Rediscovering America | Grandma's Ramblings

“How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous people be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” 

This is the opening question in a book I started reading this week. The book, “The Rediscovery of America”, written by Ned Blackhawk, raises some hard questions about our claim to being the “city on a hill.”

In school when I took a course “American History” I heard about our founding fathers, Washington, Adams, Jefferson. The Boston Tea Party and the midnight ride by Paul Revere created stories of American heroes. The story of America focused on Europeans and their descendants. 

Slavery was given a few chapters but mostly it focused only on the Civil War. Depending on the section of the nation you were in you were taught about the war to free the slaves – or the battle for states’ rights. Little attention was given to the Indigenous people. We saw them in our western movies as half-clothed savages who loved to take the scalps of white settlers. 

Most scholars believe that the Indigenous people were living in North America as long ago as 14,000 years ago (or longer – some say as much as 40,000 years ago). These native peoples spoke hundreds of languages. Far from the image we were given of small tribes living in teepees, they ranged from small family units to large scale empires with kings and large cities. 

The very word “America” is a European name given to our land. We often say Columbus discovered America. As if before he came this land did not exist, he “discovered” it. Columbus, however, did not think he had found a new world. He was seeking for a new passage to Asia. He mistakenly thought he had reached the East Indies and called the native people “Indians.” This is a name Europeans gave to the Indigenous people, not the name they called themselves. Columbus returned to Spain still not realizing the land he had found was part of a separate continent. It was not until the Italian explorer, Amerigo Vespucci, recognized that this was not Asia, but a different continent, that the name America was given to this area. 

Ned Blackhawk writes:

“For centuries American and the New World have been ideas that convey a sense of wonder and possibility, made manifest by discovery, a historical act in which explorers are the protagonists. They are the drama’s actors and subjects. They think and name, conquer and settle, govern and own. They are the center….just as Native Americans remain absent or appear as hostile or passive objects awaiting discovery and domination.”

It was not until 1924 that native peoples were granted U.S. citizenship. By this time the federal government had seized millions of acres of land and removed multitudes of children from their families and placed in boarding schools. At this schools they were forced to take European names and dress in European clothes.

While I (and you) cannot change the past and we are not personally responsible for our past record of slavery and treatment of the Indigenous people, we need to understand and acknowledge the past treatment of these people. We need to recognize the “head start” we have had versus the black and Indigenous people that are still playing “catch up.” 

I encourage you to take a look at this book. We probably will not agree with all the author says, but it should give us cause to think and possibly reevaluate our own attitudes and actions.