Four centuries after African captives arrived on the shore of Virginia, America’s origin story was recast by the 1619 Project with slavery and the contribution of African Americans at his heart. It was a long-overdue corrective to white, Eurocentric narratives. But it was the not the last word.
“Scholars have recently come to view African American slavery as central to the making of America, but few have seen Native Americans in a similar light,” writes Ned Blackhawk, a historian at Yale University and member of the Te-Moak Tribe of Western Shoshone. “Binary, rather than multiracial, visions dominate studies of the past where slavery represents America’s original sin or the antithesis of the American idea.
