Ned Blackhawk Books In Order

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Ned Blackhawk is a professor of American Studies and History at Yale who also taught at the Madison-based University of Wisconsin for a decade between 1999 and 2009.

He went to McGill University and has degrees from the University of Washington and UCLA, where he studied history. He published his debut work “Violence over the Land” in 2006 and this was the work that would make his name.
It is a study of the American Great Basin that would earn him more than twelve professional prizes. One of the most prestigious of these is the Organization of American Historians Frederick Jackson Turner Prize.
In addition to being a member of many professional organizations, he has been on the editorial boards of Ethnohistory and American Quarterly.

He has been instrumental in the establishment of fellowships to make it possible for American Indian students to attend annual conferences and to submit dissertations at Henry Roe Cloud at Yale.
Blackhawk is also on the Native American Cultural Center at Yale, where he is also a coordinator of the Yale Indigenous Performing Arts Program and the Yale Group for the Study of Native America.

Blackhawk grew up in the city and remembers learning a lot about Indian American history during his K-12 years. Growing up in Detroit, he went to public schools and then to a Jesuit high school near the suburb where he lived.
Much of what he learned about American Indian history in school was never formal, even though he remembers how he used to do projects on Indian culture and history at Cooke Elementary.

As such, he was introduced to American Indian history from very early on which got him interested in it. He did well in both A.P. European and U.S. history while he was in high school, even though he never got much formal instruction on the subject.
For Ned Blackhawk, there are many ironies about this. For instance, Michigan and Detroit were both the product of the deep history of the meeting of Native peoples and Europeans.

In modern times, Detroit usually celebrates its countless Native and French place names in addition to its founding in the 18th century.

Nonetheless, while he was in Jesuit school which had all manner of French martyrs plastered on the walls, hardly any of the teachers ever talked about the Native peoples or the history of the region.

As it stands, Ned Blackhawk has often said that he is a proud member of the Western Shoshone Te-Moak Tribe of Nevada. Working at Yale, his major research interests include histories of settler colonialism and Indigenous genocide.
His works typically situate Native Americans at the center of complex and dynamic stories of several centuries of imperial and Indigenous history that had a profound effect on the history of the American West.
His works have had a significant effect on how historians think about the histories of Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, Nevada, eastern California, and several other colonized spaces.

They have also provided some great insights into the violence often accompanying land dispossession.

“Violence over the Land” by Ned Blackhawk asserts the truism that American Indians remain poorly understood as historical agents, even if they are familiar icons.
Great Basin Indians often found themselves increasingly at the mercy of the chaotic storm that resulted from European expansion.

Like just about everyone, the American Indians reacted by refashioning themselves and in the process also changing those around them.

The work focuses on the Shoshone, Paiute, and Ute Indians as the author illuminates their history from a perspective of violence, as he excavates how colonial expansion has so many consequences.

Brutal networks of slavery and trade were a constant on the Spanish borderlands and this in turn made Indians adopt violence to survive, particularly following the independence of Mexico when many became slave traders and raiders.
The violent happenings meant that Native Communities found it hard to adapt to fast-changing circumstances and in some instances scored remarkable political ends, even if they also suffered brutal reprisals.
This work is a passionate reminder of the very high costs that Indigenous people had to pay in the making of American history.

What makes it even better is that it is told from the perspective of an Indian scholar, whose own family history is intricately intertwined in the making of that legacy.

Ned Blackhawk’s novel “The Rediscovery of America” is a work that chronicles the history of Native Americans, and how they have been overlooked, even though they are central to American history.
According to Blackhawk, it is impossible to write anything about the history of the United States and America in general without the American Indians.

In recent years, there has been a push to recognize the contribution of enslaved Black Africans in how the United States came to be.

This horrible history of slavery has been placed at the center of American history while the role of American Americans has been ignored.

The original inhabitants of America have been banished to the margins as they are discussed only when it comes to early episodes of history, and particularly when we are talking about the westward expansion.
Blackhawk counters this common trend as he notes that Indigenous action is critical in explaining American History. It can be disconcerting for many readers to read a very different kind of history from the familiar white-centric narratives.
The novel also shows how Native Americans had so much influence in the greater history of America, even if they were also influenced by it.

It is also important to note that some American heroes are not what they normally are portrayed as when looked at from the indigenous perspective.

Ned Blackhawk’s novel “Indigenous Visions” is a compelling work that follows and explores the influence of Indigenous thinkers on the founder of modern anthropology Franz Boas.

“The Mind of Primitive Man” which Franz Boas published in 1911 challenged what had been widely held claims about intelligence and race that justified inequality and violence.

In this work, Blackhawk examines how “The Mind of Primitive” was based on relationships with a wide circle of Indigenous thinkers who made use of the anthropology of Boas as a medium for putting out their ideas.
The author also examines how the thinking of Boas intersects with the theories of modernist figures, as he demonstrates ideas of identity and diversity that sprang from empire and colonization.