On Jonathan K. Parton, welcome to K-Part. When and where does the story of America start?

And who constitutes its central caste? That is among the central questions in an important

new book entitled, The Rediscovery of America, Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.

Yale University Professor Ned Blackhawk presents a compelling history of this nation

that includes the often overlooked, if not erased, foundational role Native Americans played

in U.S. history. In this conversation, first recorded for Washington Post Live on April 27th,

Professor Blackhawk explains why encounter rather than discovery must structure America's origin

story. The importance of Native Americans in the formulation of the U.S. Constitution and what

he hopes his students and readers take away from this book.

So back in January, the post dubbed your book among the books to read in 2023,

noting that it, quote, invites us to reconsider our received stories. What inspired you to re-evaluate

the stories we've been taught about Native Americans and the formation of the United States.

I've been teaching Native American history since 1999 and have been studying it for nearly all

of my adult life. And I've never ultimately felt sufficiently satisfied with not only many kind

of commonplace understandings of the subject that pervade the academy that exist in popular culture

or are found in other institutional spaces, but also couldn't ever sufficiently find a kind of

common course book or set of materials to make sense of some of the unifying themes that expand

across the many centuries of Native American history. There's been since that initial moment of

teaching a profusion of scholarly and academic work in the field and I've been trying as best as I

can to kind of stay conversant and active in these conversations and felt the need to kind of bring

it together in some kind of overarching form that draws upon what I'm calling the rediscovery

of America, an academic and intellectual rediscovery or unearthing that currently is underway among

...