The Rediscovery of America Quotes

“Despite assertions to the contrary, American democracy arose from the dispossession of American Indians.”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“Identifying American history as a site of genocide complicates a fundamental premise of the American story. Indeed, histories of Native America provide the starkest contrast to the American ideal.”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“Incapable of conquering true wilderness,” he writes, “Europeans were highly competent in the skill of conquering other people. . . . They did not settle a virgin land. They invaded and displaced a resident population.”51”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“Just a few years before Puritan settlement, the Great Pandemic of 1616–19 fractured the region. This catastrophe originated from French contact zones to the north and Dutch settlements to the south. Over two-thirds of the coastal population of Massachusetts perished during this outbreak. Their deaths enabled English colonization. When the Mayflower anchored at Plymouth in 1620, fewer than two thousand of Cape Cod’s twenty thousand inhabitants remained.48”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“The only Crime” of the Conestoga, Franklin writes, “seems to have been, that they had a reddish brown Skin, and Black hair.” Outraged, he asks for any evidence of their alleged participation in Pontiac’s War: “I thus publicly call on the Makers and Venders of these Accusations to produce their Evidence. . . . What had little Boys and Girls done; what could Children of a year old, Babes at the Breast, what could they do, that they too must be shot and hatcheted?” Such action, he concludes, “is done by no civilized Nation . . .”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“Pervasive violence and dispossession are more than sidebars or parentheses in the story of American history. They call into question its central thesis. The exclusion of Native Americans was codified in the Constitution, maintained throughout the antebellum era, and legislated into the twentieth century: far from being incidental, it enabled the development of the United States. U.S. history as we currently know it does not account for the centrality of Native Americans.”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“Whether welcoming allied Indian leaders with gunfire or beginning holidays with cannon fire, the sound of arms became a growing feature of seventeenth-century life. New audible features also characterized Indian communication. Native trade fairs, diplomatic gatherings, and arrivals to the shoreline now also commenced with gunfire. Gunfire became a new habitus of habitation.”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“Encounter—rather than discovery—must structure America’s origins story.”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“Our history must reckon with the fact that Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and millions of other non-white citizens have not enjoyed the self-evident truths of equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed at the nation’s founding as inalienable rights belonging to all.”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“the worlds of Native peoples became irrevocably disrupted by the most traumatic development in American history: the loss of Indigenous life due to European diseases.”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“Our history must reckon with the fact that Indigenous peoples, African Americans, and millions of other non-white citizens have not enjoyed the self-evident truths of equality, life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness proclaimed at the nation’s founding as inalienable rights belonging to all. Many people have remained historically excluded from the nation and exploited by its citizens. Native peoples were not granted U.S. citizenship until 1924, by which time the federal government had seized hundreds of millions of acres of land from Native nations in more than three hundred treaties.11 Tens of thousands of Native peoples were killed by settler militias and U.S. armed forces during the Civil War era, and government-sponsored campaigns of child removal from reservation communities resulted in 40 percent of Indian children”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“According to Christine DeLucia, the designation of “swamp” used to describe such refuges has remained a centuries-long practice of erasing such tribal “memoryscapes.” See Memory Lands, 121–200. As in the battle of Long Island Sound, such “swamps” became sites of military conflicts throughout the seventeenth century, particularly during King”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“Slavery, overwork, famine, and European pathogens killed Native peoples across the Caribbean, creating the most horrific of all chapters in Native American history.35”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“The lands claimed for the Spanish crown formally became extensions of the Spanish kingdom rather than colonies.”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History

“As opposed to resource-based or extractive colonial systems—from the French fur trade to the Spanish silver empire—Puritan colonization sought to transform American landscapes.”
― Ned Blackhawk, The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History