American Indians were central to every century of U.S. historical development. - Ned Blackhawk

How can a nation founded on the homelands of dispossessed Indigenous peoples be the world's most exemplary democracy? This question haunts America, as it does other settler nations. Among historians, silence, rather than engagement, has been the most common response, together with a continued unwillingness to see America's diversity from the vantage point of those most impacted by the expansion of the United States.

Identifying American history as a site of genocide complicates a fundamental premise of the American story. Indeed, histories of Native America provide the starkest contrast to the American ideal. Native American studies scholars often view the conquest of the Americas as an ongoing process marked by mass violence that connects diverse Native nations.

American democracy arose from the dispossession of American Indians. If history provides the common soil for a nation's growth and a window into its future, it is time to reimagine U.S. history outside the tropes of discovery that have bred exclusion and misunderstanding. Finding answers to the challenges of our time-racial strife, climate crisis, and domestic and global inequities, among others-will require new concepts, approaches, and commitments. It is time to put down the interpretive tools of the previous century and take up new ones.