Exploring American history through the lens of its Indigenous peoples with Ned Blackhawk
Air Dates: October 16-22, 2023
For too long, the history we鈥檝e considered 鈥淎merica鈥檚鈥 has really just been the history of European conquest. Ned Blackhawk argues that there is no American history without its first, indigenous inhabitants.
Blackhawk is a Professor of History and American Studies at Yale. He is the author of 鈥淰iolence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the early American West, a study of the American Great Basin that garnered half a dozen professional prizes, including the Frederick Jackson Turner Prize from the Organization of American Historians. In addition to serving in professional associations and on the editorial boards of American Quarterly and Ethnohistory, Blackhawk has led the establishment of two fellowships, one for American Indian Students to attend the Western History Association鈥檚 annual conference, the other for doctoral students working on American Indian Studies dissertations at Yale named after Henry Roe Cloud.
On this episode of 鈥Story in the Public Square,鈥 Blackhawk discusses the ways indigenous people helped form European settlements and American societies. He says, 鈥淣ative peoples are the sediment upon which conceptions not just of America, but really of the Western hemisphere, have really been established, and to unpack and unravel and really fully reexamine or rediscover these subjects will require an awful lot of energy and labor, but labor and energy that are really worth the effort.鈥
鈥淪tory in the Public Square鈥 broadcasts each week on public television stations across the United States. In Rhode Island and southeastern New England, the show is broadcast on Rhode Island PBS on Sundays at 11:00 a.m. and is rebroadcast Thursdays at 7:30 p.m. An audio version of the program airs Saturdays at 8:30 a.m. and 7:30 p.m. ET, Sundays at 4:30 a.m., 2:30 p.m., 9:30 p.m. ET on SiriusXM鈥檚 popular P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), channel 124. 鈥淪tory in the Public Square鈥 is a project of the Pell Center at 黑料网. The initiative aims to study, celebrate and tell stories that matter.