This Week, I'm Reading...
The Rediscovery of America, by Ned Blackhawk
I’ve only just started listening to The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History, but I want to tell you about it now because I think it’s a really important book. Blackhawk’s aim is to shift the entire paradigm of American history and tell it through the lens of its Native peoples, not the lens of the ones who showed up thousands of years later. I think it’s safe to say that very few of us learned anything through a Native lens in school. New York State’s curriculum in the 1970s and early 1980s made an attempt to familiarize students—my peers and me—with the Iroquois and their way of life pre-European contact, but much of what we were taught was based on flattened stereotypes or outright wrong. I don’t recall learning anything else about the Native peoples of North America except that they killed a bunch of white settlers out west, supposedly without provocation. Both the hostile lessons and the omissions are a disgrace that I would argue all of us who are non-native need to work now, as adults, to correct. Blackhawk is “unmaking,” and we have to “unlearn.”
The Rediscovery of America won the National Book Award in 2023. I borrowed the audiobook because the book is long and dense and emotionally challenging. My intention is to listen first and just soak it in, without worrying too much about the myriad details, though I have started jotting down a few notes on my phone, such as interesting facts that are new to me (the pueblo Indians live in the longest continually inhabited communities in America) or quotes that really strike me (“Failures [of colonialists] tell stories that unmake national histories.”) Then, I plan to get my hands on a copy of the book—I may need one for keeps, and I see that the paperback came out last fall—and comb back through the parts I want to study more closely. The audiobook is more than 17 hours long, despite the fact that the reader moves along at such a fast clip that I thought at first he might be AI-generated (he has a name, so probably not?). I was afraid if I started with the book in print, I might not get through it all, as happened with my read of Pekka Hämäläinen’s Indigenous Continent, which yes, I still intend to finish—but haven’t yet. I hope the audio/paperback combo this time will set me up better for success. Doubtless, I will have to tolerate the audiobook being snatched away from me several times for other readers who have it on hold, so this is going to be a long project.
What are you reading this week? Let us know in the comment section below!
I remember covering the Iroquois nations in school in New York in the '90s something about how their confederacy was an inspiration to our government, which now seems suspect.
This week I finished reading Pride and Prejudice which was the 6th and final Jane Austen novel I completed this year. She's the first major author of whom I've read all of their works.
I am now well into The Emperor of Gladness by Ocean Vuong. It is surprisingly delightful in spite of its beginning with contemplated suicide and its cast of characters all downtrodden in some way. They are not, however, despairing and all are becoming believable and sympathetic characters.