject in that way, and it needs to be approached with a certain level of concern that is particular to this subject matter. So on a kind of deeper level, one might say there’s something particular about this field of study and about this subject that is so hard for the kind of generic American psyche to comprehend, because it is at odds with so many presumptions about the development of the United States and the potential kind of moral equivalency or value of what the American experience means that it’s this congruence with this subject matter making it a difficult subject, one that requires kind of measured study and inquiry and not rushed or or perhaps even over determined conclusions.

Daniel Story
That was Ned Blackhawk on the state of the field of Native American History. You can learn more about this and other episodes—including other installments from the “state of the field for busy teachers” series—at historians.org/ahr. History in Focus is a production of the American Historical Review in partnership with the American Historical Association and the University Library at the University of California, Santa Cruz. This episode was produced by me, Daniel Story, with transcription support from Mallory Hutchings-Tryon. That’s it for now. See you next time.