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Do We Need a New Approach to Our Origin Stories?

An interview with historian Ned Blackhawk on the United States’ contested founding.

The Oneida Nation and the Wisconsin Department of Transportation unveil new dual-language signs in Oneida, Wisconsin, on September 30, 2022.

If the celebration of the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence has demonstrated anything, it would be that the United States remains profoundly divided over how to narrate its origin story. While some triumphantly celebrate it, others point to the country’s long history of exclusions and violence. Then there is a third perspective: Even as the US has failed to keep its promises, they can still be fulfilled over time. Which of these views is correct? Few scholars are better suited to answer this question than Ned Blackhawk, whose celebrated book The Rediscovery of America has redefined American history by portraying Native peoples not as marginal victims of conquest but as active participants in the continent’s political history. The Nation interviewed Blackhawk to discuss his views of the US founding, his thinking about American constitutional law as it concerns tribal sovereignty, and the reasons why he believes the study of American history needs a new theoretical framework.

—Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins

Daniel Steinmetz-Jenkins: This year marks the United States’ 250th anniversary, yet there is a deep division over how this history should be narrated. Some put forward a triumphalist view that celebrates 1776 as a kind of breakthrough historical moment for the institutionalization of democracy and liberty. Others stress the country’s long track record of historical wrongs and political injustices while nevertheless holding on to the American story as an unfulfilled experiment toward progress. There is also a third perspective, somewhat distinct from this latter one, that sees American democracy as inherently exclusive, racist, sexist, and militarist, and therefore arrives at a judgment of it that is resoundingly negative. As a historian of Native American history in the United States, how do you see things, especially given that we are in a year memorializing its 250 years?

Ned Blackhawk: Obviously, we as a nation arrive at the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in a state of deep national reflection and, some might argue, something closer to crisis—about how to characterize the American experiment. Anniversaries of this magnitude are not merely commemorative. They force a country to reflect upon which story of itself it intends to subscribe. Origin stories are integral to these moments of commemoration and redefinition. The account we give of our beginning shapes who we believe belongs, whose claims we are prepared to honor, and what we imagine ourselves capable of becoming.

I honestly never thought that I would be positioned to participate in this year’s commemorative conversations. I wrote a chapter subtitled “The Indigenous Origins of the American Revolution” in my book The Rediscovery of America before Covid, and only afterward did I realize that 2026 was on the horizon. I enjoyed participating in the PBS series The American Revolution, which I think offers us an origin story equal to the seriousness of the historical moment.

In a few pieces on the subject, I have tried to suggest that we as a national community—including our nation’s historians—have never fully grasped the historical origins of the anti-Indigenous ideologies found in the Declaration nor adequately gauged their legacies. The terms “savages” and “frontier” both appear in the last concluding grievance of July 4, 1776, and their histories offer far from celebratory assessments of the revolution.

Taking these terms seriously requires us to move away from the educated elites of Boston and the Atlantic coast and to see the interior world of Native America as a central and, indeed, defining component of the Revolutionary Era. These terms have histories that I explore and emerged only after the expulsion of the French empire in North America. We must be able to see the evolution of American democracy alongside these patterns of racialization, vilification, and dispossession that were also at the heart of the revolution.

DSJ: On this topic there seems to be a tension in The Rediscovery of America concerning your thinking about US constitutional law. You, for instance, explain how the Constitution’s relationship with Native peoples has mainly been........

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