“How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world’s most exemplary democracy?” This is the provocative question with which Ned Blackhawk opens his important new book, “The Rediscovery of America: Native Peoples and the Unmaking of U.S. History.“【T1】A historian at Yale and a tribe member of North American Indian group, Blackhawk rejects the myth that Native Americans fell quick and easy victims to European invaders. Instead, he asserts that “American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development.”

Despite this promising premise, “The Rediscovery of America” gets off to a slow start by keeping on discussing a straw man: “historians” who have neglected the American Indian past because they have been strongly influenced by the notions of “the superiority of Europeans” that “have bred exclusion and misunderstanding.” Who are these bad historians? Blackhawk’s introduction identifies only two, one of them dead.

【T2】In fact, this book benefits from Blackhawk’s wide and insightful reading of the many scholars who, during the last 50 years, have restored Native peoples to their prominent place within a fuller, richer American history.

【T3】In the early chapters Blackhawk’s book lacks cohesion and flow, looping back and forth in time with much repetition as he considers the first three centuries after Columbus. Here he tells a now familiar story: Claiming religious and cultural superiority, European invaders slaughtered many Native peoples and dispossessed them of their land.

Despite heavy losses and dispossession along the coasts, Native peoples still controlled most of the continental interior until the 19th century. They persisted by adapting creatively to new challenges. Some formed new confederations to practice a shrewd diplomacy, playing rival European powers against one another. During the 18th century, Native nations on the Great Plains took horses from the Spanish and obtained firearms from the French to remake their way of life around bison hunting.【T4】Within a few generations, their populations surged, reversing two centuries of decline as they drove back Spanish colonists in New Mexico and Texas. Myth casts Indians as primitive peoples incapable of coping with allegedly superior invaders. In fact, Natives innovated within a framework of tradition and sovereignty meant to preserve their distinctive identities.

In the later chapters, “The Rediscovery of America” offers an eloquent and moving story of Native recovery during the 20th century.【T5】As Blackhawk’s narrative reaches our current day, he shows how Native Americans continue to express the duality fundamental to their way of life: an ability to manage change while preserving identity, traditions and sovereignty.

【T1】