As the United States approaches the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence in July, it is still critical to acknowledge that the revolutionary ideals venerated there and in the Constitution were negated by the colonists’ treatment of both Native Americans and enslaved people, legal scholar Maggie Blackhawk said in a May 8 talk as part of the Law and Democracy: The United States at 250 speaker series.
The American Revolution was not only predicated on grievances against British rule, but also rooted in the colonists’ longstanding practice of taking land that belonged to Native American peoples, Blackhawk said in her discussion of federal Indian law and the U.S. Constitution.
When the British government, in 1763, forbade colonists from settling Native American land west of the Appalachians, the colonists resisted the dictate, Blackhawk said.
“The idea of dispossession was really at the heart of the revolution,” Blackhawk told an audience of 65 in Hinman Auditorium, with 200 watching online.
A member of the Fond du Lac Band of Lake Superior Ojibwe, Blackhawk is a professor of law at New York University concentrating in the legal history of both federal Indian and constitutional law. Her scholarly articles have been published in the Harvard Law Review, Stanford Law Review, Yale Law Journal, Supreme Court Review and American Historical Review, and she was a featured historian in the recent Ken Burns PBS documentary The American Revolution.
The talk was co-sponsored by the Rockefeller Center, Dartmouth Dialogues, Ethics Institute, Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and Sciences, and the Office of the Associate Dean for the Social Sciences and was moderated by Rockefeller Center lecturer Julie Kalish ’91.
Excavating American history “isn’t about guilt,” Blackhawk said. “It truly is about trying to find ways that we can learn from our own past, the past of humanity, the past of our country—even people that we disagree with—and learn, what is in it to celebrate? And what is in it to do differently?”
Blackhawk took on such subjects as colonialism, the role of Supreme Court justices Neil Gorsuch, Sonia Sotomayor, and Amy Coney Barrett in reshaping federal Indian laws, birthright citizenship, and the weakness of Congress as a third branch of government.
She reiterated that the early European settlers’ refusal to understand or respect Native Americans’ forms of self-government led to convoluted and often specious legal reasoning when it came to tribal sovereignty, governance, and land possession. Centuries of law still determine the U.S. government’s relations with the 570 Indigenous nations living within the United States, as well as such U.S. territories as Guam, American Samoa, and Puerto Rico, Blackhawk said.
As a document, the Constitution was imbued by its framers with a certain plasticity, meaning that it has evolved over time to both advance and reflect societal change, Blackhawk said.
“It is a mature constitutionalism, one that has made mistakes and improved. I can celebrate the fact that we can move forward in a way that I think is far more promising as a matter of constitutional politics than one that looks only for the celebratory aspects of American history and refuses to see any kind of problem,” Blackhawk said.
The Declaration and the Constitution are such fundamental documents that as soon as they were published, people on the margins, including women, Native Americans, and Black Americans, saw that they could be used to advocate legally for their own self-determination, although advances in equal rights came slowly, and did not really take hold until the mid- and late 20th century, Blackhawk said.
One of the most vital steps toward governmental reform would be to restore to Congress a more vigorous role in crafting legislation, answering to the people, and checking executive power, Blackhawk said.
“There are parts of our constitutional culture that have deeply atrophied because of the reliance on courts” to adjudicate policy, Blackhawk said.
“It is a really hard sell to put Congress at the heart of anything right now,” she added, observing that it is awash in dark money, constant campaigning and lobbying, and gerrymandering.
“It’s often more skewed by elites than by the people it represents,” Blackhawk said.
Blackhawk remains optimistic, however.
“I think the truth will honestly set us free, even if those conversations are hard. I do think that a real, deep inquiry into our past has an incredible promise, just because we’re actually growing and seeing our point as a people as one where we do learn from those mistakes. And we also really work towards that more perfect union in the future,” Blackhawk said.
After the Q&A, Ian Beierle ’29 said that Blackhawk’s talk “was a really good perspective to bring on campus,” particularly given Dartmouth’s founding mission to educate Native American students, and its evolution into a university that, since a recommitment to that goal in 1972, has graduated nearly 1,500 Native American and Indigenous students.
“It’s very good to reflect on Dartmouth and then reflect on the broader history,” Beierle said.