19552 GW Mag 26_Final_singles - Flipbook - Page 24
A Legacy Reconsidered:
Native Voices Rewrite
America’s Racial Story
In his research, History Professor David Silverman reframes
U.S. racial struggles to spotlight Indigenous identities.
IN THE EARLY DRAFTS OF AMERICA’S ORIGIN STORY,
European colonizers and indigenous peoples are usually
cast in rigid, predetermined roles—either as friendly Indians
greeting peaceful Pilgrims or, conversely, as foils for Manifest
Destiny with white settlers asserting racial superiority over
unified Native nations.
The first scene is clearly a myth. But the second story is
far more complicated too, according to Professor of History
David J. Silverman, an expert in Native American history
and the author of six books on Indigenous people and
colonial America.
At the start of the colonial era, Europeans didn’t even
think of themselves as “white,” Silverman reveals. Nor did
the diverse Indigenous groups conceive of themselves
collectively as “Indians.”
That, of course, changed. As genocidal struggles unfolded
over generations, Euro-Americans embraced a sense of
racial identity—and superiority. Faced with warfare and
displacement, Native people in turn adopted a pan-Indian
identity that transcended tribal boundaries. But “it takes
nearly 100 years for those concepts to develop,” Silverman
explained. “These identities develop in conversation with
one another—as part of the struggle for the continent.”
In his book, The Chosen and the Damned: Native Americans
and the Making of Race in the United States, Silverman follows
that conversation across four centuries of racial conflicts,
from bloody colonial wars and brutal Indian removal
24 | www.columbian.gwu.edu
Robert Lindneux’s 1942 painting
“Trail of Tears” depicts the forced
removal of the Cherokee people in
1838. (Courtesy Woolaroc
Museum, Bartlesville, Oklahoma)
campaigns to the creation of reservations and the rise of
Indigenous civil rights movements.
Along the way he notes how systemic racism against
Native Americans appears as flashpoints in American
history—reflected in the Declaration of Independence itself.
And he contends that the story of race in America, typically
understood as a Black and white tale, must be rewritten to
feature Native voices.
“Native people have been foundational to the racial
identities that came into being in the United States,” he said.
“But society has an amnesia about Native people’s role, as if
Native people have disappeared, as if they’re no longer
relevant—if they ever were.”
Correcting the Record
Even inside his own classrooms, Silverman, who has
taught Native American and Colonial American history at
GW since 2003, is frequently astonished at how ill-informed
Americans are about Native people—past and present. In his
Native American Racial History course, he routinely answers
student questions on how reservations work and whether
Native people can vote or pay taxes. Native American history
is “practically all new to them,” he said.
During the 2020 racial reckoning following George Floyd’s
killing, Silverman was alarmed by the lack of attention to
Native people in America’s racial past. “In making the case
