Book ‘unmakes’ U.S. history to include long-excluded Native Americans

When did Big Government come about in the U.S.?

Another reminder that the American Civil War was entirely unnecessary and partially disastrous in its aftermath.

Here is some food for thought: "... In Chapter 10, “Taking Children and Treaty Lands,” I examine the growing power of the federal government during the Reconstruction era and its aftermath. One of the principal emphases is how Congress developed new authorities after the Civil War to incorporate Western lands and expand national power over the Union as a whole.

This is a theme with the Civil War and Reconstruction literature that focuses on the legal transformations of the 14th Amendment and the power of Congress to extend its authority over peoples’ lives in new and unprecedented ways. This theme of legal history has never been sufficiently extended into a larger national consciousness about Indian affairs.

After the war, the United States had a powerful national legislature capable of exerting a new dominion over non-Anglophone peoples. And Congress imposed federal laws in ways that it didn't prior to the Civil War. In Indian Country, U.S. officials began intruding into the internal politics across reservations that had been established through treaties. Congress during Reconstruction began giving itself the power to alter those commitments, passing dubious legislation without the consent of Native peoples, such as the Lakota Act of 1877 and other forms of treaty abrogation. That’s a big development. And so Indian affairs became one of the first domains in which this plenary power of Congress was exhibited.

From Native Americans’ perspective, these were forms of hypocrisy and deception, and to enforce compliance with these new forms of authority, reservation and national agents began taking children to faraway boarding schools. Concurrently, once the reservations became disaggregated, they also became opened up for land development — such as for railroads, water exploitations, and other resource extractions. ..."

Book ‘unmakes’ U.S. history to include long-excluded Native Americans | YaleNews Yale historian Ned Blackhawk’s new book retells U.S. history to reveal the centrality of Native peoples in the political and cultural life of the country.