Book Smart

America is what it is thanks to its (European) settlers’ gumption, ingenuity, frugality and hard work, right?

The critical role that violence played in shaping the nation is conspicuously absent in the above equation, says Ned Blackhawk.

He adds that also missing are the effects of violence on Native peoples, and the hand that those communities took in creating the country, especially its western regions.

For him it’s personal. “In the book’s introduction and epilogue I relate how my own family’s history is tied to the American Great Basin region. Indian history is no mere curiosity or sideshow in the drama of the American past. The two remain interwoven. North America was already inhabited when the Europeans arrived,” Blackhawk says.

In pre-reservation days, roughly until the end of the 19th century, Great Basin Indians like Blackhawk’s family increasingly found themselves enmeshed in the politics and ensuing carnage of European expansion. It was commerce, driven in part by slave power, that forged the Spanish colonies, he says.

“Consequently, for many Indians, violence became a necessary survival strategy,” he says. Not surprisingly, then, violent encounters were pretty much part and parcel of everyday life in the Old West.

Blackhawk says that the shaping of what is now New Mexico, Utah, Idaho, Colorado, Nevada and eastern California is much more complicated than previously thought.

“I think it’s extremely important to recognize the depth of our multicultural past. The oldest continuously occupied communities in our nation are Pueblo Indian villages in New Mexico. The earliest explorers on the American continent spoke Spanish, not English. The oldest colonies in North America were also Spanish. The nature of our national past is tied to many Indian as well as imperial powers. Our current debates about nationalism must recognize the numerous communities that have considered America their home,” he says.

This semester Blackhawk will teach a research seminar for undergraduates on writing tribal histories and another class on Indians and the Spanish borderlands. Many of the ideas in the new book will be finding their way into his courses, he says. The book also has been featured on Wisconsin Public Radio’s “University of the Air” series.

Blackhawk also is beginning another book on American history.

“Very few books adequately synthesize our nation’s Indian past, and I’d like to try to offer an interpretative overview of this area, my primary field of specialization,” he says. “I will focus particularly on the fascinating relationships in being both Indian and American. I believe that conjoining those two powerful adjectives — ‘Indian’ and ‘American’ — will yield lasting analytical insights.”

Tentatively titled “America’s Indigenous Nations,” a draft of the book will be ready in the next few years.