Blackhawk, Ned

PERSONAL:

Education: McGill University, B.A., 1992; University of California Los Angeles, M.A., 1994; University of Washington, Ph.D., 1999.

ADDRESSES:

Home—Madison, WI. Office—Department of History, University of Wisconsin—Madison, 5115 Humanities Bldg., Madison, WI 53706. E-mail—ncblackhawk@wisc.edu.

CAREER:

University of Wisconsin, Madison, associate professor of Native American history, 1999—.

MEMBER:

Organization of American Historians, Western History Association, American Society for Ethnohistory, and the Association of American Indian and Alaska Native Professors.

AWARDS, HONORS:

Fellowship, Research Institute of Comparative Studies in Race and Ethnicity, Stanford University, 2004; Frederick Jackon Turner Award, Organization of American Historians, 2007, for Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West.

WRITINGS:

The Shoshone (children's nonfiction), Raintree Steck-Vaughn (Austin, TX), 2000.

Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West, Harvard University Press (Cambridge, MA), 2006.

Author of foreword for Encyclopedia of the Lewis and Clark Expedition, written by Elin Woodger and Brandon Toropov, Facts on File (New York, NY), 2004. Author of articles in scholarly journals, including the American Indian Culture and Research Journal, Ethnohistory, and the Journal of American History.

SIDELIGHTS:

Ned Blackhawk is a professor of Native American history and a member of the Te-Moak Tribe of the Western Shoshone Indians of Nevada. In his book Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West, which is an extended version of his doctoral dissertation, he explores the conflict between various Native American tribes in the Great Basin region (the area encompassing present-day Nevada and adjacent lands) during the westward expansion of the early eighteenth century. Far from being peaceful, the Utes, Paiutes, and Shoshone tribes fought bloody battles among themselves and the settlers that were spurred by white diplomacy, treaties, broken alliances, and burgeoning trade routes. Blackhawk's work is a "painstaking and sobering account" of the era, wrote Deborah Donovan in a review for Booklist. John Burch, reviewing the book for Library Journal, called it "one of the finest studies available" on the tribes of the area.

The purpose of Blackhawk's book is to historicize the Indians and bring to consciousness the realization that they were active participants in the country's development, not simply part of the natural world that was conquered by the Europeans. As Blackhawk wrote in an essay for the Journal of American History, "That American history was taught for so long without attention to the continent's original inhabitants and was written to celebrate certain chapters of the national story over others compounds this field's comparative disadvantages. The endless cacophony of simplistic media representations only deepens the challenge of engaging one of America's most complicated narratives."

BIOGRAPHICAL AND CRITICAL SOURCES:

PERIODICALS

Booklist, October 1, 2006, Deborah Donovan, review of Violence over the Land: Indians and Empires in the Early American West, p. 21.

Journal of American History, March, 2007, Ned Blackhawk, "Recasting the Narrative of America: The Rewards and Challenges of Teaching American Indian History."

Library Journal, September 15, 2006, John Burch, review of Violence over the Land, p. 71.