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’ve considered “America’s” 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 “Violence 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’s annual conference, the other for doctoral students working on American Indian Studies dissertations at Yale named after Henry Roe Cloud.

On this episode of “Story in the Public Square,” Blackhawk discusses the ways indigenous people helped form European settlements and American societies. He says, “Native 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.”

“Story in the Public Square” broadcasts each week on public television stations across the United States. A full listing of the national television distribution is available at this link. 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’s popular P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States), channel 124. “Story in the Public Square” is a project of the Pell Center at Salve Regina University. The initiative aims to study, celebrate and tell stories that matter.